“We risk serious historical distortion if we insist on piecing together a comprehensive moral theory from writings Locke never suggested should go together. He may not have had any such theory” (Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy, p. 142).

“Locke frequently cites Hooker in the Second Treatise, yet, as his strong endorsements of Pufendorf suggest, it is better to take him to be working with the modern natural law framework than to be using a Thomistic view. His description of the state of nature is Grotian without being Hobbesian” (ibid).

For Locke, we humans are divided by money and religion.

“In the Second Treatise Locke refers to money, which, by making it possible for people to accumulate great wealth, also puts us at odds with one another; and elsewhere he adduces a strong tendency in all of us to hold views that naturally diverge greatly and to insist that other people agree with our own opinions on important matters such as religion. He does not appeal to original sin to explain discord” (p. 143).

Law aims to resolve these conflicts.

“Controversies among sociable beings seem therefore to set the problem that gives law its utility. Law directs rational free agents to their own interest ‘and prescribes no farther than is for the general Good of those under the Law. Could they be happier without it, the Law, as an useless thing would of itself vanish’. There is no suggestion here of Hooker’s Thomistic belief in our participation in the divine reason as the source of laws of nature, or of the idea that we all naturally work for the good of others as well as our own. Law does not show us our eternal roles in a cosmic harmony. It just limits our quarrels” (ibid).

Here we see Locke’s famous appeal to rational self-interest, which grounds his ethical naturalism. This is a very individualist view that we have not seen before in the current inquiry. Anselm’s “affection for justice” has no role here. There is not even a conception of the good of a community, only your self-interest and my self-interest.

“The reference to ‘general Good’ here should not mislead us. Locke is not adverting to a substantive common good. He is saying that law gives each of us what we want, namely security in disposing as we please of our person, actions, and possessions. He is at one with the Grotians in refusing to discuss the highest good…. It follows, Locke thinks, that there is as little point in discussing the highest good as there is in disputing ‘whether the best Relish is to be found in Apples, Plumbs, or Nuts’…. [T]he ancient question of the summum bonum cannot be answered in a way that is both valid for everyone and useful in guiding action” (ibid).

The reference to possessions here is decisive in this new stance. There are no innate principles, and conscience is merely an opinion. The best we can hope for in this life is a more enlightened selfishness.

“Locke promises a science of morality. To see why he makes the promise and how he thinks it can be carried out, we must look first at his attack on innate ideas in the Essay concerning Human Understanding, book I. Locke there specifically denies that morality has any innate aspect…. Since there are many ways other than reading what is ‘written in their hearts’ by which men can learn the principles of morals, there is no need to claim that the principles are innate in the conscience. Conscience is simply one’s opinion of the rightness or wrongness of one’s own action, and one’s opinions can come from education, or custom, or the company one keeps. People frequently break basic moral rules with no inner sense of shame or guilt, thereby showing that the rules are not innate. Finally, no one has been able to state these allegedly innate rules. Attempts to do so either fail to elicit agreement or else contain utterly vacuous propositions that cannot guide action” (p. 144).

Schneewind has already told us that Locke never delivers this promised science. But we have already seen a proto-utilitarianism in Cumberland, so I have little doubt that if it had been developed, it would have been based on a kind of utilitarian calculation.

“Locke’s points here are in accord with similar ideas in Hobbes, Cumberland, and Pufendorf…. [M]orality concerns laws and obligation, and these require concepts that can only be understood in terms of a lawmaker. The first lawmaker involved in morality is God. His ability to obligate us requires a life after this observable one, since it is plain that he does not make us obey him by rewarding and punishing in this life” (p. 145).

There is no place here for an attractiveness of the good, only a voluntarist emphasis on reward and punishment, and that only in the promised afterlife. This seems grim indeed. His individualism’s best face is an encouragement to think for ourselves.

