In the OCR specification we are required to apply Kant to issues surrounding business ethics (globalisation, stakeholder interests, whistleblowing, care of the environment etc), and then in Year 2 all the moral theories we’ve learnt need to be applied to issues in sexual ethics.

A Humean and a Kantian are walking down the road and see a beggar in great need sitting on the pavement. The Humean acts out of sympathy and tosses £5 into the beggar’s hat. The Kantian is disgusted by the beggar but nonetheless tosses in a fiver. The Kantian has greater moral worth, says Kant, because the Humean “deserves only praise and encouragement but not esteem, for the maxim lacks moral content, namely that of doing actions not from inclination but from duty” (G 4:398). In all our applied ethics we need to act, says Kant out of duty and respect, not inclination, or the motive of pleasure. The only good thing, says Kant is our pure motive – duty for duty’s sake, or the ‘good will’ which rationally assents to maxims derived by an imaginative leap –into the world of universalisability. And out of the world of passion, feeling and inclination.

Click on the link below for an excellent summary of the principle points of Kantian Ethics – just remove the headline (sexual ethics – an OCR A2 applied issue) and substitute whatever issue you want (eg an issue in business ethics).

http://www.rsrevision.com/Alevel/ethics/sex_and_relationships/kant_and_sex.pdf

Applying Kant – a priori reason generates categorical imperatives – unconditional commands that are a universal, objective and absolute morality. Kant establishes the idea of intrinsic goodness – purity of motive or “duty for duty’s sake”.

Sexual ethics

Kant viewed humans as being subject to the animal desires of self-preservation, species-preservation, and the longing for pleasure, but argues that these do not create a foundation for moral behaviour – so Kant is fundamentally opposed to Hume’s view that ‘reason is the slave of the passions’. Kant believed ethical principles were determined by a priori reason, taking a step back from the situation to produce universal (and universalisable) maxims (the formula of law). The good will implies a duty to obey the moral law derived by this a priori process – so we need to think through and derive maxims in sexual ethics which all rational human beings would assent to. We can’t follow utilitarian pleasure alone or self-interest. He also argued (by the second formula of the Categorical Imperative , or formula of ends) that humans have a duty to avoid maxims that harm or degrade themselves, including suicide, sexual degradation, and drunkenness. This led Kant to regard sexual intercourse as degrading because it reduces humans to an object of pleasure. He admitted sex only within marriage, which he regarded as “a merely animal union”. He believed that masturbation is worse than suicide, reducing a person’s status to below that of an animal; he argued that rape should be punished with castration and that bestiality requires expulsion from society. Feminist philosopher Catharine MacKinnon has argued that many contemporary practices would be deemed immoral by Kant’s standards because they dehumanize women. Sexual harassment, prostitution and pornography, she argues, objectify women and do not meet Kant’s standard of human autonomy. Commercial sex has been criticised for turning both parties into objects (and thus using them as a means to an end); mutual consent is problematic because in consenting, people choose to objectify themselves. Alan Soble has noted that more liberal Kantian ethicists believe that, depending on other contextual factors, the consent of women can vindicate their participation in pornography and prostitution.

see Denis, Lara (April 1999). “Kant on the Wrongness of “Unnatural” Sex”. History of Philosophy Quarterly. University of Illinois Press. 16 (2): 225–248.

see The Social Psychology of Emotion by Ian Tucker and Darren Ellis