Adam Cureton - Böcker

We often invoke broad ideas of reason, rationality, reasonableness, reasons, reasoning, and related concepts in commonsense and express their apparent authority through ordinary language and social practices. Despite what many philosophers, economists, psychologists, novelists, and others claim, the reason of everyday life is far more substantive than cold logic or calculating self-interest. Sovereign Reason: Autonomy and our Interests of Reason explores the idea that our power of reason includes an expansive set of governing abilities, substantive motives, and substantive principles. The volume develops this novel but partial theory of reason by drawing on a wide variety of Kant's texts and highlighting themes in our ordinary ways of speaking and thinking. The unifying idea of the Sovereignty Conception of Reason is that of an autonomous person who governs herself by reason in all respects. The Sovereignty Conception of Reason dramatically extends traditional Kantian conceptions of rational self-governance. We are able to govern our many mental powers by reason, not just our ability to make choices, and we can legislate, execute, and adjudicate in ourselves all kinds of principles of reason, not just moral ones. The Sovereignty Conception of Reason holds that our reason includes substantive final interests in various things. Part of having a rational nature is to care about knowledge, enlightenment, explanation, happiness, the lives of persons, and solidarity for their own sake. These interests of reason do not depend on our natural desires but are instead constitutive of our power of reason itself. The Sovereignty Conception of Reason also holds that our reason includes a principle of justifiability according to which mental acts of all kinds, including choices, beliefs, desires, and even feelings, are required by reason if and because they are justifiable to rational people on the basis of their substantive interests of reason. Many specific requirements that we affirm in commonsense can be derived from this abstract principle. The book contrasts the Sovereignty Conception of Reason with other prominent theories and explores specific rational principles it grounds concerning beneficence, coercion, deception, friendship, expressing respect, education, envy, self-development, and others.

Proper treatment of people with disabilities should not incur any head scratching. Yet for many, it requires a multifaceted and thoroughly considered approach. Respecting people with disabilities can involve a plethora of considerations and approaches to social relations and care: how we interact with them in interpersonal contexts, what kinds of attitudes we have toward them, how we relate with them, and how people with disabilities regard and treat ourselves. Drawing on the author's own perspective and experiences as a disabled person, Adam Cureton emphasizes the importance of relationships, ideals, virtues, and attitudes in how we approach ethical issues that concern disability, and explores the nature and moral importance of respect for people with disabilities and of respect for ourselves. The book explores ways to understand and evaluate one's own disability and how to maintain one's self-respect in the face of disparaging social pressures. It also addresses unique moral challenges that disabled people face and characterizes some guiding moral ideals of self-respect for navigating these complex situations. Cureton emphasizes the importance of expressing respect for disabled people. By distinguishing several different kinds of respect for people with disabilities, he shows how many of the common attitudes that even well-meaning people have towards those with disabilities are complicated and morally problematic. Through these intricacies, he charts a nuanced path forward. This book speaks to disabled people and others with experience of disability to help people understand and evaluate the many ways we can properly respect disability.

Proper treatment of people with disabilities should not incur any head scratching. Yet for many, it requires a multifaceted and thoroughly considered approach. Respecting people with disabilities can involve a plethora of considerations and approaches to social relations and care: how we interact with them in interpersonal contexts, what kinds of attitudes we have toward them, how we relate with them, and how people with disabilities regard and treat ourselves. Drawing on the author's own perspective and experiences as a disabled person, Adam Cureton emphasizes the importance of relationships, ideals, virtues, and attitudes in how we approach ethical issues that concern disability, and explores the nature and moral importance of respect for people with disabilities and of respect for ourselves. The book explores ways to understand and evaluate one's own disability and how to maintain one's self-respect in the face of disparaging social pressures. It also addresses unique moral challenges that disabled people face and characterizes some guiding moral ideals of self-respect for navigating these complex situations. Cureton emphasizes the importance of expressing respect for disabled people. By distinguishing several different kinds of respect for people with disabilities, he shows how many of the common attitudes that even well-meaning people have towards those with disabilities are complicated and morally problematic. Through these intricacies, he charts a nuanced path forward. This book speaks to disabled people and others with experience of disability to help people understand and evaluate the many ways we can properly respect disability.