“Underlying his many objections to innate ideas is Locke’s belief that God gave us a faculty of reason sufficient to enable us to discover all the knowledge needed by beings such as we are. It would have been useless for him to have given us innate ideas or innate knowledge. He meant us to think for ourselves…. We must therefore be able to reason out for ourselves what is required of us. To claim that a set of principles is innate is to claim that there is no need for further thought about the matters they cover; and this in turn is an excellent tactic for anyone who wants those principles taken on authority, without inquiry. But God could not have meant the use of our rational faculties to be blocked in this way. The theme of the importance of thinking for oneself is as central to Locke’s vision of moral personality as his belief that we are under God’s laws and owe him obedience” (ibid).

That God means for us to use our reason to think for ourselves is a worthy precept. It should be noted, however, that the “for ourselves” language does not really add anything. Insofar as we ever really use our reason to actively think, this can always be glossed as thinking for ourselves.

“We know that the Essay grew out of discussions concerning morality. In denying the topic any privileged place within the book Locke is underscoring the belief he shares with Hobbes and Cumberland, that moral ideas can be explained using the terms that suffice for all our other ideas and beliefs. There is no need for any separate faculty or mental operation as their source” (ibid).

This is the thesis of what is now called ethical naturalism. There are no Pufendorfian moral entities here.

“The divine law, the law God makes known either by revelation or by reason, is ‘the only true touchstone of moral Rectitude‘.” (p. 146).

Ours is but to obey, and otherwise to follow our individual self-interest.

“Willing, he holds, is simply ‘preferring of Action to its absence’. And preference, Locke holds, disagreeing with most of his predecessors, is not determined by our beliefs about what course of action would bring about the greatest good. If it were, no one would sin…. More importantly, we are not mechanically moved by our desires. We are free agents, possessing the ability to refrain from action while we consider the different desires and aversions we feel, to decide which of them to satisfy, and then to act on our decision. Only the person, not the will, is properly said to be free. The will is the power of considering ideas and of suspending and deciding on action, and it makes no sense to speak of a power as free” (pp. 146-147).

Unlike earlier voluntarists, Locke does not seem to hypostasize will as a separate faculty. The idea that it is the person and not the will that is free is a good one, though all the ambiguities of freedom still apply.

“Locke takes these considerations to show that the elements needed to explain our moral ideas — ideas of God, law, good, will, reward, and happiness — can all be obtained from data given by experience. We need no other ideas to build up our complex repertoire of moral concepts” (p. 147).

I don’t think the ideas of God and a divine reward come from experience. Moreover, this is a very impoverished list of moral ideas.

“It is a matter of considerable importance to Locke that moral ideas are complex ideas of the kind he calls ‘mixed modes’. They are constructed by us, not copied from observation of given complexes. They are not intended to mirror or be adequate to some external reality, as ideas of substances are. They are rather ‘Archetypes made by the mind, to rank and denominate Things by’, and can only err if there is some incompatibility among the elements we bring together in them. Consequently if we are perfectly clear about the moral ideas our moral words stand for, we know the real and not only the nominal essences of moral properties” (pp. 147-148).

This does seem more clear than Pufendorf’s invocation of moral entities. But while he does not use Pufendorf’s striking language of “imposition”, the claim that we need only be clear about the meaning of a few words to know the real essence of moral properties does imply something similar. What those words are is fairly well suggested by the impoverished list of moral ideas above. By this reasoning, morality is effectively an imposition because it is obedience to law, and law is an imposition not grounded on anything else. This also suggests the likely content of his easily achievable but never presented “science” of morality.

Locke himself says mixed modes are “the complex ideas we mark by the names obligation, drunkenness, a lie, &c….. That the mind, in respect of its simple ideas, is wholly passive, and receives them all from the existence and operations of things, such as sensation or reflection offers them, without being able to make any one idea, experience shows us. But if we attentively consider these ideas I call mixed modes, we are now speaking of, we shall find their original quite different. The mind often exercises an active power in making these several combinations. For, it being once furnished with simple ideas, it can put them together in several compositions, and so make variety of complex ideas, without examining whether they exist so together in nature” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. I, ch. XXII, p. 381).

Schneewind says “Locke’s notion of mixed modes so helpfully fills out Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities that it might have been designed for the purpose…. Locke emphatically rejects any explanation invoking God’s immediate action on the mind. All mixed-mode ideas are our creation. They show our God-given reason doing what it was meant to do: providing us with the guidance we need through life” (Schneewind, p. 148).

