Question I'm having trouble appreciating Kant's moral philosophy. According to him an action is bad if we can't universalize it as a maxim of human behavior. Under that way of thinking being gay is bad because if everyone was gay nobody would have any babies and that means you are willing the non-existence of the human race which would be a contradiction if you want to exist. So I guess bisexuality is okay but being a monk isn't. The reasoning seems absolutely bonkers if you are gay whether from choice or from nature there is no reason to surmise that you think everyone has to be gay. If Kants moral philosophy is so lame I must admit that it prejudices me against his whole philosophical system. Is there any reason why I should give Kant's ethics more credit?

Accepted:
December 13, 2012

Comments

I don't think everyone being gay would be a problem for the Kantian approach. Children can be born to gay parents, it happens all the time, and children do not have to be produced in the ordinary way through heterosexual relationships. In any case, willing the eventual non-existence of the human race would not be willing that the willer did not himself or herself exist, merely that in the future there would be no more people.

The nice thing about the Kantian approach is that it does not allow for exceptions in just my case. I cannot say that something is wrong but it is OK for just me to do it, in just these circumstances. In fact, as we know many gay people in the past have been critical of gay lifestyles and oppressive to fellow gays, distinguishing between their own behavior and that which is publicly acceptable at a certain time, perhaps. Kantianism would be critical of such a strategy and surely rightly so.

The nice thing about the Kantian approach is that it does not allow for exceptions in just my case.

Of course, this result stems from the fact that the Kantian approach doesn't allow for exceptions in any case, which many philosophers regard as a reductio of the approach. For example, Kant famously prohibits lying to a murderer even to protect an innocent potential victim. Most people have strong intuitions to the contrary: lying is presumptively or defeasibly wrong, we say. A false theory can imply true consequences; it's the false consequences that are its undoing.

On one version of the Categorical Imperative, we're told to act only on maxims (roughly, principles of action) that we could will to be universal laws. That may or may not be the right way to think about morality; I don't have a settled opinion. However, there are philosophers who think Kant had the theory right, but fell down in applying it. Kant thought that lying is always wrong; whether the Categorical Imperative requires this is less clear. The question is whether there's a way of formulating an acceptable maxim that allows for lying in some circumstances. Kant's argument to the contrary isn't entirely convincing, to say the least.

The case of homosexuality is arguably a case in point -- or more accurately, the case of homosexual sex may be a case in point. Kant thought, far as I know, that homosexual acts are always wrong. But when someone who's homosexual by orientation acts on that orientation, it's pretty implausible that their maxim, universalized, requires that heterosexuals have homosexual sex.

This suggests a different problem for Kantianism: not that it demands morally screwy conclusions, but that at least some formulations of the categorical imperative may not provide much guidance. The first version of the categorical imperative calls for a certain sort of consistency, but consistency alone may not get us very far. The requirement that we never treat anyone as a mere means but also as an end in themselves may have more content. Once again, Kant seems to have thought that this version rules out homosexual sex (and masturbation, and extra-marital sex), but once again, we can doubt that Kant is the best guide to what the principle entails.