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Frye's Loving Perception
Marilyn Frye's work in feminist theory is most helpful in showing why Kant's morality is not possible at the present time. In her essay, "In and Out of Harm's Way", Frye goes to great lengths to show how women are subjugated and denied autonomy through the means of coercion. She denies Sartre's standpoint of complete autonomous freedom by showing the truth about coercion:

The structure of coercion, then, is this: to coerce someone into doing something one has to manipulate the situation so that the world as perceived by the victim presents the victim with a range of options the least unattractive of which (or the most attractive of which) in the judgment of the victim is the act one wants the victim to do.¹²

This shows that while Kant would have us believe that we can all make rational decisions, there are people who feel they are by a shift in the value of choices being made. In this way, especially with physical coercion, or the threat of violence, we no longer believe that our reason is the author of our actions, and hence cannot act morally. In fact, we would begin to act in very irrational ways for fear of our life, even if they were immoral. I think this is particularly insightful to the difficulties that Kant faces in showing that his morality is the way to go. Moreover, I feel it simply shows that working against oppression is in the best interest of any attempt at morality. We need not live in a perfect world, but we must live in a world in which coercion does not occur on the level that it does today.

In response to acts of coercion, exploitation, oppression, and enslavement, Frye attributes this to what she labels arrogant perception. She states that the arrogant perceiver "falsifies - the Nature who makes both green beans and Bacillus Botulinus doesn't given a passing damn whether humans live or die - but he also coerces the objects of his perception into satisfying the conditions his perception imposes."¹³ In other words, the arrogant perceiver treats everything as a means to a personal end. In response to this, Frye develops what she calls loving perception, in which the perceiver recognizes the independence of the other, sees nature as indifferent, and in order to perceive objects, must look at more data other than one's own perceptions.¹⁴ This has a striking resemblance to Kant's Principle of Humanity. Kant would agree with all three of these traits of loving perception. Moreover, the logical end of a world in which everyone uses loving perception, the beloved, furthers the parallel. This also runs right along with Kant's Principle of the Kingdom of Ends.

Kant was not insensitive to the corruptibility of humans in developing his morality. In the preface to the Groundwork, he writes "as against this, both natural and moral philosophy can each have an empirical part... for the will of man so far as affected by nature... in accordance with which everything ought to happen, although they also take into account the conditions under which what ought to happen very often does not happen."¹⁵ Kant realized that there are reasons that what people ought to do is not in accordance with their rational faculty. Frye gives the reason: arrogant perception.

I feel that Frye's loving perception fills in the gaps that Kant missed in his Principle of Humanity. Arrogant perception is the reason that it fails though rationally sensible. She reinforces the need for developing a loving perception or a Principle of Humanity as examples for others to follow in bring forth the beloved or the kingdom of ends. While I doubt that she would agree that rationality is the basis for her claims, it is interesting to note that while she is reacting to arrogant perception in developing her loving perception, Kant started with reason free to make choices to develop his categorical imperatives.