Reason as a guide for life sounds like the Stoic criterion of right reason that was popular among the Latin scholastics. (Incidentally, Locke had someone translate his Essay into Latin to reach European audiences, and the term selected to render Lockean “understanding” was none other than the intellectus that was the subject of so much scholastic discussion.) This goes along with the salutary injunction we saw earlier, that we should think for ourselves.

“Consider some moral concept, such as injustice. It contains as a part the concept of property, which in turn is the idea of something to which someone has a right. ‘Injustice’ is the name given to the mixed-mode idea of violating someone’s right to something. It follows demonstrably that where there is no property, there is no injustice” (p. 149).

The reduction of justice to respect for bourgeois property rights and ethics to verbal definitions is horrible. I say that justice begins with the idea of fairness in relations between people, which is far more general, and more humane as well.

“Even if no virtuous person ever existed, it is still demonstrably certain that a just man never violates another’s rights…. But he never gave us the science of morality whose foundations he claims to have worked out” (ibid).

If we accept the stipulated definitions, this claim is true, though I don’t see that it has any value. This again strongly suggests that the advertised science consists in nothing more than formal reasoning about the meanings of a few words that are not even the interesting ones.

“In several places, moreover, Locke insists that there is nothing in nature that corresponds to our mixed-mode moral ideas. There can be nothing in nature, then, to set a moral limit to God’s will. If neither law nor nature can constrain Locke’s God, then Locke is taking the voluntarist position, that God’s will is the origin of moral attributes…. The possession of unlimited power merely enables God to be, at best, a benevolent despot, at worst, a tyrant. There seems to be a good case for Burnet’s claim that on Locke’s view the laws God has laid down for us are ‘entirely arbitrary’ ” (p. 150).

And there we have it.

“Locke does indeed hold that we are dependent on a being ‘who is eternal, omnipotent, perfectly wise and good’. He appeals to these attributes when claiming that a science of morality is possible. But his proof of God’s existence does not show that God is naturally good. Put briefly, the argument is this. We know that we ourselves exist, and that we can perceive and know. The only possible explanation of this fact is that we were made by an eternal most powerful and most intelligent being…. Neither in the expansion of this proof that occupies the rest of the chapter nor anywhere else in the Essay does Locke show how to deduce God’s essential benevolence. If the deduction seemed easy to him, it has not seemed so to his readers” (ibid).

“Locke’s view of how to demonstrate moral truths makes matters worse, because it suggests that there could not be a demonstration of a moral principle that satisfies his own standards…. It must not be trivial or vacuous, a mere verbal statement that does not enable us to pick out right acts” (p. 151).

That the just man never violates another’s rights is a tautology based on stipulated definitions. That is to say, it is precisely a trivial and vacuous and merely verbal statement.

“Although Locke says we must start our moral demonstrations from self-evident principles, he also says that there are no self-evident moral principles with substantial content” (ibid).

By Locke’s lights, this is not a problem, because he believes that morality depends only on self-interest and obedience.

“Locke’s moral psychology compounds all these difficulties…. An untrammeled ruler giving arbitrary direction to a selfish population seems indeed to emerge as his model of the moral relations between God and human beings” (ibid). “Some of Locke’s remarks in The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) reinforce the rather grim vision of morality suggested by the Essay” (p. 152).

“Locke has argued that reason could have taught even those to whom the Jewish and Christian revelations were not delivered the crucial rudiments of religious truth. Reason could have shown, for instance, that the natural law requires that we forgive our enemies…. But as thus discovered and taught, the precepts would still have amounted only to counsel or advice from wise men about how to live a happy life. The precepts could not have been taught as laws that obligate. Only the knowledge that the precepts are the command of a supreme lawgiver who rewards and punishes could transform them into moral laws” (pp. 152-153).

Locke is justly celebrated as an early advocate of religious tolerance, but he reportedly excluded atheists and Catholics.

