Friendship, love, and family: comments on sex, love, and Gender by Helga Varden

Helga Varden’s Sex, Love, and Gender: A Kantian Theory is a sweeping and systematic tour de force – an account of our sexual and gendered human nature, grounded in Kantian theory, that is courageously comprehensive in scope, carefully rigorous in its attention to the details of Kantian philosophy, and refreshingly forthright in its author’s unwillingness to be limited by Kant’s own failings. As a contemporary argument for the value and relevance of Kant on Sex, it is overwhelmingly successful. Nevertheless, in this response, I raise three topics on which I remain unconvinced by Varden’s reconstructed Kant: namely, the duty of truthfulness in the context of sexual identity, the absence of family in her account (and his), and the implications of speech that harms.