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Liberalism and Locke's Philosophical Anthropology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2019

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Abstract

Perhaps in part because of an issue related to chronology of publications, the connections between Locke's liberalism and philosophical anthropology are underappreciated. This essay addresses that issue and re-examines Locke's account of the person, treating it as an interpretive key to Locke's political thought. Locke's person is, contra the standard readings, a relational concept that refers to beings capable of law in terms of their accountability to law; descendants of Adam are equal as persons in that they hold identical rights (or prerogatives) and duties under the divine law. This philosophical anthropology leads to a principle—eschatological accountability delimits legitimate moral and political authority, so authority over a person is necessarily limited by that person's accountability to God—that helps to clarify certain misunderstandings of the status of moral authority within Lockean liberalism and to explain how Locke set the terms of subsequent debates about the limits of political authority.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , Spring 2019 , pp. 183 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019 

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References

1 Throughout I use liberalism to refer to classical liberalism, that set of ideas related to limited government, religious tolerance, and free market economics of which Locke is rightly considered a father.

2 Of course, Locke was not necessarily orthodox in all his theological positions. Locke's view of original sin, for example, was not a standard one. See Parker, Kim Ian, The Biblical Politics of John Locke (Waterloo, ON: Wilfid Laurier University Press, 2004), 147–50Google Scholar. Even with regard to eschatological judgment, aspects of Locke's view were unorthodox for his era—his denial that the same body would need to be resurrected, for example—but Locke's overall goal was one he shared with many of his contemporaries, namely, to explain how people after the Resurrection can be accountable for actions in this life. See Jolley, Nicholas, Locke's Touchy Subjects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 100–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On how Locke's subjective approach to diachronic identity fit into early modern philosophical trends, see Thiel, Udo, The Early Modern Subject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 61–93Google Scholar.

3 Several authors use similar terms to capture the idea that person is a forensic term, but by not reading it as a relation, their interpretations end up rather convoluted. For example, Boeker uses “subject of accountability,” while Strawson uses “unit of accountability” (Boeker, Ruth, “The Moral Dimension in Locke's Account of Persons and Personal Identity,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 31, no. 3 [July 2014]: 239Google Scholar; Strawson, Galen, Locke on Personal Identity [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011], 22Google Scholar).

4 Locke seems dissatisfied with his names for this third law. Introduced in the heading for E 2.28.10–11 as the “Philosophical Law,” it is referred to in the body of the text as “the Law of Opinion or Reputation.” Later Locke calls it the “Law of Fashion” (E 2.28.13). The second of these names being burdensomely long, I generally use the first (philosophical law), judging it imperfect but superior to “Law of Fashion.”

5 Locke differentiates between justified power (authority) and raw power, but he uses the word power to refer to both concepts. Context, for the most part, makes clear which he intends. See 2nd T: 2–3, 17.

References to Locke's works will be abbreviated as follows. All emphasis is Locke's, unless otherwise noted.

1st T

Book I of Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 137–263CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Citations are by paragraph number.

2nd T

Book II of Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Laslett, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 265–428CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Citations are by paragraph number.

CE

Locke, John, Some Thoughts concerning Education, ed. Adamson, John William (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007)Google Scholar. Citations are by section number.

CT

Locke, John, Locke on Toleration, ed. Vernon, Richard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Citations are by letter number and page number.

E

Locke, John, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971)Google Scholar. Citations are by book, chapter, and section.

ELN

Locke, John, Essays on the Law of Nature, in Locke: Political Essays, ed. Goldie, Mark (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Citations are by essay number and page number.

RC

Locke, John, The Reasonableness of Christianity, ed. Ramsey, I. T. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1958)Google Scholar. Citations are by paragraph number.

6 Thiel recounts how Locke's approach “sparked off” the eighteenth-century discussions of personal identity in terms of “inner-directed consciousness” (Thiel, Early Modern Subject, 31). As Ayers has somewhat hyperbolically claimed, “the debate on personal identity has hardly moved on since the innovations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (Ayers, Michael, Locke [New York: Routledge, 1991], 2:281Google Scholar).

