Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [62]
Markets in kidneys were not prevalent in Kant’s day, but the rich did buy teeth for implantation from the poor. (Transplanting of Teeth, a drawing by the eighteenth-century English caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson, shows a scene in a dentist’s office in which a surgeon extracts teeth from a chimney sweep while wealthy women wait for their implants.) Kant considered this practice a violation of human dignity. A person “is not entitled to sell a limb, not even one of his teeth.”37 To do so is to treat oneself as an object, a mere means, an instrument of profit.
Kant found prostitution objectionable on the same grounds. “To allow one’s person for profit to be used by another for the satisfaction of sexual desire, to make of oneself an object of demand, is to… make of oneself a thing on which another satisfies his appetite, just as he satisfies his hunger upon a steak.” Human beings are “not entitled to offer themselves, for profit, as things for the use of others in the satisfaction of their sexual propensities.” To do so is to treat one’s person as a mere thing, an object of use. “The underlying moral principle is that man is not his own property and cannot do with his body what he will.”38
Kant’s opposition to prostitution and casual sex brings out the contrast between autonomy as he conceives it—the free will of a rational being—and individual acts of consent. The moral law we arrive at through the exercise of our will requires that we treat humanity—in our own person and in others—never only as a means but as an end in itself. Although this moral requirement is based on autonomy, it rules out certain acts among consenting adults, namely those that are at odds with human dignity and self-respect.
Kant concludes that only sex within marriage can avoid “degrading humanity.” Only when two persons give each other the whole of themselves, and not merely the use of their sexual capacities, can sex be other than objectifying. Only when both partners share with each other their “person, body and soul, for good and ill and in every respect,” can their sexuality lead to “a union of human beings.”39 Kant does not say that every marriage actually brings about a union of this kind. And he may be wrong to think that no such unions can ever occur outside of marriage, or that sexual relations outside of marriage involve nothing more than sexual gratification. But his views about sex highlight the difference between two ideas that are often confused in contemporary debate—between an ethic of unfettered consent and an ethic of respect for the autonomy and dignity of persons.
Is it wrong to lie to a murderer?
Kant takes a hard line against lying. In the Groundwork, it serves as a prime example of immoral behavior. But suppose a friend was hiding in your house, and a murderer came to the door looking for him. Wouldn’t it be right to lie to the murderer? Kant says no. The duty to tell the truth holds regardless of the consequences.
Benjamin Constant, a French philosopher and contemporary of Kant, took issue with this uncompromising stance. The duty to tell the truth applies, Constant argued, only to those who deserve the truth, as surely the murderer does not. Kant replied that lying to the murderer is wrong, not because it harms him, but because it violates the principle of right: “Truthfulness in statements that cannot be avoided is the formal duty of man to everyone, however great the disadvantage that may arise therefrom for him or for any other.”40
Admittedly, helping a murderer carry out his evil deed is a pretty heavy “disadvantage.” But remember, for Kant, morality is not about consequences; it’s about principle. You can’t control the consequences of your action—in this case, telling the truth—since consequences are bound up with contingency. For all you know, your friend, fearing that the murderer is on his way, has already slipped out the back door. The reason you must tell the truth, Kant states, is not that the murderer