Marriage, Sex, and Slavery in the Feyerabend Lectures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2025
In the Doctrine of Right, Kant describes domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The Feyerabend lectures lack this framework, but the same set of marriage, parent-child, and master-servant relationships are united under the framework of “domestic societies.” This chapter explores domestic right in Feyerabend, mapping Kant’s careful resistance to conceptualizing these relationships in terms of property right in light of debates about marriage, domestic right, labor, and slavery unfolding in the 1780s. This resistance is informed by a paradox at the heart of Kant’s thinking about domestic right, namely, his claim that marriage and servitude are rightful while sex work and slavery are not. This puzzle arises because Kant follows Achenwall in locating slavery in domestic right, which leads to his innovative framework of domestic right as “the right to a person akin to the right to a thing.” The deep entanglement of Kant’s thinking about sex, and about service and slave labor, should lead us to think about these problems together, and to challenge the silos in Kant scholarship that treat his thinking about gender and sex distinctly from slavery and race.
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