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Christian foundations; or some loose stones? Toleration and the philosophy of Locke’s politics

2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 14; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13698230.2011.571876

1743-8772

Timothy Stanton,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Abstract This essay disputes one of the central claims in Jeremy Waldron’s God, Locke, and Equality (2002), that being the claim that Locke’s arguments about species in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding undercut his assertions about the equality of the human species as a matter of natural law in Two Treatises of Government. It argues, firstly, and pace Waldron, that Locke’s view of natural law is foundational to his view of man, not vice versa, and, secondly, that Two Treatises is written in an idiom different from Locke’s philosophical writings, such that directly transposing the ideas discussed in one idiom to the other is as confused as it is confusing. After providing a new account of the relationship between Locke’s philosophy and his views of morality, politics and religion, the essay concludes that Waldron fails to grasp the style and structure of Locke’s thinking, and so cumulatively misunderstands and distorts Locke’s views about moral identity, toleration, religion and politics alike. Keywords: John LocketolerationJeremy Waldronpoliticsreligionabstractionnatural law Acknowledgements Thanks are due to Professor Susan Mendus and Drs Jon Parkin and Iain Harris for their written comments on an earlier version of this essay, and to Professors John Christian Laursen, Iain Hampsher-Monk and Matt Matravers and Drs Graham Long, Samuel Clark and Matthew Sleat for questions that prompted further reflection on its arguments. I would also like to thank Mr Roland Hall for his expert help with some corrections and his permission to reproduce material from a longer version of this essay was published in Locke Studies in 2008, under the title ‘Locke the thinker’. Notes 1. The Lockean God always acts to a purpose, and where His purposes are relevant to us He provides to us the means of fulfilling them. Innate ideas are useless in our pursuit of these purposes; indeed, ‘seekeing for or depending upon innate principles’ only distracts us from the pursuit (Locke Citation1990, p. 119). As Locke assumes that God neither provides, nor sanctions the use of, ‘any means, which could not reach but would rather crosse the attainment of the end’ He wishes for people (Locke Citation2006, p. 273), innate ideas cannot be means He employs. 2. Innate ideas, by contrast, have no discernable causal history. 3. Ayers (Citation1991) describes the process of as one of selective attention to some elements of given complex idea. Walmsley (Citation1999) and Ott (Citation2004) suggest that it is one of mental separation in which irrelevant elements are winnowed from the relevant. Either way, Locke’s point is that we can form general ideas on the basis of experience. 4. Cf. Locke (Citation1988), pp. 285–302, and Locke (Citation1697), pp. 100–126. The proposal consists in finding work for them (Locke Citation1697, p. 111). Its end is the abridgement of disorder (p. 112). Promised improvements in political economy and the morals and religion of the poor are presented as incidental advantages (pp. 113–116). The proposal also recommends harsh penalties to a parish should any poor person die for want of due relief within its boundaries (pp. 125–126). 5. It is not coincidental that abstraction is a capacity that distinguishes human beings from the rest of sublunary creation (Locke Citation1975, p. 160; Ott Citation2004, p. 53). 6. It is worth adding that this was Locke’s preferred way of proceeding, e.g. ‘Men shall be punished, – God the punisher, – just Punishment, – the Punished guilty, – could have done otherwise, – Freedom, – self-determination’ (Locke Citation1975, p. 673). 7. In the works published as Two Tracts on Government (1660–61), Locke identifies four hierarchically ordered laws, beginning with monastic and rising through fraternal and political to divine (Locke Citation1967, pp. 193–196). The reference to government in the given title is unhappy insofar as the tracts deal less with government than with law and authority in general, and with the civil magistrate’s authority to legislate in religious affairs in particular. 8. The reduction is explained by the fact that the monastic law was originally adduced to explain the subordination of conscience to fraternal and civil law. As Locke no longer understood the relations of conscience and order in a way that required this, it made sense to suffocate monastic law quietly. The law of faith promulgated by Jesus Christ, which completes the law of nature, is a special case. See pp. 340–41, above. 9. This is the ground for Locke’s claim that God has ‘by an inseparable connexion, joined Virtue and publick Happiness together; and made the Practice thereof, necessary to the preservation of Society’ (Locke Citation1975, p. 69). 10. Locke’s position was misunderstood by James Lowde, who suggested that he had made the law of opinion the true touchstone of moral rectitude. See Lowde (Citation1694, sig. a 3–4) and Locke’s attempts at clarification (Locke Citation1975, pp. 354–355). 11. Hence, Locke’s acknowledgement that Hobbists, Heathen Philosophers and Christians all can give reasons for engaging in the virtuous and law-abiding practice of promise-keeping without each acknowledging the wider duties of morality (Locke Citation1975, p. 68). The purpose of education, as Locke conceives it, is to make individuals capable of acknowledging and doing these duties. This is why he deprecates the use of methods intended to raise desires or aversions, such as beating, and emphasizes instead the need to train desires to submit to reason (Locke Citation1968, pp. 150–151). 12. Locke refers elsewhere to the ‘Princes of the World who all together, with all their People joined to them, are in comparison of the great God, but as a Drop of the Bucket, or Dust on the Balance, inconsiderable nothing!’ (Locke Citation1988, p. 396). 13. As if to underline his points, Locke writes in 1676 that civil laws ‘have only to do with civil actions’ and ‘have noe other obligation but to make ye transgressors liable to punishmt in this life’ (Locke Citation1676, pp. 126, 123, respectively). 