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Natural Teleology in John Locke’s Ethics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2024
Abstract
According to some of the past half-century’s most influential critics of liberalism, John Locke is the pivotal subverter of the pre-modern ethical tradition. Locke’s view of nature and of human nature, the story goes, divorced ethics from natural teleology and so set off an inevitable spiral downward into moral dissolution. This story about Locke remains influential even though the last fifty years of Locke scholarship have brought a cascade of studies treating Locke as operating within the tradition of Reformed natural law. These studies, in part because they embrace a distorted view of Locke’s conception of the person, have failed to address satisfactorily the crux of the story told by the critics of liberalism. This article corrects that distortion and demonstrates how natural teleology operates within Locke’s ethics. I show how Locke sought to identify the teleological ordering of human beings to the supreme good by developing a relational conception of the person, analysing the human being as embedded in and defined by a web of relationships including neighbour and God. The result is a Locke far more in continuity with pre-modern ethical approaches than has hitherto been realized, one who sought to preserve natural teleology for the modern world.
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References
1 Locke’s works are abbreviated as follows. Locke’s spelling has been modernized for clarity where appropriate.
- 1st T
Two treatises on government, bk I, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1988). Citations by paragraph.
- 2nd T
Two treatises on government, bk II, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1988). Citations by paragraph.
- CE
Some thoughts concerning education, ed. John Adamson (Mineola, NY, 2007). Citations by section.
- E
An essay concerning human understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1971). Citations by book, chapter, section.
- ELN
Essays on the law of nature, in Locke: political essays, ed. Mark Goldie (New York, NY, 1997). Citations by essay and page.
- PE
Political essays, ed. Mark Goldie (New York, NY, 1997). Citations by essay and page.
- PN
A paraphrase and notes on the epistles of Saint Paul to the Galatians, I and II Corinthians, Romans and Ephesians (6th edn, London, 1763). Citations by page and verse.
- RC
The reasonableness of Christianity, ed. John C. Higgins-Biddle (Oxford, 1999). Citations by chapter and page.
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11 As per Stanton, ‘Locke has an especial importance because he is taken to have put into currency certain persuasive conceptions’ – not least about legitimacy, consent, and authority – ‘which transformed subsequent thinking’. Stanton, Timothy, ‘Authority and freedom in the interpretation of Locke’s political theory’, Political Theory, 39 (2011), p. 7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Whether Locke is actually the ‘father of liberalism’, though, as is so frequently claimed, has as much to do with how liberalism is defined as with how Locke is understood. To find natural teleology in Locke is not to show that it is also present in the eighteenth-century liberalism of Rousseau and Kant or the twentieth-century liberalism of Rawls. Those are questions beyond the scope of this article. The strategy of critiquing later forms of liberalism to discredit earlier thinkers is exemplified by Deneen, who argues that the assumption of individual autonomy captures the guiding principle of ‘such authors of the liberal tradition as John Locke and the American Founding Fathers’. Deneen, Why liberalism failed, p. 45. Celebrators and critics of liberalism alike have ‘discovered what they already knew’ in Locke, reading ‘radical moral individualism’ into his texts rather than allowing him to speak on his own terms. Stanton, Timothy, ‘John Locke and the fable of liberalism’, Historical Journal, 61 (2018), p. 615Google Scholar. On Locke’s influence on the American founding, see Arcenas, Claire, America’s philosopher (Chicago, IL, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hall, Mark David, Roger Sherman and the creation of the American republic (Oxford, 2015), ch. 2Google Scholar. For the claim that Locke fathered liberalism, see Eisenach, Eldon, Two worlds of liberalism (Chicago, IL, 1981)Google Scholar; Dworetz, Steven, The unvarnished doctrine (Durham, NC, 1990)Google Scholar; John Rawls, Lectures on the history of political philosophy, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge, MA, 2007), pp. 103ff; Perry, John, The pretenses of loyalty (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Limitations of space and scope prevent me from applying my argument about teleology to the perspective of those who join Leo Strauss in praising Locke as a secularizer. The most engaging recent debate over the Straussian reading of Locke unfolded over several articles between Tate (representing the Straussian perspective) and Stanton and Bou-Habib (both representing the Dunnian camp). Tate, John William, ‘Dividing Locke from God’, Philosophy & Social Criticism, 39 (2013), pp. 133–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stanton, Timothy, ‘On (mis)interpreting Locke: a reply to Tate’, Political Theory, 40 (2012), pp. 229–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tate, John William, ‘Locke, God, and civil society: response to Stanton’, Political Theory, 40 (2012), pp. 222–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bou-Habib, Paul, ‘Locke’s tracts and the anarchy of the religious conscience’, European Journal of Political Theory, 14 (2015), pp. 3–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tate, John William, ‘Locke, toleration and natural law: a reassessment’, European Journal of Political Theory, 16 (2017), pp. 109–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bou-Habib, Paul, ‘Locke, natural law and civil peace: reply to Tate’, European Journal of Political Theory, 16 (2017), pp. 122–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Zuckert, Michael, Natural rights and the new republicanism (Princeton, NJ, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zuckert, Michael, Launching liberalism: on Lockean political philosophy (Lawrence, KS, 2002)Google Scholar.
