374

Sometimes Kant's moral framework seemed suspiciously like he was recreating puritanical Christian morality with "pure rationality", but nothing was more suspicious than when he tried to justify the rule of not having sex before marriage. He claimed that rationally you couldn't do it because you would be objectifying each other, and even objectifying yourself (???), and therefore treated each other and yourself as merely a means to an end for sexual pleasure. How this changed after marriage, rationally, I could never quite follow. Apparently he also followed this rule himself, and since he never married, well, didn't have that much experience to draw on, to say the least.

Sometimes Kant's moral framework seemed suspiciously like he was recreating puritanical Christian morality with "pure rationality", but nothing was more suspicious than when he tried to justify the rule of not having sex before marriage. He claimed that rationally you couldn't do it because you would be objectifying each other, and even objectifying yourself (???), and therefore treated each other and yourself as merely a means to an end for sexual pleasure. How this changed after marriage, rationally, I could never quite follow. Apparently he also followed this rule himself, and since he never married, well, didn't have that much experience to draw on, to say the least.