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ABSTRACT
Locke bases his moral and political philosophy on his doctrine of the ‘law of nature’. Scholars have debated the content and grounding of this law and its relationship to Christian theology. The ambiguities of the Lockean natural law’s content are traceable to an unclear grammatical construction in a crucial passage of the Treatises of Government, which can be resolved by following out a related set of arguments in that work. The ambiguities of the Lockean natural law’s grounding can then be resolved by the hypothesis, strongly supported by textual evidence, that Locke relies tacitly on the reasoning of a parallel passage in Hobbes. Lockean natural law rests on neither atheistic nor specifically Christian premises but on a hypothetical natural theology. Locke’s conclusions from that natural theology represent an attempt to follow out Hobbesian logic while also tightening it up on one important point on which Hobbes himself appears to vacillate.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Kimberley Burns, Devin Stauffer, Micah Watson, and above all the two anonymous BJHP reviewers, for their valuable feedback and criticisms. I would also like to thank the Catholic University of America's Institute for Human Ecology for a generous fellowship that allowed me to complete this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The regulation of politics means primarily the regulation of laws: 2 T, 3. Works by Hobbes or Locke containing original section numbers are cited by those section numbers, with Laslett’s line numbers occasionally added for Locke's Treatises. I have eliminated Locke’s italics in all quotations. All translations are my own.
2 Lamprecht, Moral and Political, 79–87, especially 81n22, 86; cf. Locke, ECHU, 1.3, especially 1.3.14–27; similarly RC, 155–56. Lamprecht and some others state outright that Locke’s thought is riddled with gross logical inconsistencies: see Laslett, “Introduction”, 95, 102–3; Parry, John Locke, 13; Byrne, “Basis”, 60–62.
3 I defend Locke only against the narrow charge of publishing insincere philosophical arguments on the natural law. I do not deny that he could fib, as for example when he claimed not to have read much of Hobbes’ Leviathan (cf. the texts quoted at Waldmann, “Locke as Reader”, 281–82).
4 Without discussing the content of Locke’s law of nature, Hittinger, “Two Lockes”, and Byrne, “Basis”, arrive at conclusions similar to Strauss'. Darwall, British Moralists, 33–52, 149–75, Stanton, “Hobbes and Locke”, Rossiter, “Hedonism and Natural Law”, and Dawson, “Normativity”, arrive at different ones. LoLordo, Locke’s Moral Man (especially 23–24, 132) comes close to Strauss but does not cite him. Others who try to address these same philosophical difficulties rely on uncareful summaries of the content of the law of nature: see Tuckness, “Coherence”; Wootton, “Socinian”; Oakley and Urdant, “Locke, Natural Law, and God”; Oakley, “Locke, Natural Law and God – Again”; Schneewind, “Moral Philosophy”; Aarsleff, “State of Nature”; Dunn, Political Thought, 187–99; John Dunn, “Justice”; Laslett, “Introduction”, 67–92; Rogers, “Law and the Laws of Nature”.
5 For the title Disputations, see Goldie, “Clarendon Edition,” 4.
6 Strauss, “Locke’s Doctrine”, 216, quoting Locke, LN, fol. 82–83, and Hobbes, L, Chapter 15, 242; see also Strauss, Natural Right, 226–30.
7 See similarly Locke, Essay, 4.19.16: “Where … the Action [is] conformable to the dictates of right Reason or Holy Writ” (emphasis added).
8 See Horwitz, “Introduction”. Schotte, “Virtues and Vices”, agrees that the Disputations cannot be taken to represent Locke’s mature views but claims that this is somehow a refutation of Strauss' interpretation of Locke.
9 This point was even clearer in the first three printings prior to Locke’s corrections in the Christ’s copy (1689–90, 1694, 1698), as the introductory statement had been followed by a semicolon rather than a period (see Laslett’s collation ad loc).
10 Locke drew this distinction between positive and negative duties in private correspondence: Colman, Moral Philosophy, 69–70.
11 This reading resembles some doctrines from Cicero’s De Officiis that were of interest to Locke: see Shimokawa, “Concept of Justice”, 71–72; Hawley, Republicanism, 141–58.
12 Monson's reasoning is that “there are only a few statements in which the law of nature is said to justify selfishness but there are over fifty references to its justifying concern for all mankind”. Cf. Oakley and Urdant, “Locke, Natural Law, and God”, 96: “As Strauss has done well to remind us, doctrinal questions are not to be decided by any manipulation of textual statistics”.
13 Laslett’s editorial footnote ad loc asserts without evidence that when 1 T, 86 speaks of the natural right of individual self-preservation, it means the “natural law” of “preservation, of oneself and all mankind”.
14 Harris, Mind, 215, cites the first half of this sentence but breaks it off before the clause “therefore had a right”, which allows him to assert instead that Locke here points to a “duty of self-preservation”.
15 See Pangle, Republicanism, 186–87. West, “Ground”, 16–18, inverts Locke’s argument by claiming that this desire is called reasonable only because it “leads toward things ‘necessary or useful to [one’s] being’”.
16 On Locke’s gender-neutral usage of “Men”, see Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 24–25.
17 See Zuckert, Natural Rights, 275; Simmons, Lockean Theory, 71.
18 For Hobbes see L, Chapter 13, 190; Chapter 14, 198; DC, 1.7–11; EL, 1.14.6–10. When Zuckert, “Perhaps He Was”, 566–67, denies that Lockean natural right has several of these characteristics, he appears to be speaking about individual rights under Lockean natural law, not the Lockean natural right that precedes natural law.