13 Taylor, Sources of the self, pp. 171ff.
14 Ibid.
15 Manent, City, pp. 113–16.
16 MacIntyre, for example, folds Locke into his story of the development of what he calls the ‘emotivist self’, arguing that Locke conceived of the self as a ‘character abstracted from a history’, part of the movement toward a self ‘detached from’ and ‘set over against the social world’. MacIntyre, After virtue, pp. 32–4, 217; cf. Mehta, Anxiety of freedom, pp. 170–4; Deneen, Why liberalism failed, pp. 32–4.
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18 Schindler, D. C., Freedom from reality: the diabolical character of modern liberty (Notre Dame, IN, 2017), p. 25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 66.
22 Ibid., p. 360. Schindler’s argument updates previous criticisms of Locke. Byrne, for example, argued that Locke destroyed ‘the proximate metaphysical foundation of the law of nature’, because, given that ‘man is a substance’, in Locke’s epistemological framework, man’s ‘real nature is unknowable and cannot be the means of discovering the content of the natural law’. Byrne, James W., ‘The basis of the natural law in Locke’s philosophy’, The Catholic Lawyer, 10 (1964), p. 58Google Scholar. For the same reasons, David Wootton held that Locke’s intellectual commitments demanded he ‘abandon the notion of natural right’ and commit himself to ‘utilitarian principles’. David Wootton, ‘John Locke: Socinian or natural law theorist?’, in James Crimmins, ed., Religion, secularization, and political thought (New York, NY, 1990), p. 63. See also Macpherson, C. B., Possessive individualism (Oxford, 1962)Google Scholar; Kendall, Willmoore, John Locke and the doctrine of majority rule (Urbana, IL, 1965)Google Scholar; Zinaich, Locke’s moral revolution.
23 Schindler, Freedom, p. 81.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 34. Similarly, J. B. Schneewind claims that, for Locke, ‘the ancient question of the summum bonum cannot be answered in a way that is both valid for everyone and useful in guiding action’. Schneewind, Invention of autonomy, pp. 143–4.
26 Schneewind puts the concern this way: ‘Locke accepts the Cumberlandian distinction between natural and moral good’, but he does not ‘require the law involved in moral good to direct us to natural good’. Schneewind, Invention of autonomy, p. 145. Schneewind is mistaken; as we will see below, Locke did require the law involved in moral good to direct us to natural good.
27 Schindler seems to be making this assumption. He speaks glowingly of how, for Aquinas, ‘the soul first apprehends its object intellectually, by abstracting the intelligible species – the essence – of the thing, becoming “intentionally” identical with it through the act of understanding, and thus quite literally “internalizing” its intelligible form’. Schindler, D. C., ‘Towards a non-possessive concept of knowledge’, Modern Theology, 22 (2006), p. 581CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
28 Schindler, Freedom, p. 44.
29 Ibid., p. 43.
30 E. J. Ashworth, ‘Locke and scholasticism’, in Matthew Stuart, ed., A companion to Locke (Oxford, 2016), p. 98.
31 Ibid., pp. 98, 87–9. On Locke’s debate with Stillingfleet over his views on substance, see Woolhouse, Roger, Locke (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 372–3Google Scholar, 406–7.
