John Locke’s philosophy in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding has long been interpreted as fundamentally at odds with the political theory of his Two Treatises. This so-called “Two Lockes” problem, most famously announced by Peter Laslett, finds Locke advancing a skeptical epistemology in the former, which denies the possibility of absolute human knowledge of either natural law or the true essence of the human species.Footnote 1 The political theory of Two Treatises, conversely, grounds its normative claims in our shared humanity as God’s workmanship and the knowability of natural laws that govern moral and political conduct. Scholars since at least the 1960s have been grappling with the implications of the “Two Lockes” problem, and the task of reconciling his authoritative normative prescriptions with epistemological skepticism.
I argue that Locke’s epistemology is not only reconcilable with the method and substance of his political works but elucidates how he is a pragmatic thinker whose normative theories develop because of—not despite—his recognition of the limits of human knowledge and ability to conform conduct to natural law. My reading challenges that of Don Herzog, who argues Locke’s foundationalist moral theory fails to support his political conclusions.Footnote 2 Dennis Rasmussen has similarly used Locke and his foundationalism, grounded in reason and nature, as a foil to an alternative, meliorative tradition of “Pragmatic Enlightenment.”Footnote 3 Ruth Grant, on the other hand, has argued that Locke’s epistemology in the Essay is integral to understanding his political works. She applies the Essay’s method of certain deductive moral reasoning, while recognizing fundamental limitations in our understanding and reliance on probabilistic judgments.Footnote 4 In this vein, Emily Nacol notes that “Locke acknowledges uncertainty and deep vulnerability as permanent background conditions for political and economic endeavors.”Footnote 5 According to Douglas Casson, a cohesive reading of Locke is possible given his concern with the tension at the heart of human judgment. This fundamental capacity is inescapably fallible but necessary for establishing legitimate political authority.Footnote 6
With these latter scholars, I argue that Locke demonstrated the possibility of normative political theory that takes seriously the problems posed by both epistemological and moral skepticism. Locke presents greater affinities with “Pragmatic Enlightenment,” as a “more realistic, moderate, flexible, and contextually sensitive” tradition, than Rasmussen identifies.Footnote 7 Obscuring this feature of Locke’s thinking can distort both his epistemological and political commitments, as well as the role of Christian theology in his egalitarianism. I take aim at Jeremy Waldron’s treatment of the Two Lockes and his claim that Locke’s theological commitments provide the most compelling foundation for a meaningful normative theory of equality today.Footnote 8 Locke’s philosophy is saturated with scriptural references and invocations of the Christian God. But his political theory ultimately confronts the limits of human knowledge and understanding in light of, and sometimes despite, those commitments. Waldron errs in identifying a capacity to abstract and its theological valence as the basis of Locke’s egalitarianism and a bulwark against moral uncertainty and conventionalism. I argue that Locke instead enlisted pragmatic bases for defending and acting on foundational moral and political claims, like our belief in human equality. His recommendations derived from his recognition of the inescapable limits of human knowledge and judgment.
I outline the puzzle of the Two Lockes and scholarly divisions on his methodology. I focus on Waldron’s argument that Locke’s moral prescriptions for equality are meaningful due to his turn to Christian premises and theologically grounded traits, despite the Essay’s thoroughgoing epistemological skepticism. I present a novel critique of Waldron and his attempt to bypass the implications of Locke’s species nominalism through a turn to a naturalistic real resemblance. I argue this resemblance cannot confer the moral or ontological objectivity Waldron requires for his egalitarianism, as Locke’s skeptical epistemology asserted the inescapable conventionalism and indeterminacy in identifying such a trait amongst putative equals. The third section explicates Locke’s formal deduction from the logic of legality in his defense of equality, which is not grounded on the normative strength of a specific equality-conferring trait as Waldron claims. Locke’s certain moral propositions must then be understood, I argue, in tandem with his emphasis on empirically meliorated, probabilistic judgment and nominal categories. This imperfect knowledge was required to apply moral claims to human conduct and did not threaten their normative value. I next critique Waldron’s selective appropriation of John McDowell’s metaethics in his defense of his theologically valent real resemblance. I argue that McDowell’s claims ironically undermine Waldron’s turn to theological premises and instead present basic affinities with Locke’s pragmatic reliance on education for cultivating moral sensibilities and normative compulsion. I conclude with the implications for contemporary egalitarianism from Locke’s acceptance of reason’s limits and his enduring relevance for secular readers.
