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Towards a Secular Lockean Liberalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Jeffrey Reiman
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In God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Jeremy Waldron argues that Locke's defense of human moral equality is inextricably tied to a theological doctrine: “Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them.” Moreover, Waldron suspects that this points to a more general truth, namely, that an adequate secular defense of human equality is not possible. He writes, “I actually don't think it is clear that we—now—can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation” (GLE, p. 13). If Waldron's claim of the inseparability of equality and theology in Locke's theory is taken as a claim about what Locke himself thought he was doing, I shall not dispute it, though, as I shall argue below, I do not think that Waldron's argument for this claim is satisfactory. If Waldron's claim is rather about the theory that Locke created, which I take to be a system of propositions whose implications and significance are not necessarily fully known to its author, then I disagree. I think that there is, in Locke's theory, a separable secular defense of moral equality intertwined with the theological defense, but I shall not try to prove that Locke intended this to be a separate defense or even thought (as I do) that it could stand on its own.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 67 , Issue 3 , Summer 2005 , pp. 473 - 493
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2005

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References

1. Waldron, Jeremy, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar (future references to this book will be as GLE, with page numbers). Though I criticize the core argument of this book, there is much in the book with which I agree, and much from which I have benefited. I think Waldron writes with admirable clarity about the nature of the problem of human moral equality, that he is right that there is inadequate contemporary philosophical discussion about the grounds for believing in that equality, and that he successfully refutes numerous prejudices about Locke that are all-too-common today. What's more, God, Locke, and Equality is that rarity in the philosophical literature: a delightful read.

2. Here, and on many other points, I agree with A. John Simmons, who writes: “Many of Locke's arguments concerning rights are purely conceptual. Many are simple appeals to common sense. … These arguments are logically independent of and detachable from the theological foundations from which Locke begins” (Simmons, A. John, The Lockean Theory of Rights [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992], p. 10).Google Scholar The secular version of Locke's moral theory that I shall sketch out below is not, however, the same as the one sketched out by Simmons in this excellent book.

3. “Locke … wrote during a transitional period, when the religious and secular components of his central concepts of rights and property were no longer simple to delineate” (Simmons, , The Lockean Theory, p. 11).Google Scholar

4. Locke, John, Second Treatise of Government (first edition, pub. 1690), chapter II, section 4;Google Scholar my emphasis (future references to this text will be as ST, with chapter and section numbers). Though Waldron's argument ranges over the First Treatise as well, his focus in chapter 3, the crucial chapter in which he argues for the inseparability of Locke's theory of moral equality and his theological claims, is primarily on the Second Treatise. So, too, will be mine.

5. Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), Book 1, Chapter 1, Section 5 (Future References To This Book Will Be As Essay With Book, Chapter And Section Numbers).Google Scholar

6. Waldron cites Locke quoting Filmer as holding “that there cannot he any Multitude of Men whatsoever, either great or small … hut that in the same Multitude … there is one Man among them, that in Nature hath a Right to be King of all the rest” (GLE, p. 5n15 and accompanying text).Google Scholar

7. I call this a judgment rather than an inference to be clear that Locke is not committing the naturalistic fallacy of inferring a normative conclusion from factual premises. Here I fully agree with Waldron who says that, though Locke bases our moral equality on our factual similarity, he is not “inferring our normative equality from some factual similarity. [Locke] says in the Second Treatise that the connection is ‘evident,’ but that this is not the same as saying that it is logically implied is indicated by his going on to add that creatures who share the relevant descriptive property might still be unequal if God had so ordained it” (GLE, P. 69Google Scholar; Citation Omitted). Note, by the way, pace Jefferson, that Locke does not here or anywhere else affirm that human equality is self-evident. It is simply no less evident as anything else. In the Essay, Locke denies that any moral principle is self-evident (Essay, 1.3.4), and, of course, he is right. Perhaps, Jefferson did know this after all, since if it were truly self-evident that all men were created equal, it would not be necessary for us to hold it to be self-evident—we'd only have to point at it.