32 Other scholars have argued that Locke’s person is a substance, an interpretation that, given his view of substances, makes it highly difficult to see how Locke could have offered a coherent view of natural teleology. For the substance view, see Gordon-Roth, Jessica, ‘Locke on the ontology of persons’, Southern Journal of Philosophy, 53 (2015), pp. 100–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Samuel Rickless, ‘Are Locke’s persons modes or substances?’, in Paul Lodge and Tom Stoneham, eds., Locke and Leibniz on substance (New York, NY, 2015), pp. 124–5; Winkler, Kenneth, ‘Locke on personal identity’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 29 (1991), pp. 201–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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35 For this argument, see Mattern, ‘Moral science’, pp. 33–9.
36 Grant, John Locke’s liberalism, pp. 198–205.
37 Rossiter, ‘Hedonism and natural law’, p. 209.
38 Simmons, Lockean theory, p. 24.
39 Forde, ‘Mixed modes’, p. 605.
40 Schindler, Freedom, p. 44.
41 Recognizing how Locke used relations helps to dispel Reid’s concern that the ‘natural outcome’ of Locke’s understanding of nature was ‘skepticism with regard to the existence of everything except the existence of our ideas and of the necessary relations amongst them that appear when we compare them’. Reid, Thomas, An inquiry (Edinburgh, 2000), ch. 7Google Scholar. Reid’s concern stands behind Schindler’s criticism of modern thought. Schindler contrasts Aquinas, for whom ‘what we understand, finally, is the thing itself’, with Kant, whom Schindler interprets to hold that we can never understand ‘the thing itself’ but only ‘our concept of it’. Schindler, ‘Concept of knowledge’, p. 581. Leaving Kant aside, Locke thought that our senses give us real information about the qualities of things themselves (E: 2.8.8; 2.8.12) and that we can reason with precision about those things using the relations belonging to them. On Locke’s theory of knowledge, see Weinberg, Shelley, ‘Locke’s natural and religious epistemology’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 58 (2020), pp. 241–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 Locke cites Cicero’s pithy summary of the teleological argument: ‘what can be more sillily arrogant and misbecoming than for a man to think that he has a mind and understanding in him, but yet in all the universe beside, there is no such thing?’ (E: 4.10.6; cf. Cicero, De legibus, §2.16).
43 I suggest, in another context, that Locke’s person is a relation. Zorzi, Graedon, ‘Liberalism and Locke’s philosophical anthropology’, Review of Politics, 81 (2019), pp. 185–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To my knowledge, Simendić is the only other recent author to see Locke’s person as a relation, but he thinks it quite a different kind of relation than I do. See Simendić, Marko, ‘Locke’s person is a relation’, Locke Studies, 15 (2015), p. 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
44 This phraseology is derived from N. T. Wright’s paper ‘Mind, spirit, soul and body’ presented to the Society of Christian Philosophers regional meeting in March 2011. Yolton may have something similar in mind when he suggests that we view Locke’s terms ‘man, self, person, agent’ as referencing ‘different functionalities’ of man. Yolton, John, The two intellectual worlds of John Locke (Ithaca, NY, 2004), p. 37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 As Boeker explains, Locke’s conception of consciousness includes awareness (of, for example, current mental states), memory (of, say, past mental states), and unity (in that consciousness ‘provides a unifying structure’ to a person’s life over time). Boeker, Ruth, ‘Locke on personal identity’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55 (2017), pp. 426–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Boeker, Ruth, Locke on persons and personal identity (Oxford, 2021)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the metaphysics of the unifying aspect of consciousness, see Weinberg, Shelley, Consciousness in Locke (Oxford, 2016), pp. 156–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 394; Garrett, Don, ‘Locke on personal identity, consciousness, and “fatal errors”’, Philosophical Topics, 31 (2003), pp. 107–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 116–17; Jolley, Nicholas, Locke’s touchy subjects (Oxford, 2015), pp. 13, 102–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
46 As Lucci emphasizes, for Locke ‘personal identity entails moral accountability’, implicating not only ‘human justice’ but also the ‘last judgement’. Lucci, Diego, ‘The Biblical roots of Locke’s theory of personal identity’, Zygon, 56 (2021), p. 185Google Scholar.
