Kant, morality, and Good sex

I’m currently reading and enjoying Joshua Schulz’s essay on Good sex and Kantian Philosophy in which he takes on Alan Soble and Soble’s comment on this essay. My favorite part of Schulz essay is his use of the story of Adam and Eve to illustrate the view that Kant’s view of sex is related to his take on ethics more specifically to his view that people should not use themselves as sexual object and that sex therefore must be tied to morality. Sugary excerpt:

The trick here is to imagine the relation between the wills of Adam and Eve at each step of their fall and to consider the moral relationship that obtains at each step between them.

There is a brief point in the story conveyed by chapter three in which Eve has eaten of the tree of knowledge, having committed the first mortal sin, but Adam has not. At this point in time Adam contains within his being, including his body, the promise of happiness for Eve (for he is her completeness as she was made to be his), while Eve is morally unworthy of the happiness her prelapsarian spouse promises her. We could not call Adam, representative of this happiness, evil on account of the sin of Eve: he is still naturally good on his own account, and he is her good, though clearly she does not deserve this natural good. Hence he is “conditionally good” for her, as Kant would say, in the sense that his natural goodness to Eve is dependent on her worthiness of her husband. Yet Eve no longer possesses that condition.

Once Eve has fallen, Adam has not become evil (he could still satisfy her every moral desire), as we have said, but he cannot satisfy her immoral desires, sexual or otherwise, and remain just. If this were a permanent state, we could imagine a point in time where Adam would have to deny a desire of Eve’s because the desire was immoral (that is, to be picturesque, he could deny her immoral desire that he should eat an apple by refusing to eat it): their flesh, let us say, a similitude of the complete good (which is contingently separated in us all), has become divided. This division of the complete good is contingent because it need not have happened. Once it does happen, however, it must necessarily hold not only the promise of future pain for Eve (some of her desires ought not be met) but also Eve’s shame in the knowledge that such denials are just. If she had been contrite, Eve could certainly have lived for a time with her unfallen husband, whose very presence, though painful, would have only allowed the satisfaction of her moral desires. In contrition she could have given thanks for this.

After Adam’s fall, though neither is morally worthy of the other, Adam and Eve yet hold the promise of happiness for each other, and all creation holds it for them too, though sometimes now, disgustingly, immorally. Though the natural goodness each represents to the other still remains—they could not destroy this aspect of their finiteness totally—there are points in time when they are not worthy of enjoying the goodness of their bodies, or of enjoying each other’s: they no longer possess that condition. Even natural goodness can be a temptation to evil for an unworthy will.