Sex, Morality, and Modernity: Can Immanuel Kant Unite Us?

Treating people as ends in themselves and "doing unto others..." as a bridge between traditionalists and mainstream American youth.

Conor Friedersdorf
May 20 2013, 10:26 AM ET

Before I jump back into the conversation about sexual ethics that has unfolded on the Web in recent days, inspired by Emily Witt's n+1 essay "What Do You Desire?" and featuring a fair number of my favorite writers, it's worth saying a few words about why I so value debate on this subject, and my reasons for running through some sex-life hypotheticals near the end of this article.

Until I was 17, the Catholic schools I attended focused on the teachings of the church. Then, as high school juniors, my friends and I studied general ethics under Mr. Holtkamp, a dry-humored man who coached the mock trial team, ran an X-Files fan club, and managed, within a Catholic institution, to give believers and skeptics alike the gift of thinking more clearly and expansively about morality. He'd have smiled to see us the summer after we graduated, when we'd sneak onto deserted beaches and build bonfires on the sand to light our conversations. We burned melaleuca logs, drank lukewarm Bud Ice or Mickey's, and debated our respective Catholicism, agnosticism, atheism, Buddhist flirtations, impulses toward utilitarianism, and everything else about how we ought to think and live. The particulars of the conversations are forgotten. Yet few memories are more precious to me, now that I understand why those nights are forever gone. It isn't that the people, with whom I'm still in touch, love one another any less. If we gathered tomorrow--we're scattered across the country now--we could still talk in the ways that deep friendship permits. But at 18, 19 and 20, as different as we were in our personalities and inclinations, we spoke to one another in the same vocabulary, which we'd learned from the same teachers in the same community, where many of our experiences were alike.

Today the conversations would be harder. In part, this is due to the fact that we now speak different languages. One friend, who was an atheist when we sat around the bonfire and is now an orthodox Catholic, has remained, before, after, and throughout his transformation, a person whose insights about how to live I've valued and benefited from profoundly, despite our constant disagreements. For years, as we were living in different cities, I was surrounded by NYU graduate students. He was surrounded by orthodox Catholics. We'd both done a lot of thinking about sexual morality in our respective lives, but one New Year's Eve, when we found ourselves in the same city for a night, our conversations on the subject were more difficult than they'd ever been before. As our experiences and communities had diverged, so too had our foundational assumptions about what the world is like; and as we explored increasingly complicated paths leading in different directions, we ceased to easily understand one another's field notes.

Eventually, he gave me 14 hours of lectures on Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. Listening to hours of it made me understand him much better, even as parts of that worldview remain impenetrable to me. As we think and live, the investment required to understand one another increases. So do the stakes of disagreeing. 18-year-olds on the cusp of leaving home for the first time may disagree profoundly about how best to live and flourish, but the disagreements are abstract. It is easy, at 18, to express profound disagreement with, say, a friend's notions of child-rearing. To do so when he's 28, married, and raising a son or daughter is delicate, and perhaps best avoided, presuming that his notions, however absurd, aren't abusive.

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/sex-morality-and-modernity-can-immanuel-kant-unite-us/276009/