Rhodes Scholarship and a Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has published widely on ethics and Kant, including a collection on human dignity and essays on respect, solidarity, and hope. He is also an internationally recognized scholar in philosophy of disability who published a book on respect for people with disabilities and edited several collections in this area.
Cureton applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sovereign Reason: Autonomy and our Interests of Reason, and reported the following:
If a browser opened my book to page 99, they would land on what may be its most distinctive and provocative idea. Moralists from several traditions, especially those influenced by the 18 th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, have long thought that good people govern themselves through their own reason, living by reasonable standards they endorse for themselves rather than by mere custom, whim, habit, or selfishness. Yet such autonomy has often seemed illusory. Reason is frequently portrayed as a passive tool, a calculator of means or prover of logical theorems, that is better suited to serve our purposes rather than to rule over us.Learn more about Sovereign Reason at the Oxford University Press website.
Page 99 begins to upend this picture. I argue there that several of our mental powers are not mere abilities or instruments. They have built into them active dispositions, tendencies, desires, and other interests that move us to act. Our power of understanding does not simply wait for prompting; it pushes us to make sense of the world around us. Our power of judgment can itself acquire habits of thought that bias our thinking. Most importantly, our power of reason contains active elements that lead us to recognize moral principles, to hold ourselves accountable to them, and to resist doing what we know is wrong.
These “interests of reason” also extend beyond tendencies to govern ourselves by moral principles. As the book progresses, I explain that, as rational creatures, we have substantive interests of reason in expanding our knowledge, promoting freedom and justice, relieving the suffering of those around us, developing our natural talents, respecting ourselves and others, and cultivating friendships and other social bonds. To have reason, in this sense, is already to care about these things for their own sake.
The central theme of the book is that each of us is like a political state, with competing factions vying for power and influence. In an autonomous, well-governed person, reason holds the reigns, aligning our desires, beliefs, and actions with the demands of morality, and moving us to treat everyone with equal dignity and respect. Page 99 offers readers a first glimpse of that ideal.
--Marshal Zeringue
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