8. A similar argument from the absence of God's appointment is to be found in the First Treatise, where Locke writes that “all that share in the same common nature, faculties, and powers are in nature equal, and ought to partake in the same common rights and privileges, till the manifest appointment of God … can be produced to show any particular person's supremacy” (Locke, John, First Treatise of Government, VI.67).Google Scholar

9. I say that Waldron doesn't take this seriously enough because he does quote Locke, from the Essay, writing that “were there a Monkey, or any other Creature to be found, that had the use of Reason, to such a degree, as to be able to understand general Signs, and to deduce Consequences about general Ideas, he would no doubt be subject to Law, and, in that Sense, be a Man, how much soever he differ'd in Shape from Others of that name” (Essay, 3.11.16; cited at GLE, p. 67)Google Scholar. But Waldron doesn't make anything of this secular account of the threshold level needed to be subject to the law of nature and, indeed, to count as a human.

10. “To be an (equal) rightholder (i.e., a person), an individual must have an ‘understanding of his own to direct his will’ and ‘regulate his actions.’ The individual can then rationally pursue personal good and the good of others, with knowledge of the law of nature and the boundaries to action it establishes” (Simmons, , The Lockean Theory, p. 82, quoting from ST, VI.58).Google Scholar

11. Simmons also takes this as the natural reading, though he raises doubts about its suitability as an explanation of our duties to God. See The Lockean Theory, p. 30.Google Scholar

12. Waldron's statements at GLE, p. 69, suggest that he would agree that Locke assumes such a competence. See note 7, above.Google Scholar

13. Summing up his argument at the end of his chapter 3, Waldron writes: “So Locke's position seems to be this. Anyone with the capacity for abstraction can reason to the existence of God, and he can relate the idea of God to there being a law that applies to him both in his conduct in this world and as to his prospects in the next. The content of that law may not be available to everyone's reason, but anyone above the threshold has the power to relate the idea of such law to what is known by faith and revelation about God's commandments” (GLE, pp. 79–80).Google Scholar How does abstraction get us an idea of the next world, or give us reliable convictions about the content of faith and revelation, or harder still, how does it get us to something “known by faith”? Here it might also be added that, as Simmons, observes (The Lockean Theory, p. 24n28)Google Scholar, Locke's anti-essentialism rules out our having knowledge of God's essence. This would seem to raise additional doubts about how far the power of abstraction will get us in understanding what our relation to God implies.

14. I am not the first philosopher to try this. For example, I think that Simmons does a quite convincing job of interpreting Locke as a rule-consequentialist in The Lockean Theory, see esp. pp. 36–59.Google Scholar I don't claim that my concoction is the only valid one. It is simply the one that I find most plausible and most satisfying in light of contemporary philosophical concerns.

15. In his Essays on the Law of Nature (written by Locke shortly after 1660, but not published in his lifetime), Locke wrote that the “law of nature can be described as being the decree of the divine will discernible by the light of nature and indicating what is and what is not in conformity with rational nature, and for this very reason commanding or prohibiting” (Locke, John, Essays on the Law of Nature [Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2002], p.111Google Scholar [future references to this book will be as ELN, with page numbers]). And in the Essay, Locke suggests that “God himself cannot choose what is not good” (Essay, 2.21.49). So, then, if we can figure out for ourselves what is and what is not in conformity with our nature—or what's good regarding our behavior, we will have at least the content of the law of Nature on secular grounds. And, if, as I shall suggest below, the very fact that these things are plainly knowable to all humans grounds an effective obligation to comply, then we have the “commanding” as well.