Two Lockes revisited
The Two Lockes problem is straightforward: The Locke of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding was an empiricist who rejected the notion of innate ideas;Footnote 9 an anti-essentialist and nominalist who denied the existence of discrete species, including an identifiable “human species”;Footnote 10 and an epistemologist who highlighted the limits of human knowledge, especially vis-à-vis observation and experience of the natural world.Footnote 11 The Locke of the Two Treatises posited natural laws written on every human heart and legible to all who sought them out,Footnote 12 which created binding moral obligations even after individuals entered political society founded on convention.Footnote 13 His normative theory of equality was based on the moral valence imputed to membership in a distinct and knowable human species subject to those laws.Footnote 14 Locke famously announced that there is “nothing more evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one among another without Subordination or Subjection.”Footnote 15
This apparent contradiction has yielded a parallel cleavage among Locke scholars. Laslett finds the Two Lockes to be fundamentally different strands of Locke’s thought. Locke’s philosophy, premised on the limits of human knowledge, cannot be squared with a political theory that prescribed rules of conduct and practice with “suave assurance.”Footnote 16 Other Locke scholars believe Locke’s epistemology corresponds to elements of his political theory. John Yolton documents Locke’s mixed mode analysis in his treatment of property, which offers conceptual clarifications to political claims in the Second Treatise. Footnote 17 Grant ties Locke’s methodology to his political investigations, as the Two Treatises provide “the kind of demonstrative normative theory the possibility of which is argued in his Essay.”Footnote 18 This enables Locke to construct logically sound arguments supporting his substantive political and moral doctrines.Footnote 19 Limitations in empirical knowledge, on the other hand, explain the need for liberal institutions to adjudicate amongst self-interested and uncertain practical judgments.Footnote 20
The characterization of Locke’s enterprise as deriving from theological first premises leads John Dunn to dismiss the relevance and normative strength of Locke’s subsequent demonstrations and policy prescriptions for skeptical contemporary readers.Footnote 21 Jeremy Waldron inverts Dunn’s conclusions by arguing that Locke’s Christian commitments and absolute theological foundations render his liberalism the most normatively compelling for liberal theory today. In Waldron’s bold claim, it’s unclear whether “we—now—can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation.”Footnote 22 A liberal theory and its foundational commitment to human equality may not be possible without recourse to Christian, or at least, theologically grounded, principles, at the apparent risk of undermining liberalism’s other core commitment to value neutrality.
In grappling with the Two Lockes problem, Waldron focuses on the contradiction between Locke’s recourse to human species in grounding equality in the Second Treatise, and the Essay’s characterization of species as nominal constructions. Locke claimed that we cannot discern with certainty whether a “changeling” or “monstrous births”Footnote 23 conform to any “real essence” of man, which is epistemically inaccessible for humans. We can only refer to our imperfect empirical investigations and conventional classifications.Footnote 24 For Waldron, the implications are dire. Locke’s egalitarian claims in the Two Treatises may be fatally undermined by the Essay’s epistemological skepticism. If species categories are nominal creations, Locke’s claim that humans possess special, equal moral status may lack objective foundations. Our commitment to equality would be “at the mercy” of our conventional understandings of humanity, which could be freely defined along racial, gender, or any arbitrary lines. “Locke’s anti-essentialism … leaves the field wide open for anyone to draw the boundaries of humanity wherever he likes.”Footnote 25 The concern with species skepticism implicates not only who is entitled to equality but a justification of equality itself; the way we define “humanity” shapes the reasons why we commit to human equality in the first place.Footnote 26
Waldron turns to “what Locke is prepared to concede—namely, real resemblances between particulars.”Footnote 27 He suggests that Locke shifted from species to the shared trait of “corporeal rationality.”Footnote 28 This shift means that if “the moralist can secure that idea (as the basis of a fundamentally relevant resemblance among certain individuals), then the detail of the issue about species can be left as a purely speculative problem for the naturalists and philosophers.”Footnote 29 But, as Waldron notes, Locke argued that we might find very clever monkeys who possess such rationality, which presupposes a threshold that could leave ambiguities at the margins of its application. He suggests textual evidence for a Lockean “region on a scale,”Footnote 30 demarcated by the “power of Abstracting.”Footnote 31 This power allows its possessors to form a belief in God, execute his will, and therefore stand in a special moral relationship to him and similarly endowed others. This “range property” and its theological valence reassert a sufficiently robust and objective basis of equality, more normatively compelling than any inference derived from its relative possession.
Real resemblances and mixed modes
Waldron’s attempt to resolve the tension between species nominalism and Lockean egalitarianism stretches Locke beyond the breaking point of his philosophical commitments. Waldron’s turn to “real resemblances” in lieu of species identification, as Locke’s move and lifeline to his theory of equality, pivots on a misreading of a key passage in Locke’s Essay and his epistemological taxonomy of ideas. Revisiting Locke’s epistemology offers a different insight into the Two Lockes, based on a definition of person or “moral man” as a mixed mode not a substance or identified by a real resemblance.