7 To my knowledge, only one recent commentator argues that Locke's persons are relations, but his position is quite different from mine. Simendić holds that person is the relation between present consciousness and the various temporal iterations of that consciousness. He claims that person is a relation but man is not because “person is defined by its temporal extension and this serves a specific forensic purpose” (Simendić, Marko, “Locke's Person Is a Relation,” Locke Studies 15 [2015]: 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Simendić is certainly right that Locke dwells on the diachronic identity of persons and that this identity serves a specific forensic purpose. But given that Locke thinks we form the idea of identity when we compare “any thing as existing at any determin'd time and place” with “it self existing at another time,” it is unclear what it would mean for diachronic identity to be more definitive of one type of thing than another (E 2.27.1, my emphasis). And Locke's interest in eschatological accountability is sufficient to explain the extended attention he gives to the identity of persons. Simendić does, it should be said, make a passing gesture toward something like my position at the end of his essay (ibid., 94).

8 See, for example, LoLordo, Antonia, Locke's Moral Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strawson, Locke on Personal Identity, 2–4; Thiel, Early Modern Self, 108.

9 Edmund Law, “A Defence of Mr. Locke's Opinion concerning Personal Identity,” in Strawson, Locke on Personal Identity, 236.

10 Ibid., 243.

11 Using the term person to refer to beings in relation to law has a long historical precedent. In Roman law, “‘Persona’ simply referred to the individual human being insofar as he stands in a relationship to legal matters,” and the “person as a bearer of rights and duties is also central to the Christian tradition of natural law” (Thiel, Early Modern Subject, 27).

12 See Rickless, Samuel, “Are Locke's Persons Modes or Substances?,” in Locke and Leibniz on Substance, ed. Lodge, Paul and Stoneham, Tom (New York: Routledge, 2015), 124–25Google Scholar; Gordon-Roth, Jessica, “Locke on the Ontology of Persons,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 53, no. 1 (March 2015): 100–102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Gordon-Roth points out that the fact that “fathers, constables, and dictators have powers, even though they are not substances” cannot work as a defense of the mode interpretation, since these terms name relations not modes (“Ontology of Persons,” 103).

14 See LoLordo, Locke's Moral Man, 85; Mattern, Ruth, “Moral Science and the Concept of Persons in Locke,” Philosophical Review 89, no. 1 (January 1980): 33–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the argument that parts of the Second Treatise are intended as a demonstrative science, see Grant, Ruth, John Locke's Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 198–205CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Rickless, “Locke's Persons,” 122; cf. Gordon-Roth, “Ontology of Persons,” 109–10.

16 LoLordo also thinks person and moral man are equivalent (Moral Man, 65). For the opposing view, see Thiel, Early Modern Subject, 129.

17 See Gordon-Roth, “Ontology of Persons,” 113–14; Rickless, “Locke's Persons,” 120–21.

18 I agree with Winkler that personal identity is determined by what a consciousness can appropriate (Winkler, Kenneth, “Locke on Personal Identity,” in Locke, ed. Chappell, Vere [New York: Oxford University Press, 1998]Google Scholar). People will not be judged for anything they cannot themselves recognize their responsibility for. But there is also an external, objective standard of personal identity that this internal standard is brought to match on the Great Day. At that time, “the secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open,” meaning that God will fix any forgetfulness that would artificially prevent a being from repeating the idea of a past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first (E 2.27.26). Several commentators have noticed that Locke often seems to suggest a continuous metaphysical reality unifies each consciousness over time, even though “Locke does not spell out what the metaphysical constitution of the unifying component of consciousness is” (see E 2.27.14, 19–20, 23, 25). Boeker, Ruth, “Locke on Personal Identity: A Response to the Problems of His Predecessors,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 3 (July 2017): 427CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Garrett, Don, “Locke on Personal Identity, Consciousness, and ‘Fatal Errors,’” Philosophical Topics 31 (2003): 107–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 116–17; Weinberg, Shelley, Consciousness in Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 154–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If person is a relation, then beings that are persons (like those that are brothers) clearly have a metaphysical reality that can provide an external standard of personal identity. Of course, Locke talks about such beings as persons precisely in order to avoid metaphysical puzzles, so he would not attempt to spell out their metaphysical constitutions. Overlooking this objective standard of personal identity leads to odd ideas such as Strawson's suggestion that persons are metaphysically gappy entities (Strawson, Locke on Personal Identity, 60).

19 John Locke, Identy [sic] of Persons (June 5, 1683), Bodleian Library, MS Locke f.7, p. 107; facsimile in Thiel, Udo, John Locke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), 89Google Scholar; Locke, John, An Early Draft of Locke's Essay, together with Excerpts from His Journals, ed. Aaron, Richard and Gibb, Jocelyn (Oxford: Clarendon, 1936), 121–23Google Scholar. See the discussion in Thiel, Early Modern Subject, 97–100.