47 Edmund Law, ‘A defense of Mr. Locke’s opinion concerning personal identity’, in Galen Strawson, Locke on personal identity (Princeton, NJ, 2014), Appendix 2, pp. 236, 243.
48 Schindler, Freedom, p. 34.
49 Locke thought that ‘the moral rule to all mankind, being laid within the discovery of their reason…the gentile world did acknowledge’ (PN: 227 on Rom 1:26). Pagan behaviour was nevertheless immoral because, as Locke put it, they ‘revolted from God’ and ‘became servants and worshippers of the Devil’, so ‘God abandoned them to the vassalage they had chosen’ (PN: 356 on Eph 1:6).
50 What Locke thought could be known of the future state by unaided reason is a matter of debate. Tuckness’s proposal is the most intriguing: Locke believed such knowledge to be ‘based on probability rather than certainty’ but nevertheless sufficient to make obedience to God’s law rational. Tuckness, ‘Coherence’, pp. 86–8.
51 Augustine, City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York, NY, 1993), §19.13.
52 This argument from desire is echoed in the work of Locke’s friend Damaris Cudworth Masham, who wrote that ‘the loveliness of his [God’s] works as well assures us, that that cause, or author, is yet more lovely than they, and consequently the object the most worthy of our love’. Masham, Damaris, A discourse concerning the love of God (London, 1696), p. 64Google Scholar.
53 Schindler, Freedom, p. 360.
54 Ibid., p. 81.
55 Locke was what Tully calls a ‘mitigated voluntarist’, or, in Tuckness’s phrasing, a ‘ground voluntarist’. A ‘ground voluntarist’ holds the will of a superior to be necessary to create moral obligations; in contrast, a ‘content voluntarist’ holds (as Locke does not) that the content of moral obligations is determined by the will of the superior without reference to rationality from the standpoint of the inferior. Tuckness, ‘Coherence’, pp. 75–6; Tully, An approach, p. 281. Locke viewed ‘morality as a law imposed on mankind from God…that followed necessarily from the creature God had freely created and to whom he had given reason to infer it’. Dawson, Hannah, ‘The normativity of nature in Pufendorf and Locke’, Historical Journal, 63 (2020), p. 531Google Scholar.
56 Schindler, Freedom, p. 124.
57 On ‘Ethica A’, see Rossiter, ‘Hedonism and natural law’, pp. 211–12; cf. Nuovo, Victor, ‘Aspects of Stoicism in Locke’s philosophy’, in Christianity, antiquity, and enlightenment (Dordrecht, 2011), p. 190CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forde, ‘Mixed modes’, p. 598.
58 Stanton emphasizes the centrality of love to Locke’s thought: ‘for Locke, humanity is defined not by the freedom to choose, but by the freedom to love’. What matters to Locke is not ‘autonomy’ but the ability ‘to follow a law which commands us both to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves’. Stanton, Fable, p. 616.
59 Locke anticipates Adams’s social requirement theory, sharing with Adams the convictions (1) that God’s commands are necessary to create genuine moral obligations and (2) that the content of those commands should be understood in terms of ‘responding well to the various claims and interests involved in a situation’, a relational excellence of which ‘God is praised as the supreme and definitive standard’. Adams, Robert, Finite and infinite goods (Oxford, 1999), pp. 249, 254Google Scholar.
60 According to Mitsis, Locke wanted to show that neither the moral law (as the Stoics claimed) nor pleasure (as the Epicureans claimed) is motivationally prior; instead, we apprehend moral law and pleasure together ‘as a complex mode of ideas that answer to our rational nature and motivate us’. Phillip Mitsis, ‘Locke on pleasure, law, and moral motivation’, in Iakovos Vasiliou, ed., Moral motivation (Oxford, 2016), p. 178; cf. Michael Hawley, ‘Locke’s Ciceronian liberalism’, Perspectives on Political Science, 50 (2021), pp. 74–9; Hill, Lisa and Nidumolu, Prasanna, ‘The influence of classical Stoicism on Locke’s theory of self-ownership’, History of the Human Sciences, 34 (2021), pp. 13–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nuovo, ‘Aspects of Stoicism’; Hawley, Michael, Natural law republicanism (Oxford, 2022)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
61 Locke’s First treatise lays out ‘a teleology for human life, which revolves around a notion of divine purpose that sets ends to people’s actions, which they learn cognitively through the exercise of their natural faculties’. Stanton, Timothy, ‘Hobbes and Locke on natural law and Jesus Christ’, History of Political Thought, 29 (2008), pp. 75–6Google Scholar.
