Helga Varden’s Sex,Love, and Gender (Oxford University Press 2020) was awarded the prestigious North American Kant Society’s Senior Scholar Prize for the best book published in the three years 2020-2022.

Sex, Love, and Gender presents a holistic Kantian philosophical account—the first of its kind— of the structures of our human phenomenology and explores core related moral (ethical and legal) issues, such as abortion, the evil of sexual violence, complexities surrounding the selling and buying of sexual services, the legal institution of marriage, and sexual or gendered identities and sexual orientations. The first part lays out a Kantian moral psychological and ethical theory of sex, love, and gender, while the second part treats rightful uses of coercion in relation to sex, love, and gender. Overall, the book uses Kant’s practical philosophical tools, in combination with feminist and gender theory and in conversation with other relevant thinkers, to provide a critique of emotionally healthy, morally justifiable, and responsible forms of sexual, loving, and gendered being and of sexual and gendered wrongdoing and oppression.