Waldron's Locke and Locke's Waldron: A Review of Jeremy Waldron's God, Locke, and Equality

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Notes

1. References to Locke's works will be abbreviated as follows. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ed. P. H. Nidditch, (1975), Clarendon Press: Oxford, will be referenced as “E” followed by book, chapter, section and page number. Two Treatises of Government, Ed. P. Laslett, (1988), Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, Book II, will be referenced as “2nd T” followed by the number of the cited paragraph. The Reasonableness of Christianity, Thommes Press: Bristol, (1997), will be referenced as “RC” followed by a page number.

2. And again: “It may seem to us now that we can make do with a purely secular notion of human equality; but as a matter of ethical history that notion has been shaped and fashioned on the basis of religion. That is where all the hard work was done” (p. 242).

3. There are many published discussions of Locke's conception of essences and kinds. For a start, see Michael Ayers, “Locke versus Aristotle on natural kinds” Journal of Philosophy 78, 1981, pp. 247–71; Ruth Mattern, (1986) “Locke on natural kinds as the ‘workmanship of the understanding’” The Locke Newsletter, 17, pp. 45–92; and David Owen, (1991) “Locke on real essence” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 8, pp. 105–18.

4. To clarify our terminology: An instrumentalist justification of a moral principle, like the principle of equality, shows a connection between the principle and progress towards achieving some end. A utilitarian justification of a moral principle is a species of instrumentalist justification in which the end in question is identified with the good of the aggregate of persons.

5. Such is the view ascribed to Bishop Butler by Stephen Darwall. See Stephen Darwall, (1995) The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge; Ch. 9.

6. The proposition that atheists are unable to respect the equality of others is, at least as a sociological matter, simply untrue. Waldron recognizes this, but his argument seems to be that an atheist cannot justify her belief in equality, and if she mistakenly believes otherwise, this is to be explained by the fact that her beliefs are inherited from centuries‐old religious traditions of thought. This is what Waldron means by living on borrowed time. But here, then, it is not the historical necessity of Christian doctrine in supporting egalitarianism, but its conceptual or logical necessity on which Waldron insists and, as we have seen, there seems little reason to follow him in his belief that Christian doctrine really must be invoked to justify belief in equality.

7. Waldron acknowledges Locke's “toying with various Socinian and unitarian possibilities” (p. 215).

8. Waldron does not go so far as to say that what is needed is the personal experience of salvation or being born again. But it is hard to understand what else the emphasis on the supernatural aspect of Jesus Christ—“and his miracles”—is meant to signify.

9. Waldron does not attempt to explain how to reconcile this description of the particularism of the law handed down at Sinai with the universalism of “the natural law material in Genesis,” i.e., the Noahide law, which he acknowledges exists (pp. 188–89). For general discussion of Noahide and natural law, see Suzanne Stone, (1991) “Sinaitic and Noahide Law: Legal Pluralism in Jewish Law,” 12 Cardozo Law Review 1157.

10. See S. Ettinger, “The beginnings of the change in the attitude of European society towards the Jews,” 7 Scripta Hierosloymitana 193, 195–96 (Alexander Fuks & Israel Halpern Eds. [1961]). On Christian Hebraism more generally, see Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe (Allison P. Coudert & Jeffrey S. Shoulson Eds. [2004]); Frank E. Manuel, (1992) The Broken Staff: Judaism Through Christian Eyes.

11. Thanks to Cliff Ando, David Myers and Greg Keating for comments on an earlier draft.