14. The philosophical basis of this proposition can only be stated here, not defended. Locke denies that relations are reducible to the intrinsic properties of substances. Our ideas of the powers that underlie relations, which are themselves ideas of relation, cannot be deduced from those properties because they do not supervene upon them, but owe their connexion with them instead to ‘God’s good pleasure’ (Locke Citation1975, p. 559). This is true of the powers Locke calls secondary qualities, such as the greyness of rocks (p. 545), and those he calls tertiary qualities, such as gravitation (Locke Citation1823, pp. 467–468). It is true, too, of the power of thought, which assures the possibility, upon which Locke notoriously insists, that a material substance might think: that power might be given to any created being, to any sort of substance with any set of intrinsic qualities, ‘by the good pleasure and Bounty of the Creator’ (Locke Citation1975, p. 541; for a defence, see Langton Citation1998, pp. 154–158, and compare the alternative view developed with great skill in Ayers Citation1991). 15. Thus Locke’s two notions of essence play different roles: real essences (would) explain, in a narrow sense, why a particular thing is what it is; nominal essences identify sorts of thing and are used to classify particulars (Lowe Citation1995), pp. 78–83). 16. Consider Locke’s example of the English child who can demonstrate that ‘a Negro is Not Man’ (Locke Citation1975, p. 607) because the lack of diversity in his experiences has led him to make an abstract idea of man which includes a particular idea of flesh-tone, in this case ‘white’. If the child were confronted with the full variety of flesh-tones on repeated experiential occasions he would presumably refine his abstract idea, but confronted with a single instance of something that has the same shape, size, motion and so on as ‘man’, without the colour, he does not allow it the name. The example is designed to illustrate the mistake of taking words for things. But cf. Waldron (Citation2002), pp. 62–63. 17. Locke imagines someone possessed of microscopic sight and hence of different ‘visible Ideas of every thing’. He would be unable to connect his ideas of intrinsic properties with those of powers, and so could not communicate about colours; he would be unable to see whole or distant objects and so his microscopic eyes could not ‘conduct him to the Market and Exchange.’ 18. There are general criteria: (1) our abstract ideas should answer to the world, not our fancies (Locke Citation1975, p. 456); and (2) they should serve the general purposes for which God has made us, by helping us to understand and so master, then improve the world (Locke Citation1990, pp. 21, 147). 19. The career of Isaac Newton bespeaks the possibility of engaging in both disciplines simultaneously but separately (Westfall Citation1980, pp. 152–155, 299–308, 508–510, 730–732). 20. Having suggested that it followed ‘just as necessarily from the nature of man that, if he is a man, he is bound … to observe the law of nature, as it follows from the nature of a triangle, that, if it is a triangle, its three angles are equal to two right angles’, Locke adds that this is a result of man’s ‘inborn constitution’. 21. The difference is seen most easily if we consider the ways in which the latter can be called ‘good’. The criteria for a good man will vary according to the interests of those who are doing the evaluating: anthropologists and physiognomists will differ about what a ‘man’ has to be like if it is to count as a good one, petrologists and smash-and-grab merchants will differ about what counts as a good rock. The criteria for a good man qua free agent, in contradistinction, answer to God’s fixed purposes not our variable ones, such that the criteria for someone being a man and being a good man are not independent of one another by Locke’s account. For functional and non-functional terms generally, see Hare (Citation1952). 22. This point sets Locke in an intriguing relation to the trajectory sketched in MacIntyre (Citation1981). 23. Hence Locke’s fondness for comparing despots to dangerous beasts: the former put themselves in the moral position of the latter. 24. A point Locke emphasizes when addressing Edward Stillingfleet’s somewhat incoherent claims about just what is resurrected on the day of judgement. Locke gently suggests that Stillingfleet is too quick to assume that it must be the same body. Stillingfleet’s subsequent intellectual gymnastics implicitly acknowledge the difficulties that that assumption raises, difficulties vividly encapsulated in Robert Boyle’s concern for the eternal fate of godly men eaten by cannibals (Locke Citation1823, pp. 302–324; cf. Boyle Citation1991, p. 198). See also Waldron (Citation2002), p. 71, for speculations on the same theme suggestive of an equally thoroughgoing misunderstanding of Locke’s position on this point. 25. Locke (Citation1692), p. 136: ‘[It] is impossible for you, or me, or any Man, to know, whether another has done his Duty in examining the Evidence on both sides, when he imbraces that side of the Question, which we (perhaps upon other Views) judg false: and therefore we can have no Right to punish or persecute him for it. In this, whether and how far any one is faulty, must be left to the Searcher of Hearts … the great and righteous Judg of all Men, who knows all their Circumstances, all the Powers and Workings of their Minds; where tis they sincerely follow, and by what Default they at any time miss Truth: And he, we are sure, will judg uprightly.’ 26. And, as such, does not possess the conclusive importance attributed to it by Waldron (Citation2002), pp. 75–84 (cf. Stolzenberg and Yaffe Citation2006, pp. 195–205). 27. See Locke’s notes on William Sherlock’s Case of Allegiance due to Sovereign Powers (Locke Citation1691, pp. 84–85): ‘Mistakes … Allegiance is neither due nor paid to Right or to Governmt which are abstract notions but only to persons haveing right or governmt’. 28. The failure to register this point has occasioned a good deal of confusion (e.g. Tully Citation1980, pp. 105–124). 29. Pace Waldron’s (Citation2002, p. 214) remarkable suggestion that Locke had not ‘sorted these things out in his own mind’. 30. The absence of such reference seems to baffle Waldron (Citation2002, p. 216), who accounts for it by ‘a desire on Locke’s part to avoid unnecessary controversy’. 31. For further discussion, see Stanton (Citation2006), pp. 91–95. But cf. Waldron (Citation2002), pp. 211–212.