Kantian Ethics for Men, Utilitarianism for Women
There’s a classic thought experiment called The Trolley Problem. Briefly, it goes like this: You’re in the driver’s seat of a trolley without brakes. In front of you is a track that forks off from the main track. Beyond the fork, five people are tied to the main track, and one is tied to the side track. If you do nothing, the trolley will stay on the main track and kill the five. If you turn the wheel, the trolley will divert to the side track and kill the one. What do you do?
Most people say they’d turn the wheel and kill the one to spare the five.
Here’s where things get weird. Now imagine you’re a surgeon in a hospital with six patients. Five of these need organ transplants and will soon die if they don’t get them. The other is in no immediate danger of death. Why not kill the healthy guy and distribute his organs among the five who need transplants?
Most people say they wouldn’t.
The two scenarios are seemingly parallel. In both cases, you can sacrifice one person to save five. In both, the single person will survive if you take no action, but the five will die. In my opinion, we can morally defend our impulse to take different actions in these two scenarios, but that’s a post for another day.
Moral philosophy is divided broadly into two kinds of ethical frameworks.
Utilitarian ethics hold that the moral action is the one that results in the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. It’s utilitarian ethics that govern things like collecting taxes, which takes away a little personal freedom from individuals in the interest of providing services for the group. It’s utilitarian ethics that tell you to turn the trolley wheel and reduce the number of imminent deaths.
Kantian ethics hold that no person should ever be treated as a means to an end. It’s Kantian ethics that inform America’s recognition of inalienable rights, and that are used to condemn slavery. Even if the lives of the majority are improved by the enslavement of the few, that isn’t ok—each individual’s freedom is paramount. It’s Kantian ethics that tell you that you shouldn’t kill the healthy patient and distribute his organs to the other patients.
Neither system is without its flaws, but in the free world, Kantian ethics have won the day. Individual rights reign supreme. People are valuable, in and of themselves, and should not be used as a means to an end (even if the end is good for society).
At least, that’s the ethical system applied to men.
It’s been said that conservatives believe women are private property, and liberals believe women are public property. That comic comes to mind in which two men surround a woman, one forcing a hijab on her, the other ripping it off. Women have always belonged to men, whether as wives or prostitutes.
Men want Kantian ethics for men. Men want utilitarian ethics for women.
As Roe versus Wade comes under threat, a joke resurfaces: if men could get pregnant, abortion pills would be available in vending machines. They would, though. Men are too busy with important business to have their plans derailed by unwanted children, and men simply aren’t given to submitting their freedoms to a vote. Kantian ethics for them. They won’t be used as a means to an end.
Women get pregnant, though, so they shift their focus from her human rights to the good of the community. What about the babies, the fathers, the stability of society? She can be asked to give herself over to the greater good. Utilitarianism for her.
When it comes to reproduction, we are bodies, not free agents. See the historical obsession with female virginity. Policies limiting our access to birth control and tubal ligation. And Christian women, submit to your husbands. He has rights. You have duties.
From time immemorial, men have kept a portion of women sequestered for sexual abuse. Concubines, courtesans, sex slaves. A sacrifice of the few for the pleasure of the many. Utilitarianism for these women.
Men still do this, but now we pretend it’s consensual. Don’t kink shame, we say. Sexual empowerment. The queering of social norms. What if a woman wants to be a sex worker? We shouldn’t criminalize that.
But we know a sacrifice when we see one. We don’t raise our daughters for a career in pornography. We don’t suggest phone sex as a retirement gig for our moms. We intuit what prostitutes endure: 85% have been threatened with a weapon, a similar number physically assaulted, and the majority suffer with PTSD. If prostitution benefits women as well as men, why do 92% want out? Why would sex trafficking ever be a thing?
We don’t ask men to sell themselves. Kantian ethics for them. Utilitarian ethics for us.
Men are free. Women are used as means to men’s ends. You see it in the laws and policies that once limited women’s access to credit cards, bank accounts, education and the vote. In horror movies, heroin chic and domestic violence. In “friend zoning” and the complaints of incels. In domestic labor, caregiving, and therapy. You see it in the way bisexual women are sexualized—valued for what they can offer to men—and lesbians are reviled. You see it when someone gives up her career for her husband’s career and her freedom for the care of children.
Thanks for the summary of utilitarian vs. Kantian ethics. My college philosophy class is far enough behind me that when you began to illustrate the trolley problem, I could intuit the moral difference between the possible outcomes but could not have articulated it.
Cannot agree with your thesis mapping these two kinds of morality onto the sexes however.
“We don’t ask men to sell themselves. Kantian ethics for them. Utilitarian ethics for us.
Men are free.”
From where I sit, men who have or want a wife and children have been always been asked to sell themselves in order to provide for their families; they just sell themselves to corporations rather than selling their bodies sexually. Over the decades, millions upon millions of men have spent their entire adult lives working long hours at jobs they hated so their families could have comfortable lives, which looks to me far more like duty & responsibility than like freedom. Millions more have literally sold their lives via military service for the greater good.
Beyond providing for their families, men’s work benefits society (as does women’s, of course). Just as one example, I’d argue that the long haul truckers who keep Target stores stocked are providing much more collective utility to the people (mostly women) who shop there than they are to themselves.
The only men who may truly be free are single men who don’t want a wife / partner or family (not a large group), or men in the top 1% of attractiveness who women are drawn to regardless of how he conducts himself. Otherwise, to attract women, men must acquire status, as judged by women, which generally means going to college and then getting a white collar job. This strikes me as a box, a pre-written life script, far more than as freedom. Note that the reverse does not typically hold; men, more often than not, care far less what prospective mates do for work (or if they even work at all), or where (or even whether) they went to college, etc.
None of this is to say or even imply that “ackshually, women have it better than men,” or don’t have difficulties that are specific to women. I’m just saying that, as a man, particularly one with a wife and kids but even before that, the notion that I am or have been “free” to do whatever I want while women have been forced to sacrifice themselves for my & everyone else’s benefit does not come close to matching what I observe, and I’m confident that most men would say the same.
My disagreement aside, you’re a talented writer and I’m looking forward to reading the rest of your Substack posts (and not just to argue with them 🙂).
And even Kant himself was quite antisexual, and most likely an incel.