Matt asked:

I'm in the middle of a debate with someone who claims that, using Kant's categorical imperative,
homosexuality is wrong. He says that you can easily will everyone to be heterosexual, but you can't
will everyone to be homosexual because it would lead to the extinction of the human race. I find this a
pretty stupid argument, to be honest with you, but I can't exactly say why. His way of saying it seems
awfully clumsy and contrived to make his point. Also, I was thinking that I might be able to use the
second formulation of the imperative to say that he can't use heterosexuals merely as a means to
propagate the species. Anyway, I'm thoroughly frustrated and could definitely use a hand here.

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Yes. This is a severe problem with Kant's ethics. Here's the situation:

Kant was coming from a time where there were basically no sciences as we know them, and people
were collecting lots of little bits of data, and not being able to put them together into coherent pictures.
The big exception was Newton, and Kant wanted to get philosophy on the same footing. Well,
Newton developed a system of physics which started from first principles, i.e., Newton's Laws, and
from which you could then derive the behavior of any (he hoped) physical system. But those laws
were for idealobjects; point masses, frictionless surfaces, objects moving in a vacuum... etc... "ideal"
objects, you see? But they worked pretty well for the real world, at least as far as measurements went
in those days, and everyone could see that you had to fiddle these other factors to make the ideal
equations work for real masses, and so forth, but that they were nevertheless the correctideal
equations.

So Kant wanted the same for philosophy. And what he did, then, was to try to derive the most
abstract ethical principles he could. Then he thought once that was done, everyone could just work
down and fiddle a little, and it would work out like Newton. Well. Not a bad idea, really... but when you
look at what he came up with it's a bit silly, in my opinion, anyway. There are two basic principles, sort
of... although they are intended to be aspects of one principle. There's "act as if everyone else would
do the same thing"... a kind of way to fiddle out the detailed answer, I think; and the really general,
abstract, idealprinciple is that the willed action cannot be what might be termed "self-contradictory".
That is, if you think you can steal, and you ask, "what if everyone stole?", and you find that if
everyone stole society collapses, or something like that... thenyou have to say that stealing is in a
way self-contradictory, because it results in a condition or a society in which stealing is impossible...
because the society in which you askedthe question could not exist if you answerthe question in the
affirmative. You see?

Basically, he's trying to show that unethical actions are in a rather bizarre way contradictions, or
self-defeating, because they destroy the circumstances under which they originally start. An
ingenious way to make ethics logical, right? Right. It's so full of holes you could drive a truck through
it. For one thing, what about people who need to steal to survive, in some sort of exceptional
circumstances? Well, then, you either have to say that they can't, period, oryou have to say, well, we
have to take theircircumstances into account, and if everyone elsestole, society would collapse...
etc. Of course you can see the problems, here... just what do we end up with, finally, as situations
which are "normal", so that we can't steal in them? And what criteria do we use to decide those
criteria? Whoops... And all this is aside from the little problem of demonstrating that this self-defeating
dynamic will actually happen, haha. Believe me, his three Critiques are much more impressive. So
sure, if everyone were homosexual, there'd be no human race in a couple of generations... but
everyone isn'thomosexual, nor is even a majority likely to be (I just read about a study on
homosexual sheep... yes, well, a useful study, actually... and about 8 percent of rams are
homosexual; consistent with what's found in humans and other animals, I believe).

Steven Ravett Brown

The Categorical Imperative is a guide to moral action so it cannot be used to say that being a
homosexual is wrong, only that a homosexual act is. It is an objection to Kant that you can
universalise anything, but I don't understand it. We cannot universalise anything as rational beings. I
don't see how the principle that you should commit a homosexual act can be valid as a law or an
"objective principle valid for every rational being". Would a rational being hold the principle that
everyone should commit a homosexual act? I would say that it was an individual's subjective principle
of action which does not go on to the stage of being objective and becoming moral law. A subjective
maxim is not moral law but "a practical rule determined by reason in accordance with the conditions
of the subject (often his ignorance or again his inclinations)".

As to the argument you are trying to develop against using heterosexuals as a means to propagate it
will probably fail. Kant says "Act in such a way that you always treat humanity... never simply as a
means, but always at the same time as an end". If heterosexuals are used (by whom??) to propagate
the species this is to treat persons as both means and ends.

Rachel Browne

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