Adam Cureton (University of Tennessee)-“The Social Nature of Reason”

Personal relationships of various kinds are, from the perspective of reflective commonsense, part of a fully reason-governed life.  A theory of reason must somehow capture and explain our reflective commonsense judgments that certain relationships accord with reason, generate requirements of reason, play a significant role in a life of reason, and are worthy of promotion, protection, and respect by rational and reasonable people.  A longstanding criticism of Kantian theories of reason is that they apparently deny, downplay, or misrepresent the nature and value of friendship, community, and other loving relationships.  Most personal bonds we have are emotional, contingent, and particular, whereas reason is apparently intellectual, necessary, and universal.  In a forthcoming book called Sovereign Reason, I develop a new and unorthodox way for Kantian theories to incorporate and justify the value of many kinds of personal relationships and other aspects of reflective commonsense.  The power of reason in human beings itself, I suggest, includes substantive final interests in forming, maintaining, perfecting, respecting, and promoting relationships of solidarity.  Part of being a rational and reasonable person is to be concerned with relationships of this sort apart from any natural desires and feelings we might have.  These interests of reason provide grounds for legislating presumptive laws of reason that rational and reasonable people could or would rationally endorse.  My aim in this talk is to describe what I call the Sovereignty Conception of Reason and to explain how it can be interpreted and applied in ways that capture and explain a wide variety of judgments in reflective commonsense about loving relationships.  I also describe a fully general and universal social ideal that arises out of the Sovereignty Conception of Reason and reveals the deeply social nature of our power of reason.  This ideal is a world of fully self-governing people who are bound together in solidarity by their shared commitments to the laws of reason themselves and to their shared interests of reason that underlie those standards.

Adam Cureton is Lindsay Young Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee.  He received a B.Phil. in philosophy from Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, a PhD in philosophy from UNC Chapel Hill on an NSF fellowship, and a BA and MA in philosophy from the University of Georgia on a UGA Foundation Fellowship.  He has published widely in ethics and Kant, including a collection on human dignity, essays on respect, solidarity, and hope, and a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press called Sovereign Reason: Autonomy and our Interests of Reason.  He is also an internationally recognized scholar in philosophy of disability who edited several collections in this area, including the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability, and has a forthcoming book from Oxford University Press called Respecting Disability.