Scholars who defend the view of persons as mode turn to Locke’s proposition for moral demonstration as clear evidence of this reading.Footnote 32 Locke asserted that moral deductions and absolute knowledge pivot on the kind of demonstrative reasoning from first principles that guides mathematical proofs. Certain moral knowledge, like the truth of human equality, can be demonstrated only when modes and relations are applied, not empirical observations or natural kinds. With mixed modes, “the precise real essence of the things moral words stand for may be perfectly known,”Footnote 33 which Locke deemed fit for the work of the moralist versus the naturalist. Moral reasoning via mixed modes allows us to gain perfect knowledge because it deals with ideas that are conceptually fixed. The implication of this distinction is to see moral persons as a construction related to experience and observation, not a substance idea or identified by a natural real resemblance.Footnote 34 In Antonia LoLordo’s words, “the category of a person is something we impose on the natural world to serve our own purposes, rather than something we copy from nature.”Footnote 35
Viewing persons as modes clarifies the distinct types of arguments Locke deploys in the Essay and the Two Treatises. Locke’s methodology is evident in the notorious passage in which he argues that “morality is capable of demonstration, as well as mathematics.”Footnote 36 Locke writes, “as to substances, when concerned in moral discourses, their divers natures are not so much inquired into as supposed; e.g. when we say that man is subject to law, we mean nothing by man but a corporeal rational creature: what the real essence or other qualities of that creature are in this case is no way considered.”Footnote 37 Waldron takes this passage as evidence of Locke’s shift from species to corporeal rationality as a morally valent naturalistic trait. This interpretive move allows Waldron to bypass the nominalism of Locke’s ideas of substance and unknowable essences, by focusing on a single, observable trait shared amongst moral entities.
But I argue that this distorts the context and meaning of the passage, which shows instead Locke’s assertion that moral deductions and absolute knowledge are possible only when mixed modes and fixed conceptual definitions are applied. “Corporeal rationality” is a conceptual definition of “man” deployed in moral argumentation, as Locke undertook with “suave assurance” in dealing with fixed meanings in Two Treatises, not a naturalistic feature extracted for moral demonstration, as Waldron falsely claims.
If we follow Locke’s claims, the epistemological foundations of Waldron’s Lockean egalitarianism are shakier than even Waldron’s critical readers have identified. Waldron’s textual basis for Locke’s turn to a real resemblance is rooted in Locke’s claim that Nature creates “many particular things” that share “sensible qualities.”Footnote 38 This quality provides an ontological realism for Waldron’s egalitarianism, as it inheres in moral equals as they are created by Nature, not as they are conceptually posited via mixed mode or nominal species classifications. But Waldron’s reliance on a naturalistic quality presents a sleight of hand. Locke allowed the idea of real resemblances to comprise constitutive parts of a mixed mode. But Waldron attributes to his real resemblance and range property features of a mixed mode. While a modal trait can provide epistemic certainty and objectivity in moral claims, it cannot confirm the ontological realism Waldron imputes to his equality-conferring resemblance. Nor can a natural trait underwrite the type of moral certainty Waldron assigns to his Lockean egalitarianism.
Even if we accept the certain truth of Christian egalitarianism and the ontological reality and moral value of this real resemblance, I argue that Waldron’s account still fails to overcome the implications of Locke’s nominalism. Locke’s skeptical epistemology was not restricted to essences and definite species but extended to our ability to identify a real resemblance with certainty. Sensory perceptions are often mediated by “habitual custom” and “altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it.”Footnote 39 Locke famously argued that observations of qualities like color do not yield context-independent knowledge that such qualities inhere in an object; “we are then quite out of the way, when we think that Things contain within themselves the Qualities, that appear to us in them.”Footnote 40 Establishing an objective resemblance between two instantiations of a quality like whiteness is therefore impossible, “because we have no certain standard to measure them by, nor means to distinguish every the least real difference, the only help we have being from our senses, which in this point fail us.”Footnote 41 A certain standard to measure and confirm this quality would require access to the real essence or powers behind physical matter which cause our ideas of whiteness.
Establishing a “capacity to abstract” as a real resemblance presents further complications. Such mental powers do not produce simple, direct ideas for us to grasp like colors.Footnote 42 Though we can intuitively confirm our own mental powers,Footnote 43 we cannot compare our private mind’s ideas of such powers with that of others, without the mediation of nominal terms.Footnote 44 Nor can other people’s mental faculties be confirmed with certainty through observation; they can only be inferred probabilistically from observable effects.Footnote 45 Identifying and classifying such faculties as constitutive of a shared resemblance requires fallible inferential judgments and interpretive mediation, which are inherently subject to nominalism.
Waldron’s claim that his equality-endowing faculty is morally sufficient as an unexercised potentiality ought to deepen our skepticism toward its non-conventional bases.Footnote 46 Intuitive confirmation of one’s own potential capacity to abstract is unavailable if its possessor does not or cannot exercise it. Locke’s own questionable confidence that “brutes” lack the faculty to abstract treads only on a negative inference, as he “observe[s] no footsteps in them of making use of general signs for universal ideas.”Footnote 47 If this provides sufficient evidence to demarcate the bounds of moral regard, an unused potential is empirically indistinguishable from its total absence amongst brutes. In these instances, no humanly accessible means are available to distinguish moral equals from beasts made for our uses.