20 Augustine can be taken as representative of the church's general position on the natural equality and liberty of humans when he says, “By nature, as God first created us, no one is slave either to man or to sin” (Civitate Dei §19.15).

21 Rae captures the concerns of the contemporary literature on equality: “The complexity that interests us does not arise within the abstract idea of equality but in its confrontation with the world” (Rae, Douglas, Equalities [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981], 5Google Scholar). Rae means that studying equality itself is less interesting than examining different attempts to establish forms of equality in particular times and locations. But looking to Locke's view of the person in order to better understand Locke's liberalism leads to a different conclusion: the complexity within the abstract idea of equality, within the idea that humans are equal, is worthy of attention.

22 Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Ibid., 79–80.

24 Stolzenberg, Nomi and Yaffe, Gideon, “Waldron's Locke and Locke's Waldron,” Inquiry 49, no. 2 (2006): 204CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Mitchell also emphasizes the importance of this disagreement, as both Locke and Filmer hold that the “original of political truth” is to be “found in Adam” (Mitchell, Joshua, Not by Reason Alone [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 82Google Scholar).

26 Here we find the linkage between the idea that humans are made in the image of God and the grant of dominion to humans so frequently commented on in the history of the church. And, although Locke does not make frequent use of the language of the image of God, we can see that it does no injustice to his thought to read him as developing a particular version of the classic Christian position that humans are naturally equal because all made in the image of God.

27 Deneen, Patrick, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Ibid.

29 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar, §1.15

30 Ibid.

31 Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed, 47.

32 In perhaps the most influential version of this story about modernity, Hirschmann argues that whereas medieval people conceived of a battle between virtues and vices, early moderns conceived of a world in which interest subdues passions, making people predictable and tractable. Locke is part of this story, according to Hirschmann, because his understanding of freedom as security against arbitrary rule supposedly fits with the expectation that men will be “steadfast, single-minded, and methodical” in pursuit of their interests (Hirschmann, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013], 21, 52, 53–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar). But Locke's educational and psychological writings show him to expect humans to be inconstant pursuers of whatever desires are momentarily strongest and to therefore have a profound need to cultivate virtue.

33 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 171–72Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 167–71.

35 MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 61, 217Google Scholar; MacIntyre, Alasdair, Dependent Rational Animals (Peru: Open Court, 2010), 156Google Scholar.

36 Mehta, Uday Singh, The Anxiety of Freedom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 6Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 170–74.

38 Against the standard interpretation that Locke tried to produce a demonstration of morality and then found it to be impossible, Tuckness argues convincingly that Locke held a consistent position: all of morality is in principle demonstrable, but the human mind in its present condition can only uncover a portion of it (Tuckness, Alex, “The Coherence of a Mind: John Locke and the Law of Nature,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 37, no. 1 [Jan. 1999]: 78–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Schneewind is an influential proponent of the standard interpretation. See Schneewind, J. B., The Invention of Autonomy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 154–59Google Scholar.

39 See, e.g., Taylor, Sources of the Self, 161; Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 150.

40 Peter Harrison has offered a compelling criticism of the standard account of the role of nominalism in the Reformation and early modern periods. Aquinas distinguished the potentia dei absoluta from the potentia dei ordinata in order to make the point that there are things God hypothetically could do but never actually does. Certain late medieval voluntarists are said to have operationalized this distinction by holding that, as Harrison puts it, “God reserved for himself the possibility of cutting across the ordained order of events through an exercise of his absolute power.” And the reformers and early moderns are said to have made much of this distinction. Locke especially is implicated in this account of the history of ideas, since the empirical science Locke took part in developing is supposed to have been motivated in part by the type of voluntarism that relies on the operationalized distinction between God's absolute and ordained powers. But, as Harrison shows, Calvin and the Reformers explicitly rejected the notion of operationalized absolute power. And such empiricists as Newton, Boyle, and Locke also are far from offering clear support for the notion. What motivated their empiricism, Harrison argues, was not that they rejected a link between God's reason and his will but that they thought the fall of man had noetic effects. Because of the noetic effects of sin, humans cannot know exactly how much our reason will tell us about the natural world, so we must investigate it empirically (Harrison, Peter, “Voluntarism and Early Modern Science,” History of Science 40 [2002]: 8–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar). While Locke did not think guilt or the necessity of sinning was transmitted from Adam to his progeny, he did nonetheless think humans to be, practically speaking, noetically limited sinners.