62 Setting Locke’s view of law in the context of the order of the heavenly city helps us to see that, pace Schneewind, Locke did not reject but rather embraced Hooker’s belief that law ‘show[s] us our eternal roles in a cosmic harmony’. Schneewind, Invention of autonomy, p. 143.
63 It is not hard to see parallels to Aquinas, who, as Herdt puts it, thought of God as ‘the Supreme Good…who reorients all our loves…drawing them into the communion of the divine life’. Herdt, Jennifer, ‘Excellence-Prior Eudaimonism’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 47 (2019), p. 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica (Westminster, MD, 1981), I–II pr. In claiming that humans necessarily pursue happiness, defined in terms of excellent responsiveness to the relational webs that define us, Locke ends up holding, as Aquinas did, ‘that the will is necessarily oriented toward the agent’s own perfection, or equivalently, his happiness’. Jean Porter, Justice as virtue: a Thomistic perspective (Grand Rapids, MI, 2016), p. 239; cf. Aquinas, Summa theologica, I–II Q. 1, A. 5.
64 Locke denied innate concepts (the ‘blank slate’) but affirmed innate proclivities. His insistence that there are ‘natural tendencies imprinted on the Minds of Men’ (E: 1.3.3) is missed by Parker, who assumes Locke thought humans naturally morally good (he did not, see CE: 103) based on his denial of innate ideas. Parker, Biblical politics, p. 21.
65 The relevant Latin terms, made famous by Augustine, are libido dominandi and incurvatus in se.
66 Locke’s hedonism does not clear the way for subjectivism but instead provides a mechanism for justifying Calvin’s insistence that ‘the end of the natural law…is to render man inexcusable’ by removing ‘all pretext for ignorance’. Calvin, Institutes 2.2.22. By showing how mundane reflection on human desire can reveal human duty, Locke underscores the potency of the moral abilities of the ‘man of ordinary capacity’, a recurring theme for Locke (E: 3.10.11–12; 1.1.5–6; 4.17.4; 2nd T: 13). Waldron captures this democratic bent in Locke, writing that ‘he has little patience for the view that possession of the technical apparatus of philosophical argument marks an important distinction between types of reasoners’. Waldron, God, Locke, and equality, p. 92.
67 Consider, for example, the mind–body problem in contemporary philosophy. See Warner, Richard and Szubka, Tadeusz, eds., The mind–body problem (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar. The precise issues Locke brings up in E: 2.27.23–5 about mind, body, and soul in relation to judgement and resurrection continue to be topics of inquiry among Christian philosophers, for example in the debate over whether the intermediate state requires a dualistic view of human constitution or, alternatively, is compatible with a monist view. See Cooper, John, Body, soul, and life everlasting (Grand Rapids, MI, 2000)Google Scholar; Green, Joel, Body, soul, and human life (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008)Google Scholar; Baker, Ruth, ‘Need a Christian be a mind/body dualist?’, Faith and Philosophy, 12 (1995), pp. 489–504CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hasker, William, ‘Concerning the unity of consciousness’, Faith and Philosophy, 12 (1995), pp. 532–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 On poiesis, Zuckert’s Straussian reading of Locke’s view of property is relevant. Had Locke, as Zuckert argues, supplanted divine ownership with self-ownership, Locke would indeed have been emphasizing man’s poietic, artistic capacity. Zuckert reads Locke’s claim ‘every man has a property in his own person’ (2nd T: 27) as contradicting his claim just above about humans being God’s property (2nd T: 6). Zuckert, Natural rights, p. 219. A more convincing reading harmonizes those two claims by recognizing that, for Locke, to hold ‘property in’ something, including one’s own person, is to hold a usufruct, a ‘right to use and enjoy God’s property for God’s purposes’. Colman, Locke’s moral philosophy, p. 122; cf. Tully, An approach, p. 28.
69 Taylor, Sources of the self, pp. 171ff.
70 Manent, City, pp. 113–16.