Given this reading of Locke’s skeptical epistemology, I believe Waldron’s attempt to reconcile the Two Lockes simply reproduces, without resolving, the problematic implications of Locke’s species nominalism. Because Waldron’s real resemblance cannot be discerned objectively, conventionalism and indeterminacy re-enter in its imperfect identification and the moral claims devised on that basis. An absolute standard to determine its existence would depend on knowing the real essence of the entity believed to possess it. Any human attempt to make such determinations would collapse into the very reliance on nominal essences Waldron finds dire for egalitarianism.
Waldron writes in rejecting unknowable real essences as a basis for equality claims, “so long as the basic orientation of such improvement [in our taxonomies] is pragmatic rather than objective, the associated idea of real essence is of no use for politics or morality.”Footnote 48 His objections fail to acknowledge that a real resemblance demarcating the boundaries for equal moral regard, and the resultant taxonomy of putative equals, work for “pragmatic rather than objective”Footnote 49 purposes. Waldron’s turn to real resemblances thus takes the problem of Locke’s skeptical epistemology and allows it to recur at a lower level of specification. Such resemblances cannot be established with certainty or underwrite the demonstratively objective bases for morality that Locke demanded. Such bases are possible with a modal trait anchoring moral demonstrations, which is conceptually defined not ontologically grounded.
If the range of beings claimed to possess the relevant real resemblance is not coextensive with the category of “humans” asserted for the purposes of liberal theory, then the universality condition of liberalism is lost. Waldron acknowledges that Locke’s conception of humanity does not “include all whom we pre-theoretically describe as human.”Footnote 50 But his efforts to rein in difficult borderline cases with a range property are insufficient. Hard cases arise in determining whether an action or person takes place within the range of New Jersey, in Waldron’s example (even as a juridical or mixed mode category). Neither the naturalist nor the moralist can know objectively if “the capacity to abstract” applies to a “particular body,” like “idiots,” “beasts,” and “clever monkeys.” We lack certainty when faced with arguments that certain severely developmentally impaired individuals or frozen zygotes lack this real resemblance.Footnote 51
More generally, Waldron argues that his Christian premises provide a normative valence that can overcome the moral implications of differential possession within a range. But his range property’s theologically certain principles cannot bypass the inherent indeterminacy and conventionalism that shape its identification and perceptions of differential possession. By Waldron’s account, for example, “In the passage about husbands and wives [II.82], Locke is not just noticing a difference in ability, he is inferring a difference in authority from a difference in the capacities of human beings; and that is fundamentally at odds with what he wants to say generally about equality.”Footnote 52 Women are described as unequal in authority, even though they possess the baseline power to abstract to God.Footnote 53 Locke’s views undermine the textual consistency and normative power Waldron attributes to Locke’s Christian range property as determinative of equality. As Waldron describes the atheist, Locke appears equally “at a loss to defend any particular line or threshold, in a non-question begging way.”Footnote 54
While Waldron documents this “embarrassment,”Footnote 55 he does not acknowledge its full implications. Even if Locke’s theological premises establish the moral valence of this resemblance, they do not confirm its ontological status. Even if ontologically real, this resemblance cannot overcome indeterminacy and conventionalism at the level of identification. These issues are not simply ancillary to the objectivity and claimed contemporary relevance of Waldron’s egalitarianism. If this egalitarianism can be interpreted by Locke himself to justify its antithesis—inequality—then its normative power and fidelity to empirical reality appear fatally undermined. The certain theological truths animating Waldron’s Lockean egalitarianism may prove normatively inert in warding off its total perversion in practice.
Certain moral deductions and moral man
Locke’s non-controversial deductive basis for human equality presented a formal precondition for subjection to laws, natural and civil: (1) Subjection to natural law defines “moral man.” (2) Natural law—or any law—requires that its subjects be free and equal vis-à-vis fellow subjects because of their equal duties and rights guaranteed under that law and the freedom that this law guarantees. (3) Conversely, law cannot exist without the basic freedom it provides, and freedom under law is impossible as a matter of a priori principle if there are inequalities in authority, duties, and rights.
Moral man—corporeal rational man—is governed by moral laws. This may present a mixed mode trait of moral agents, but not the descriptive property needed to reconcile Locke’s skeptical anti-speciesism with a substantive ground for moral equality. Waldron’s turn to Locke’s real resemblances—whether faithful to Locke’s egalitarianism and epistemology—attempts to find such supervenient traitsFootnote 56 or descriptive properties “robust enough to sustain the sort of equality thesis Locke wants.”Footnote 57 Though Locke suggested traits associated with moral personhood under law like corporeal rationality, the capacity to abstract did not provide Locke the substantive basis for distinguishing equals in the way Waldron claims. Nor was the identification of such traits the apparent focus of his moral deductions, especially in the Essay.