“It is not evident how this position can be made compatible with Locke’s view that God has given us reason enough to discover what we need to know concerning the things most important to us, morality and religion…. ‘The greatest part of Mankind want Leisure or Capacity for Demonstration … you may as soon hope to have the Day-Labourers and Tradesmen, the Spinsters and Dairy Maids perfect Mathematicians, as to have them perfect in Ethics by teaching them proofs of moral laws. ‘Hearing plain Commands’, Locke continues, ‘is the sure and only course to bring them to Obedience and Practice. The greatest Part cannot know, and therefore they must believe’ ” (p. 153).

I think the answer is plain enough. “Us” refers to the sons of gentlemen for whom he recommended the reading of Pufendorf, and not to Tradesmen or Dairy Maids.

“Locke makes it clear that he does not view God as a tyrant. He notes that to obey a king merely out of fear of his power ‘would be to establish the power of tyrants, thieves, and pirates’. To avoid charging God with tyranny Locke appeals to the principle that a creator has the right to control his creations” (p. 154).

The first part seems like a laudable sentiment, but the second part is not at all reassuring. Such a right recalls the Roman emperor’s “right” to treat everyone as his property.

“We do know from Burnet and others that his readers had more general worries … about his views on morality. Their worries arose from his voluntarism. And we can see how Locke’s political concerns could well have forced him into voluntarism and into the empiricism that is connected with it” (p. 157).

It is good to hear that people were worried about this. Schneewind’s wording even suggests that voluntarism might be more fundamental to Locke than his empiricism. Apparently some people saw legal positivism as a way to try to guard against the ravages of sectarianism.

“Locke was concerned to combat both skeptical doubts about morality and enthusiastic claims to have divinely inspired insight into it. All of the modern natural lawyers would have shared these aims. Both skepticism and enthusiasm work against the possibility of sustaining a decent and stable society. An empiricist naturalism seemed to Locke, as it did to Hobbes and Pufendorf and Grotius, the only response that could offer a scientific way of settling disputes and avoiding the deadlock of appeals to authority or personal preference” (pp. 157-158).

“Only voluntarism keeps God essential. But Locke’s theory of meaning then forces him to hold that only God’s power makes him our ruler. Nothing else can meaningfully be said” (p. 158).

“In 1675 Thomas Traherne published Christian Ethicks, a systematic if unoriginal exposition of morality. A devout poet and advocate of virtue rather than a thinker, he nonetheless pithily summarized a concern raised by voluntarism quite generally. ‘He that apprehends God to be a tyrant’, Traherne says, ‘can neither honour God, nor Love him, nor enjoy him’…. The combination of voluntarism and empiricism was taken to lead inescapably to a vision of the relations between God and his human subjects that is morally unacceptable” (ibid).

“Locke’s version of naturalism in ethics seems to many philosophers now to be misguided because it gets the meanings of words wrong. Traherne’s remark suggests that the problem Locke’s readers had with it was different. Their problem was that … Locke could not portray God’s dominion over us as resting on anything but his power and skill as creator. He could admit no difference in principle between God’s rule and that of a benevolent despot except at the cost of allowing into his scheme concepts that could not be derived from experience” (ibid).

“It was not the problem about proving the great law of charity, I suggest, that made Locke refuse to publish a deductive ethic. What did so was his embarrassment at his inability to give Burnet a satisfactory explanation of how we could even say and mean, let alone prove, that God is a just ruler…. Locke’s failure drew attention to the moral consequences of empiricism more forcibly than previous empiricist ethics had done. Hobbes argued for the elements of an empiricist ethic, but his epistemology was massively overshadowed by his extremely contentious political views, and his views on religion were in any case scandalous. His work therefore raised problems more urgent than any that might arise from a connection between empiricism and voluntarism. Pufendorf, though an empiricist, did not develop a general theory of the derivation of concepts from experience” (pp 158-159).

“With Locke it was different. Locke was more interested in the epistemology of natural law than in working out a code. As a result the connection between voluntarism and empiricism stood out more starkly…. Locke’s readers could hardly avoid seeing that if, like him, they embraced naturalistic empiricism about moral concepts, then they would be forced into voluntarism — unless they left God entirely out of morality” (p. 159).