19 According to the Essay, God’s existence is necessarily hypothetical in a “general Proposition” of this kind: the “Proposition … That Men ought to fear and obey GOD, proves not to me the Existence of Men in the World, but will be true of all such creatures, whenever they do exist” (ECHU, 4.11.13).
20 Locke does also say in the same paragraph that “Force without Right, upon a Man’s Person, makes a State of War, both where there is, and is not, a common judge” (emphasis added). This is because without a common judge, force always makes a state of war, whereas in the state of society, rightfully employed force does not have to make a state of war (see 2 T, 202, 207).
21 The complications introduced by children, discussed in Chapters Six and Seven of the Second Treatise, deserve a separate paper.
22 I say “more or less” because, if this aggressor’s only misdeed was stealing property by stealth, I must wait to kill him until I see whether he shows any sign of resistance to restoring the property when confronted over his crime – as he will “seldom fail” to do (Locke, 2 T, 181, 126).
23 See also Locke, ECHU, 3.11.16: “when we say that Man is subject to Law: We mean nothing by Man, but a corporeal rational Creature” (or later in the section, “a corporeal rational Being”).
24 Because West, “Ground”, 4, 11, and Josephson, Art of Government, 66, cannot imagine any such “faculties” other than the ones Locke explicitly rules out at 2 T, 54, they conclude that Locke’s foundational doctrine of natural human equality must be a conscious lie.
25 This acknowledgment of the Lockean primacy of self-preservation has disappeared from Waldron’s subsequent God, Locke, and Equality.
26 The parallel passage at De Cive speaks similarly of our “equality of strength and of other human faculties” (DC 1.15; the word “faculties” is used there in the English version as well). In Leviathan, the same argument begins from the fact that “Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind” (L, Chapter 13, 188; Chapter 14, 198–200).
27 For non-mental “faculties” in Locke, see ECHU, 2.21.20 (“there are Faculties both in the Body and Mind”), 2.21.29 (“a power in the Mind to direct the operative Faculties of a Man to motion or rest”), 3.6.3 (“Faculties of Moving, Sensation, and Reasoning”).
28 Of the Lockean precepts listed at Yolton, “Law of Nature”, 487–88, all of those dealing with our fellow adults can be found (pace Yolton) among Hobbes’ nineteen laws of nature.
29 See Hobbes, L, Chapter 15, 240: “the ground of all Lawes of Nature” is “Natures preservation”, which in context means individual self-preservation; also Colman, Locke’s Moral Philosophy, 203–4.
30 Strauss, “Locke’s Doctrine”, 216, quoting and summarizing Locke, LN, fol. 82–83.
31 See Hobbes, L, Chapter 15, 242; DC, 3.33; EL, 1.17.12. Similarly for Locke, although the law of nature is “the true Principle to regulate our … Morality by”, yet “the true ground of Morality”, in the ordinary sense of a genuine moral law, “can only be the Will and Law of a God” (Locke, STCE, 116; ECHU, 1.3.6).
32 The phrase is borrowed, consciously or not, from Hobbes’ treatment of the state of nature: L, Chapter 13, 196.
33 Hobbes, DC, 2.11 (emphasis added), with Hobbes’ note ad loc confirming this reading, as well as 13.7; the reasoning is even repeated at L, Chapter 14, 210. Lamprecht, Moral and Political, 93–94, 122–23, and Ashcraft, Two Treatises, 108, grasp only one horn of a genuine Hobbesian dilemma when they claim that all contracts are void in the Hobbesian state of nature.
34 Hobbes, L, Chapter 15, 232; DC, 3.10; EL, 1.16.9. In the “warre of every man against every man … the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have … no place”, L, Chapter 13, 196.
35 Hobbes, L, Chapter 15, 232; DC, 3.11; see similarly EL, 1.19.2. Zuckert, Natural Rights, 277, and Leyden, “Strange Doctrine”, 115, both overlook this aspect of Hobbesian natural law while seeking to distinguish Hobbes from Locke.
36 Hobbes, DC, 3.9; L, Chapter 15, 232 (emphasis added). This Hobbesian law of nature is sufficient to explain the obligation of “Charity” that Locke mentions at 1 T, 42.
37 Of the first claim, at L, Chapter 13, 190–91, Hobbes says “there is no way for any man to secure himselfe, so reasonable, as” this (the Latin version alters the wording, but the context still conveys the same sense). Of the second claim, at L, Chapter 14, 198–200, he says that it “is a precept, or generall rule of Reason”.
38 Locke says that “to understand Political Power right … we must” first understand the state of nature correctly (2 T, 4, emphasis added), as Hobbes evidently failed to do.
39 At DC, 14.4, Hobbes says that all of De Cive is an effort to explicate the natural law.
40 See Colman, “Empiricist Theory”, 107–108; also Tuckness, “Coherence”, 86: “If God has attached punishments to the breach of the natural law in the next life, then it suddenly becomes rational to fulfill positive duties to others in this life” (emphasis added).
41 The chapter of the Essay containing this famous statement about “the true ground of Morality” ends with an often-neglected warning from Locke that he has been presupposing ad argumentum several “common received Opinions” that he does not actually share and will henceforth jettison (ECHU, 1.4.25).