Important traits for moral personhood and the nature of moral laws are reciprocally defined for Locke. As Alex Tuckness argues, for Locke, God may retain control over natural law insofar as He may “create humans with whatever nature He prefers.”Footnote 58 As Udo ThielFootnote 59 and Galen StrawsonFootnote 60 have noted, Locke’s best-known formulation of personhood, as a “forensic term appropriating actions and their merit; and so belongs only to intelligent agents capable of a law, and happiness and misery,”Footnote 61 applied terminology derived from the Roman law. Locke’s turn to personhood and identity selected features required for legal personhood, namely the consciousness of identity extended over time as a basic prerequisite for legal accountability and rule-guided behavior. As LoLordo claims, against Waldron, Locke’s egalitarianism rests on a conception of moral man as a free, rational agent capable of liberty, deliberation, and suspension of “the prosecution of your most pressing desires.”Footnote 62 This foundation grounds the capacity to abstract, reflect, and appropriate past experiences as one’s own on non-theological terms.Footnote 63
Scholarship on the status of criminals in the Second Treatise has complicated the Lockean account of equal personhood and equitable treatment under law, and the normative weight of both theological real resemblances and traits constitutive of juridical personhood. Locke viewed the criminal who “trespasses against the whole species”Footnote 64 and “quits” his presumptive “rank” as human, as an animal who “may be destroyed as a lion or a tiger, one of those wild savage beasts.”Footnote 65 Waldron defends Locke’s account by emphasizing his stipulations for just punishment under law and the possibility of executive pardon; these stipulations suggest that, for Locke, the criminal never loses his moral standing or his potential to reenter political society.Footnote 66
Against this view, Sinja Graf has argued that “mankind” as the subject of natural law and of crime and punishment is not afforded a baseline of equal moral status. Instead, legal subjects are ordered in a “hierarchical humanity”Footnote 67 spanning “innocents” and “offenders.” The “Industrious and Rational” to whom God bequeathed Earth are likewise positioned and rewarded over and against the “quarrelsome and contentious.”Footnote 68 Rebecca Kingston has similarly concluded that Locke’s treatment of transgressors of natural law and the issue of forfeiture contravenes the basis of Waldron’s Lockean egalitarianism in “certain perennial and universal features of human beings.”Footnote 69 The weak limitations on the rules of proportionality and retribution in the state of nature render the criminal’s claimed equality an empty formality.Footnote 70 These readings suggest equality under natural law is forfeited by, or never afforded to, an unspecified but “greater part”Footnote 71 of humanity in the state of nature. The bestialization of crooks and the “quarrelsome and contentious” may provide attributes of those lacking equal status, but they cannot affirm properties that confer unconditional moral equality.
Another central feature of the nature of law that Locke reciprocally defined according to traits of human nature—hedonismFootnote 72—would not likely be “robust enough” to ground equality. Though we need not view Locke as a proto-utilitarianFootnote 73 or Hobbesian,Footnote 74 his hedonism was a complement to—not in conflict with—his moral thought, and his natural law theory specifically. Locke believed that the absence of hedonistic motivation to follow the law, or an enforcement mechanism, impugned the validity of law.Footnote 75 As Steven Forde argues, hedonism and our pursuit of personal happiness are inseparable from rationality, and Locke’s moral laws are built on this premise.Footnote 76 Morality is constituted by reason and the rational pursuit of true happiness or pleasure versus mere appetites.Footnote 77 The relevant equality trait appears to be a capacity for true pleasures and pain, self-interest, or at minimum a supplement to the rational pursuit of the highest good of adherence to natural and divine law. Such traits seem insufficient to ground equality. Locke’s account of “moral man” and “corporeal rationality” may simply present a minimalist or formally derived trait of moral and legal personhood. I do not believe it provides Waldron’s substantive moral and descriptive grounds for equality, even if animated by distinctively Christian premises. Nor does it appear sufficient as the basis of Locke’s egalitarian edifice and natural law claims.
Probabilistic knowledge and the “democratic intellect”
Locke’s deductions and mixed modes like “moral man” and “corporeal rationality” are still relevant to concrete moral practice, even if they are not grounded in a naturalistic resemblance. His methodology in the Two Treatises assessed the empirical relevance of mixed modes or moral principles by applying them to existing historical and anthropological (or generally, non-ideal) contexts. His political works provided a bridge between his certain moral prescriptions and the limits of empirical knowledge, in both his substantive claims and methodology. For example, Locke writes in the context of critiques of his state of nature account, “He must shew a strange inclination to deny evident matter of fact, when it agrees not with his Hypothesis,” then turns to concrete historical examples of Venice and Rome to defend the validity of his concept.Footnote 78 Casson rightly states, “His insistence on the historical reality of the state of nature is evidence that this division [between moral and political argument on the one hand and the evidence of the natural world on the other] is not as absolute as he initially maintains.”Footnote 79
I believe this view of Locke’s methodology neutralizes Waldron’s concern over the implications of potential nominalism in Locke’s egalitarianism. The necessity of nominal classifications is consistent with Locke’s belief that we can apply meaningful normative prescriptions to our conduct, without the certainty of deductive knowledge.Footnote 80 Certain knowledge is rare; “most of the propositions we think, reason, discourse—nay, act upon, are such as we cannot have undoubted knowledge of their truth.”Footnote 81 Nominal essences or words are pragmatic benchmarks established to help us navigate the world, impart and advance knowledge over time, and make sense of empirical data.Footnote 82 Judgments based on observations and experience can have probabilistic relationships to absolute knowledgeFootnote 83 and are necessary to bridge moral deductions with concrete prescriptions for conduct.
