Sunday roundup

You'll recall that the other day, I posted - in a roundup - a link to a Dennis Prager piece about men being hardwired to objectify women, but not to worry, because a good man can simultaneously take into regard her full humanity. Raja Halwani, philosophy professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, offers a somewhat different take on the matter:

The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that human beings tend to be evil. He wasn’t talking about some guy rubbing his hands and crowing with glee at the prospect of torturing an enemy. He was thinking about the basic human tendency to succumb to what we want to do instead of what we ought to do, to heed the siren-song of our desires instead of the call of duty. For Kant, morality is the force that closes this gap, and holds us back from our darker, desiring selves. 

Once desire becomes suspect, sex is never far behind. Kant implicitly acknowledged the unusual power of sexual urges and their capacity to divert us from doing what is right. He claimed that sex was particularly morally condemnable, because lust focuses on the body, not the agency, of those we sexually desire, and so reduces them to mere things. It makes us see the objects of our longing as just that ­– objects. In so doing, we see them as mere tools for our own satisfaction.

Treating people as objects can mean many things. It could include beating them, tearing into them, and violating them. But there are other, less violent ways of objectifying people. We might treat someone as only a means to our sexual pleasure, to satisfy our lust on that person, to use a somewhat archaic expression. The fact that the other person consents does not get rid of the objectification; two people can agree to use one another for purely sexual purposes.

But don’t we use each other all the time? Many of us have jobs – as cleaners, gardeners, teachers, singers. Does the beneficiary of the service objectify the service provider, and does the service provider objectify the recipient by taking their money? These relationships don’t seem to provoke the same moral qualms. Either they do not involve objectification, or the objectification is somehow neutered.

Kant said that these scenarios weren’t really a problem. He draws a distinction between mere use – the basis of objectification – and more-than-mere use. While we might employ people to do jobs, and accept payment for our work, we don’t treat the person on the other side of the transaction as a mere tool; we still recognise that person’s fundamental humanity.  

Sex, though, is different. When I hire someone to sing, according to Kant, my desire is for his or her talent – for the voice-in-action. But when I sexually desire someone, I desire his or her body, not the person’s services or talents or intellectual capabilities, although any of these could enhance the desire. So, when we desire the person’s body, we often focus during sex on its individual parts: the buttocks, the penis, the clitoris, the thighs, the lips. What we desire to do with those parts differs, of course. Some like to touch them with the hand, others with the lips, others with the tongue; for others still, the desire is just to look. This does not mean that I would settle for a human corpse: our desire for human bodies is directed at them as living, much like my desire for a cellphone is directed at a functioning one.

But, one might object, don’t we do sexual things because we love our partners, and want them to feel pleasure? Of course we do. But if we did so when we didn’t want to in the first place, then we do not do it out of sexual desire. And if we don’t do it out of sexual desire, then the problem of objectification does not present itself. We can enjoy sexually pleasing someone else. But you can think of the other person as a sophisticated instrument: to give the maximum pleasure, we have to please it.  

If those last few sentences strike you as indicating that Professor Halwani may be tying  himself in knots, that was kind of my impression, too. But consider what he says a bit later:

The capacity to reason is what makes people ends in themselves, worthy of moral respect, according to Kant. And what’s objectifying about sexual desire is its ability to numb a person to reason, both in themselves and in others. Its power is such that it makes our reason its servant: our rationality becomes the means to satisfy its goals. It has been the downfall of kings and leaders; the ruination of relationships; the seedbed of lies in the pursuit of getting laid (‘Me too! I love atonal music!’). In my pursuit to fulfil it, I cheat, I deceive, I pretend to be not who I am – and not just to the other person, but to myself, too. I set aside the other’s rationality, and in doing so, set aside their humanity. That is not my concern; his or her body is.

There's something unsatisfying about his conclusion, though, to evoke a sexual metaphor. He says he agrees with Kant that the inevitable pairing of sex and objectification present humanity with a moral dilemma and leaves it at that. Well, good professor, is there a way out? And if not, why bring the matter up? Can we not just say, "That is the way the world is constructed" and leave it at that? After all, everybody you see around you in the course of the day is the result of some kind of sex, excited or bored.

Great Kimberly Strassel piece at WSJ on why the important - and exciting - thing about Scott Pruitt's appointment to head the EPA is that it signals a rediscovered focus on federalism. Pruitt is not a climate scientist, he's a constitutional scholar. In participating in the move by a multitude of state AGs to sue to stop the Clean Power Plan, he was asserting states as coequal powers to the federal government. He's now in a position to make good on that assertion big-time.

One of the most heartbreaking episodes of the ISIS menace has been that group's destruction of priceless historical artifacts in the Syrian city of Palmyra. Elation was certainly warranted when it was driven out of the city last spring. Well, it's back:

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reports that the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, "entered Palmyra on Saturday and now occupies its northwest. There is also fighting with the army in the city center," Al Jazeera reports. The observatory says the militants reached the city’s Tadmor Hospital and its strategically located wheat silos.
The activist-run Palmyra Coordination Collective also reports militants seized the city’s military warehouse and its northern and western neighborhoods after taking several government positions, oil fields, and strategic hilltops in the surrounding countryside in a rapid three-day campaign, the Associated Press reports.

There's been some concern in recent days that the urgency exuded by the incoming Congress to repeal the "A"CA will dissipate. If this NRO piece by Senator Mike Lee and Representative Mark Walker is any indication, such worries are not to be given too much weight.

Venezuelan authorities have arrested two executives of a toy company and seized its inventory of nearly four million toys. Photographed the execs being marched out of their facility. Seems the company was in violation of a government edict to reduce prices by 30 percent.