Everyone is disabled in some respect, at least in the sense that others can do things that we cannot. But significant limitations on pursuing major life activities due to severely limited eyesight, hearing, mobility, cognitive functioning and so on pose special problems that fortunately have been recognized (to some extent) in our public policies. Public policy is important, as are the deliberative frameworks that we use to justify them, and the essays in the second and third sections of this volume have significant implications for public policy and offer new proposals for justifying frameworks. Underlying public policies and their assessment, however, are the attitudes, good and bad, that we bring to them, and our attitudes as well deeply affect our interpersonal relationships. The essays here, especially in the first section, reveal how complex and problematic our attitudes towards persons with disabilities are when we are in relationships with them as care-givers, friends, family members, or briefly encountered strangers. Our attitudes towards ourselves as persons with (or without) disabilities are implicated in these discussions as well. Among the special highlights of this volume are its focus on moral attitudes and relationships involving disabilities and its contributors' recognition of the multi-faceted nature of disability problems. The importance of respect for persons as a necessary complement to beneficence is an underlying theme, and a deeper understanding of respect is made possible by considering closely its implications for relationships with persons with disabilities. Awareness of the common and uncommon human vulnerabilities also makes clear the need for modifying traditional deliberative frameworks for assessing policies, and several essays make constructive proposals for the changes that are needed.

This book offers a much-needed investigation of moral and political issues concerning disability, and explores how the experiences of people with disabilities can lead to reconsideration of prominent positions on normative issues. Thirteen new essays examine such topics as the concept of disability, the conditions of justice, the nature of autonomy, healthcare distribution, and reproductive choices. The contributors are Norman Daniels, Ellen Daniels Zide, Leslie P. Francis, Christie Hartley, Richard Hull, Guy Kahane, F. M. Kamm, Rosalind McDougall, Jeff McMahan, Douglas MacLean, Susannah Rose, Anita Silvers, Julian Savulescu, Lorella Terzi, David Wasserman, and Jonathan Wolff.

This book offers a much-needed investigation of moral and political issues concerning disability, and explores how the experiences of people with disabilities can lead to reconsideration of prominent positions on normative issues. Thirteen new essays examine such topics as the concept of disability, the conditions of justice, the nature of autonomy, healthcare distribution, and reproductive choices. The contributors are Norman Daniels, Ellen Daniels Zide, Leslie P. Francis, Christie Hartley, Richard Hull, Guy Kahane, F. M. Kamm, Rosalind McDougall, Jeff McMahan, Douglas MacLean, Susannah Rose, Anita Silvers, Julian Savulescu, Lorella Terzi, David Wasserman, and Jonathan Wolff.

This book advances our understanding of the nature, grounds and limits of human dignity by connecting it with Kant’s notion of an ideal moral community, or "Kingdom of Ends". It features original essays by leading Kant scholars and moral and political philosophers from around the world.Although Kant’s influential injunction to treat humanity as an end in itself and never merely as a means has garnered the most attention among those interested in analyzing human dignity with a Kantian lens, Kant himself places much more emphasis on the Kingdom of Ends as crucial for defining human dignity. The chapters in this collection focus not only on interpretive issues related to the Kingdom of Ends but also on practical applications that have the potential to advance discussions about the nature and foundations of rights, the content of moral principles, the importance of moral ideals and attitudes and the nature of moral motivation. Exploring and connecting the ideas of human dignity and the Kingdom of Ends significantly deepens our moral understanding, advances discussions in moral and political philosophy and enhances our appreciation of Kant’s moral theory.Human Dignity and the Kingdom of Ends: Kantian Perspectives and Practical Applications will appeal to scholars and advanced students of Kant, moral philosophy, political philosophy, and political theory.