This imperfection did not yield skepticism or fatalism, as Locke stressed the possibility and ethical imperative of improving probabilistic knowledge through pragmatic measures. Locke insisted that we “inquire into the nature and properties of the things themselves, and thereby perfect, as much as we can, our ideas of their distinct species.”Footnote 84 We can do so by turning to “experience, observation, and natural history”Footnote 85 and standardizing nominal classifications “in discourse with others.”Footnote 86 He championed epistemic virtues like examining all sides of our beliefs and arguments, with recourse to evidence and patient engagement with others’ ideas.Footnote 87 As LoLordo argues, it is “central to Locke’s project that we have a moral obligation to regulate our assent by the grounds of probability,” as most of our beliefs cannot be grounded in certain knowledge.Footnote 88 This is crucial to Locke’s skeptical epistemology, and explains its coherence with his moral and political theorizing.
Locke was clear that certain knowledge was still possible via moral deductions, like his own demonstrations proving God’s existenceFootnote 89 and the obligatory nature of divine commands.Footnote 90 But, as Michael Zuckert has argued in the vein of John Dunn, because Locke’s certain belief in God’s existence is untenable, his egalitarianism is irrelevant for contemporary skeptical readers. “[I]f reason cannot know or prove God’s existence, then how can it be known? Through faith. At the end of the day the key piece of knowledge must be given by faith.”Footnote 91 Knowledge of God, like much of the Christian ground of equality, seems to presuppose—short of divine revelation—an empirically and rationally unmoored faith as the true foundation of human equality.Footnote 92 Zuckert’s critique can be taken further. If Christian belief can no longer be sustained by either certain reason or empirically rigorous assent as Locke required, the viability of Locke’s Christian egalitarianism today is unsatisfactory by Locke’s own standards. The basis of contemporary belief may be the type of orthodoxy or unexamined religious enthusiasm Locke cautioned against, in which believers turn to “the ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain, and assumes them for a foundation both of opinion and conduct.”Footnote 93
Without addressing the issue of contemporary relevance, Waldron counters Zuckert’s critique by clarifying that his reading is faithful to “Locke [who] believed that reason could lead one to belief in the deity.”Footnote 94 Part of the normative appeal of Locke’s account, according to Waldron, rests in his belief that such reasoning to theological premises was widely accessible. Locke championed what Waldron terms a “democratic intellect,” or a baseline intellectual capacity evident across class lines.Footnote 95 Waldron emphasizes Locke’s belief that the philosopher’s level of epistemic ability was unnecessary to reason to God, natural law, and moral duties. This rendered Locke’s Christianity congenial to “vulgar capacities.”Footnote 96 Waldron rightly notes Locke’s ambivalence toward deductive reasoning and natural theology, as Locke clearly identified reason’s inability to recognize substantive Christian doctrines like the existence of angels or resurrection.Footnote 97
Waldron takes such signs of ambivalence to explain Locke’s insistence on revelation and miracles as a necessary and democratic supplement or replacement for moral deductions.Footnote 98 But Waldron does not address the related limits Locke placed on the type of knowledge revelations produce. Revelations may be more “democratic” in their reach than philosophical deductions, but assent to revealed truths lacks certainty. As Nathan Rockwood shows, revelations require weighing empirical evidence and testimony to corroborate that they are genuine revelations from God.Footnote 99 This evidence-based understanding is fallible and relies on probabilistic knowledge.Footnote 100 God has given us “the light of revelation in any of those matters wherein our natural faculties are able to give a probable determination.”Footnote 101 It is qualitatively distinct from, and cannot supersede, certain knowledge underwriting moral deductions, which philosophers like Locke ostensibly possess.Footnote 102 “Traditional revelation may make us know propositions knowable also by reason, but not with the same certainty that reason doth.”Footnote 103
Just as Waldron finds in his naturalistic resemblance attributes reserved for mixed modes, he seems to impute a certainty to everyday people’s “belief in the deity” and equality, despite its basis in faith and probabilistic knowledge.Footnote 104 For Waldron, certainty in God may be part of the normative appeal of Locke’s theological premises and the strength of its normative compulsion. But for Locke, such knowledge was not widely available given epistemic limitations nor necessary for a viable egalitarianism.Footnote 105
Thick concepts and McDowell’s metaethics
Locke’s reliance on probabilistic reasoning highlights the difficulties in anchoring his certain claims in moral and political theorizing to empirical realities. While still reliant on foundational theological commitments, I believe that Waldron, despite himself, selectively applies an alternative metaethical framework for a pragmatic reconciliation between absolute moral foundationalism and the limits of reason and knowledge. Waldron notes that, in any normative theory, the principle advanced may cover an uncertain range of predicates. He explains this relationship between principle, predicate, and extension via a rejection of non-cognitivist assumptions in normative ethics.Footnote 106 The non-cognitivism he challenges claims that moral concepts like “honesty” or “courage” have separable descriptive elements (steadfastness, for example) and evaluative elements (positive approval of courage).Footnote 107 R. M. Hare argues that, because of their descriptive element, the content of these terms is open to evaluation and disagreement, if not truth-evaluation.Footnote 108 Evaluation cannot affect descriptive content or the shape of a thick moral concept. It follows from a fixed, objective rule that tells us how to determine the correct application of a concept.