16. I say that it is right reason which is that law, because Locke distinguishes “right reason” (which “is nothing but the law of nature itself”) from “reason” (which is “the manner whereby … natural law is known”). See ELN, p. 149.Google Scholar

17. Consider, for example, that, in both Political Liberalism and A Theory of Justice, John Rawls appeals to the importance that religious beliefs have for religious people as part of a secular argument for freedom of conscience. He writes: “if but one of the alternative principles of justice available to the parties [in the original position] guarantees equal liberty of conscience, this principle is to be adopted. … For the veil of ignorance implies that the parties do not know whether the beliefs espoused by the persons they represent is a majority or a minority view. They cannot take chances by permitting a lesser liberty of conscience to minority religions, say, on the possibility that those they represent espouse a majority or dominant religion and will therefore have an even greater liberty. For it may also happen that these persons belong to a minority faith and may suffer accordingly. If the parties [in the original position] were to gamble in this way, they would show that they did not take the religious, philosophical, or moral convictions of persons seriously, and, in effect, did not know what a religious, philosophical, or moral conviction was” (Rawls, John, Political Liberalism [New York: Columbia University Press, 1993], p. 311;Google Scholar see similar remarks in Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971] pp. 206–07).Google Scholar

18. Locke, , A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983; originally published 1689), p. 26 (future references to this text will be as Letter, with page numbers).Google Scholar

19. This is an argument that was very common among Enlightenment writers, and which I suspect played a greater role in grounding Enlightenment liberalism than is normally recognized. For example, Voltaire wrote: “Our soul acts internally. Internal acts are thought, volition, inclinations, acquiescence in certain truths. All these acts are above coercion” (de Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet, “The Ecclesiastical Ministry,” quoted in Rramnick, I., ed., The Portable Enlightenment Reader [New York: Penguin Books, 1995], p. 116).Google Scholar And Jefferson said, “Almighty God hath created the mind free, and manifested his Supreme will that free it shall remain by making it altogether insusceptible of restraint” (Jefferson, Thomas, “A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom,” in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Boyd, Julian [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1950], vol. 2, p. 545).Google Scholar See my Critical Moral Liberalism: Theory and Practice (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 1997), pp. 5–11.Google Scholar

20. See notes 7 and 12, and accompanying text, above.

21. That I would replace the current language of “intuitions” with that of “reasonable judgments” should suffice to indicate that I in no way endorse the view, associated with G. E. Moore and W. D. Ross, that we have intuitions—in the sense of direct knowledge—of values or principles of right. These are claims of self-evidence that Locke would rightly reject, and I reject them too.

22. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956; originally published 1788), p. 61.Google Scholar

23. Shorn of fiery rhetoric, the justifications that Osama bin Laden gives for his war against the West boil down to garden-variety harms and injuries that he believes have been perpetrated by the West on Muslims.

24. On Locke's views about the ground of moral obligation, see the discussion in Simmons, , The Lockean Theory, pp. 26–28.Google Scholar

25. Here, too, I shall not attempt a fullscale defense. Suffice it to say that anyone who thinks that the state is morally justifiable (anyone not an anarchist, that is) must believe that the benefits of the state justify imposing state institutions on people without their having first consented in fact. And, among these non-anarchists, anyone who believes that it is wrong to impose things on people without their consent, will have little choice but to appeal to a theoretical version of consent, that is, taking people to consent to what it would be reasonable for them to consent to.

26. This has the interesting implication that, to the extent that one thinks that Rawls's two principles of “justice as fairness” spell out the content of what it would be reasonable for people to agree to (and I think that they do to a very great extent), to that extent one will be able to believe that those principles are the true principles of justice—not just what “we (northeastern liberals) believe.”

27. I discuss the implications of Locke's social contract theory for the right to vote in “Liberal and Republican Arguments Against the Disenfranchisement of Felons,” Criminal Justice Ethics 24, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 2005): 3–18.Google Scholar

28. This is evident regarding political institutions. It is less obvious with respect to private property, but true nonetheless. Both of Locke's arguments for private property (the argument for subsistence appropriation as long as “enough, and as good” is left over for others, and the argument for large and unequal appropriation based on the dubious inference from the conventional nature of money to it and its consequences having been agreed to—as well as the more plausible claim that such property is productive of more goods for all) show that he thought that property had to be such that it would be reasonable for all to agree to its terms, both owners and nonowners alike. See ST, V.25–51.Google ScholarI think that Waldron would agree, see GLE, pp. 170–77.Google Scholar See, also, my Justice and Modern Moral Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 170–78.Google Scholar