1 The language of “mere” and “only” appears in The Foundations of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. T. K., Abbott (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988), especially 56–58.Google Scholar

2 It is the subject of a paper by Todd Calder, entitled “Kant and Degrees of Wrongness,” presented at the Eastern Division conference of the American Philosophical Association in 2002.

3 See “On Psychological Oppression,” in Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 27.

4 Martha, Nussbaum, “Objectification,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 24 (1995): 249-91.Google Scholar

5 They were not original in doing so. Someone testified at hearings in Minneapolis about harm posed by pornography about “working men plaster[ing] women's crotches on the walls of workplaces.” See In Harm's Way: The Pornography Civil Rights Hearings, by Andrea, Dworkin and Catharine, MacKinnon (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 6.Google Scholar

6 See Bartky, “On Psychological Oppression,” 26, 27.

7 The term “consummate expression” is Jeremy Bendik-Keymer's (personal communication). I owe this point to him.

8 Nussbaum, “Objectification,” 257.

9 Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 119, her emphasis.

10 Andrea, Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: The Free Press, 1987), 142.Google Scholar

11 Sally, Haslanger, “On Being Objective and Being Objectified,” in A Mind of One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, eds. Louise, Antony and Charlotte, Witt, 2d ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 225, her emphasis.Google Scholar

12 I thank Christine Overall and Sue Sherwin for bringing this point to my attention.

13 John Hard wig first gave me the idea that acts of objectification can be successful or unsuccessful.

14 Andrea, Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Perigee Books, 1981), 128.Google Scholar

15 Haslanger, “On Being Objective,” 225, her emphasis.

16 Objectification is sexist, or oppressive in general, if it targets one's membership in an oppressed group (e.g., women) and if it is systemic. See Sandra Lee Bartky, “On Psychological Oppression.”

17 “On Psychological Oppression,” 26.

18 On adaptive preferences, seeJon, Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, Amartya, Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992)Google Scholar, and Martha, Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar Nussbaum leaves out this phenomenon despite discussing it in Sex and Social Justice, where “Objectification” also appears.

19 Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 139, my emphasis; quoted in Nussbaum, “Objectification,” 269, fn. 37.

20 MacKinnon, , Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 119.Google Scholar

21 Dworkin, Pornography, 22, my emphasis.

22 Ibid., 128.

23 MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified, 12.

24 Ibid., 100.

25 Dworkin, Intercourse, 123.

26 The quotation is from a section by Dworkin in In Harm's Way, 34.

27 “On Psychological Oppression,” 27.

28 She summarizes what is going on in them and suggests that each is about seeing the other as nothing but an object. See “Objectification,” 254, 255.

29 Most of the examples here from feminist work involve the objectification of beautiful female bodies. However, people sometimes objectify women for their ugliness rather than their beauty (as Rebecca Kukla stressed to me at the conference at which we presented our work for this volume). This point comes out clearly in Iris Marion Young's, “The Scaling of Bodies,” Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). She describes how oppression can be “aversive,” where dominant groups feel repulsed by those whom they dominate. Some women's bodies are defined as objects to be averted. Young is somewhat of an exception among feminists who have written on objectification in that she implicitly acknowledges the degreed nature of women's objectification. She refers to the “aesthetic scaling of bodies” in Western culture. Beautiful, youthful bodies form the apex of the scale and “degenerate” bodies, the nadir (128). Oppressed people have degenerate bodies, which are objectified in her view (as are beautiful bodies, but Young does not acknowledge that). The idea that bodies are “scaled” suggests that degrees of degeneracy exist. And if all degenerate bodies are objectified, then degrees of objectification must also exist.

30 Kathryn Pauly, Morgan, “Of Woman Born? How Old-fashioned! - New Reproductive Technologies and Women's Oppression,” in The Future of Human Reproduction, ed. Christine Overall (Toronto: The Women's Press, 1989), 73.Google Scholar

31 Janice, Raymond, Women as Wombs: Reproductive Technologies and The Battle over Women's Freedom (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993).Google Scholar

32 Gena, Corea, The Mother Machine: Reproductive Technologies from Artificial Insemination to Artificial Wombs (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).Google Scholar

33 Raymond, Women as Wombs, viii, xix.

34 Corea, The Mother Machine, 4.

35 See Anne, Donchin, “Feminist Critiques of New Fertility Technologies: Implications for Social Policy,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 21 (1996): 475-98;Google Scholar and Jan, Sawicki, “Disciplining Mothers: Feminism and the New Reproductive Technologies,” in Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power, and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991).Google Scholar

36 Donchin makes that point in “Feminist Critiques.“

37 The statement comes from an unpublished narrative that this patient wrote about her treatment and which she kindly shared with me.

38 “Objectification,” 257, her emphasis.

39 The definition excludes the objectification of animals, which is problematic, for animals are not objects, although they can be treated as such. However, in filling out her account, Nussbaum makes room for their objectification, as we shall see.

40 I endorse the idea that objectification comes in these different forms, but one might think that is inconsistent with my title, which emphasizes only one form: namely instrumentality. Treating people as mere means involves treating them as instruments for our use. But is that necessarily true of Kantian means? One could read Kant as saying that treating people as means involves placing them in the class of objects that, among other things, can be mere instruments (see Dennis Klimchuk's “Three Accounts of Respect for Persons,” Kantian Review (forthcoming). Instrumentality does not have to be their defining property. Support for such a view comes from examples of disrespect in Kant that do not involve someone getting something out of being disrespectful. (So the person disrespected does not have to be a means to the other person's ends.)

41 Nussbaum, “Objectification,” 265.

42 Given how this advantage supports her thesis (that objectification can be benign), it is surprising that Nussbaum does not make the point more forcefully than she does.

43 I owe this example to Betsy Postow.

44 MacKinnon herself does that in Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, 120, 121, and so does Evelyn Fox Keller in Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).

45 Earlier versions of this paper were presented to audiences at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, at the 2002 conference of the North American Society for Social Philosophy, and at the conference organized for this volume. I wish to thank them all for their helpful comments. Special thanks go to Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, who was very generous with his time, Samantha Brennan, John Hardwig, Dennis Klimchuk, Jim Okapal, Christine Overall, and Susan Sherwin.