Waldron turns to John McDowell’s critique of this “disentangling manoeuvre” to explain how his and Locke’s Christian reasons shape the descriptive predicate of equality.Footnote 109 He adapts McDowell’s claim that, for many thick concepts, the descriptive and evaluative content are inseparable. The evaluative dimension is not just an addition or a causal response to a value-neutral descriptive property. In McDowell’s view, the disentangling maneuver ignores how evaluation parses descriptive content such that it comports with what we understand as its extended evaluative analogue; though many acts can be described as steadfast, not all are evaluated positively as courageous. Waldron applies McDowell’s claims to explain why the descriptive content of “human” cannot pre-exist the evaluative concept of (Christian) equality; the latter shapes the former. Locke’s Christian premises cannot be bracketed off, as they shape and endow moral significance on traits that “might seem arbitrary, shapeless, even insignificant apart from the religious context.”Footnote 110 Identifying traits alone cannot carry the normative weight of upholding equality claims or overcoming the problem of differential possession.
But Waldron cannot apply these metaethical claims without exposing interpretive and logical shortcomings in his account. Waldron is presumably tasked with presenting a cogent justification of our egalitarian beliefs, not just explaining how they shape certain equality-conferring traits. But his method seems to simply posit (Christian) equality to explain the egalitarian valence of his real resemblance and then to use that trait to carry the normative burden of justifying what has already been posited (Christian equality, or perhaps Christian equality deriving from the power to abstract to God). Waldron’s Lockean egalitarianism appears to presuppose equality in the principle that is supposed to justify it. As with utilitarianism, which Waldron critiques on the same grounds, equality in this account appears to be justified in a “question-begging way.”Footnote 111
The counterargument seems to be that this account avoids circularity for those who already accept the foundational truth of Christian equality. This provides its unique normative power, though it may not be convincing for those outside specific Christian “forms of life,” in McDowell’s appropriation of Wittgenstein’s phrase.Footnote 112 But McDowell’s views cannot be assimilated to Locke’s as Waldron attempts. In fact, I believe McDowell’s metaethics expose more fundamental issues with the coherence and normative power Waldron attributes to his real resemblance and the “shaping” work of his theological premises. McDowell’s account of moral judgments and ethical perception, somewhat ironically, explains how non-theological, normative reasons can accomplish what Waldron attributes to his and Locke’s Christian premises, but cannot ultimately deliver.
McDowell views moral values as internal to “shared forms of life,” intelligible only within a background of ethical acculturation.Footnote 113 The ontological realism of values is premised explicitly on his rejection of Lockean empiricism.Footnote 114 For McDowell, moral values, like colors, have a real ontological existence, but a cultivated perceptual capacity is required to identify them and shape their status as relevant features of reality.Footnote 115 Their objective existence is affirmed by and cannot be disentangled “from the sensitivity that constitutes” them.Footnote 116 McDowell, unlike Locke or Waldron, rejects the idea that moral values derive their existence from external theological or metaphysical reasons. Such reasons do not provide “the perception of a truth, but a consoling myth, elicited from us by our inability to endure the vertigo” of uncertainty in the sources of our moral values.Footnote 117
Waldron’s theological premises not only run afoul of McDowell’s account, but I believe they undermine his own metaethical claims. In appropriating McDowell’s conceptual vocabulary of “shaping,” Waldron commits the very disentangling maneuver he critiques. For Locke, empirical description must be disentangled from certain moral prescriptions. Moral reality and the normative shape of descriptive facts exist even “when one peels off the reflection of the appropriate attitude,”Footnote 118 in McDowell’s words, as they are mind-independent metaphysical truths. Lockean epistemology dictates that a correct evaluative response or normative shaping of descriptive facts must follow from demonstratively true moral precepts. His theological premises work like a feature or rule that McDowell critiques as “singled out as an independent ingredient in a purported explanation of why occupants of the perspective see things as they do.”Footnote 119 For McDowell, the internal moral practices and responsiveness of an ethical community provide the objective basis of evaluative and descriptive “shaping.” For Locke, only a modal trait can shape the theological dimension of a descriptive feature for humans in this way; the latter must be defined precisely by the theological premises ascribed to it, like the “thick concepts” McDowell critiques.
