We live an age of cultural relativism that asks how universal moral obligation can be justified. Immanuel Kant took up this challenge. His arguments can be reconstructed in a way that makes sense today.

In his famous discussion of the source of our duties concerning anirrals, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant approvingly mentions a series of engravings ( "The Four Stages of Cruelty") by the English artist William Hogarth as exemplifying one of his central contentions. [2] The approach to our duties regarding anirrals advocated by Kant holds that avoiding cruelty is the most fUndamental duty...

Kant famously claims that autonomy is the ground of dignity. If he is correct about the grounding relationship, then doubts about our autonomy entail doubts about our dignity. Here, I attempt to show that Kant is sensitive to this problem, and invokes the ‘fact of reason’ (Faktum der Vernunft) as the key piece of evidence for our autonomy, and therefore our dignity. But as is well known, Kant’s...

This paper examines an issue at the centre of feminist debates about pornography and sex work, and that is whether these practices reduce women to sex objects. I question the assumption that the expression of sexual desire is unique in its power to degrade and dehumanize persons. I show that this assumption underlies Catharine MacKinnon’s attack on pornography by considering MacKinnon’s intelle...