41 Calvin “gives no countenance to the fiction of absolute power,” for God is not “lawless” but rather “a law to himself”; while Calvin insists that there is nothing “greater and more sublime than the will of God,” Calvin nevertheless follows Aquinas in refusing to divorce God's will from his reason (Institutes, §3.23.2). The laws God has set are expressions of his reason. For God to violate them would be to contradict himself, and divine self-contradiction is impossible. On this line of thought, God works miracles through his ordained power.

42 Despite Locke's hedonism, Yaffe is right that Locke thinks there is value in the world that we are to respond to. And “when we respond to it appropriately … we have liberty worth the name” (Yaffe, Gideon, Liberty Worth the Name [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000], 139Google Scholar). We also move closer to “the highest perfection of intellectual nature” and therefore toward similarity to “God almighty himself” (E 2.21.50–51).

43 Hobbes, Leviathan, §3.43.

44 Ibid.

45 On Locke's development, see Ashcraft, Richard, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's Two Treatises of Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 75–99Google Scholar.

46 Hobbes, Leviathan, §3.43.

47 The idea of the sufficient declaration of God's legislative will through reason is a long-settled position of Locke's, seen as early as his Essays on the Law of Nature (ELN 6, 117; 7, 121).

48 Mehta, Anxiety of Freedom, 170.

49 Dunn, John, The Political Thought of John Locke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 145CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Note how Locke relies on relational terms (magistrate, child, parents) to reason morally about humans.

51 Simmons, A. John, On the Edge of Anarchy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., 113.

53 Ibid., 114.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 Locke uses Jephtha's war with the Ammonites (Judges 11) as the paradigmatic case of the appeal to heaven. Jephtha is “forced to appeal to Heaven” because there is no “superior Jurisdiction on Earth, to determine the right between Jephtha and the Ammonites,” and Jephtha “prosecut[es]” his appeal by “lead[ing] out his Army to Battle” (2nd T 21). But appealing to the Lord to judge could simply mean withdrawing tacit consent. Recent research demonstrates that the nonviolent withdrawal of support from a regime is often enough to topple it. See Chenoweth, Erica and Stephan, Maria J., Why Civil Resistance Works (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

57 Simmons, Edge of Anarchy, 133.

58 Ibid.

59 Ibid., 137.

60 Emphasizing how this jurisdictional question emerges out of Locke's view of the individual helps us to see why Hannah Pitkin is not quite right to think “the doctrine of hypothetical consent” is “the truth toward which [Locke was] striving, but which [he] saw only indistinctly.” According to this doctrine, Pitkin tells us, “Legitimate government acts within the limits of the authority rational men would, abstractly and hypothetically, have to give a government they are founding” (Pitkin, Hannah, “Obligation and Consent—I,” American Political Science Review 59 [1965–66]:, 999CrossRefGoogle Scholar). Minogue takes a similar position; see Minogue, Kenneth, “The Foundations of Liberalism,” in John Locke and Immanuel Kant, ed. Thompson, Martyn P. (Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1991), 275Google Scholar. But on my reading of Locke, no government can be legitimate apart from the actual consent of the people, since one legally equal vicegerent can only have power over another if it is actually granted. As long as there is a government, though, and no one is appealing to heaven against it, everyone can be assumed to have actually granted authority to it. No government has authority, however, to take actions beyond its jurisdiction. And it is ultimately up to each individual to determine when her own jurisdiction has been violated severely enough to warrant an appeal to heaven. Alex Tuckness's concept of “legislative consent” is more helpful than Pitkin's hypothetical consent, since Tuckness is merely attempting to capture one method Locke uses to reason about the natural law: if it would make no sense for God, as the “legislator of the natural law,” to make a certain demand, then God can reasonably be assumed to not have made the demand (Tuckness, Alex, Locke and Legislative Point of View [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], 74–84Google Scholar).

61 Jonas Proast, “Argument of the Letter Concerning Toleration, Briefly Considered and Answered,” in CT 62.

62 Locke explains, in this same paragraph, the relation between this principled claim and his often-repeated claim about the inefficacy of force. The two arguments are complementary. Because force will not work to produce belief, God clearly did not authorize its use. But even if force did work, it still would not be authorized, on the basis of the argument explained above (as well as several related ones).