If only a mixed mode or relation can stipulate the normative significance of otherwise random descriptive traits, Waldron is faced again with the uncertain ontological status of his real resemblance. A theological “perceptual capacity” of the type McDowell identifies may plausibly shape and affirm the ontologically real and objective moral valence of naturalistic features, not just as modal traits or transcendental presuppositions. But Locke denied this possibility. Lockean epistemology cannot bridge ontological and moral reality in the way McDowell’s metaethics allows. A theologically valent perception of descriptive facts would remain an operation of an individual private mind, not a cultivated power that can grasp the true nature of ontological or moral reality.Footnote 120 For Locke, organizing or “shaping” descriptive facts in accordance with normative interests is grounded in conventionalism, as the underlying structure and nature of material reality are fundamentally unknowable. Human ascription of true theological premises to empirical reality cannot escape such conceptual mediation, even if they provide objectively true, non-arbitrary bases for normative classifications. As such, the only available method for identifying moral equals in the world relies on fallible empirical identifications of a single, conceptually posited trait. No normative weight can extend to our experiences with the complex entities comprising our shared forms of life or our certain perception of their moral equality.
Locke’s pragmatic education for equality
More problems arise for Waldron’s Lockean egalitarianism with his selective application of McDowell’s metaethical framework. McDowell turns to Stanley Cavell to describe the quotidian details that shape sensibilities and moral understandings, like “sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humour and of significance … all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life.’”Footnote 121 Locke was deeply sensitive to the role of such features in the realization of moral and social values. He did not believe true Christian belief alone could shape moral understanding and conduct, or normative compulsion, without proper education and acculturation. Waldron, however, appears to attribute to Locke a belief that minimal knowledge of Christian reasons, discernible with a “democratic intellect,” could motivate moral evaluations and normative compulsion. “When I catch a rabbit, I know that I am not dealing with a creature that has the capacity to abstract”; catching a human with the relevant equality-conferring capacity, on the other hand, triggers recognition that one must be “careful” in dealing with him.Footnote 122
But this view that external reasons alone can motivate agents and provide normative compulsion contravenes core lessons from the Second Treatise. Mutual identification of theological traits is explicitly denied as a sufficient basis for recognition of equality, the common good and equitable treatment of others.Footnote 123 Locke clearly argued that we must cultivate our reason and decipher our attendant moral duties.Footnote 124 But such duties, even if legible to us by reason, are not self-executing and require external motivation to be realized. Our judgment and treatment of each other is clouded by partiality, and our willingness to adhere to laws is swayed by self-interest.Footnote 125 Exiting the state of nature requires setting up a sovereign legislator,Footnote 126 executive,Footnote 127 “Judge on Earth,”Footnote 128 and, of course, the social contract.Footnote 129
Locke’s turn to education provided another framework for effectuating moral claims. Waldron characterizes Locke’s treatment of education and parental duty as an affirmative duty to nurture children’s innate rational capacities so they can actualize their telos as chosen by God for moral equality.Footnote 130 He claims that Locke’s education offers coherence to his egalitarianism, by nurturing the infant’s innate potential capacities into the stature of moral personhood. But casting education and the cultivation of egalitarianism as a theological duty to achieve a divinely chosen telos risks minimizing the pragmatic, non-doctrinal emphasis of Locke’s educational tracts. His Of the Conduct of Human Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education highlight the practical imperatives of education within an ethical community, as necessary for a trained moral sensibility and everyday conduct. He emphasized virtues that conduce not just to moral personhood, but fostering a well-adjusted individual who “has found the true art of living in the world.”Footnote 131 Locke celebrated the cultivation of wisdom derived from “the effect of experience and observation in a man who has lived in the world with his eyes open and conversed with men of all sorts.”Footnote 132
Locke shares this basic turn to moral education and acculturation with McDowell and his emphasis on “ethical upbringing in a roughly Aristotelian way, as a process of habituation into suitable modes of behaviour, inextricably bound up with the inculcation of suitably related modes of thought.”Footnote 133 Locke’s distinctive treatment of moral education, habituation, and virtuous dispositions emphasized remedial means for combating reason’s precarity. The systematic perversion of both children’s and adults’ mental faculties—as practical powers, not metaphysical foundations—risked social destabilization and individual corruption. As Rita Koganzon argues, Locke’s education was oriented toward “compensat[ing] for the dangerous intellectual conditions which characterize all societies,”Footnote 134 while eschewing theological doctrines as either the basis or justification for early education.Footnote 135
Locke identified a host of powerful, if commonplace, intellectual vices stymying reason and the rational path to truth: rushing to judgment and reaching premature conclusions,Footnote 136 instead of suspending assent;Footnote 137 complacency and laziness in examining one’s beliefs;Footnote 138 prejudice and ceding to custom rather than evidence;Footnote 139 and partiality or indulging in motivated reasoningFootnote 140 in lieu of disinterested consideration of truth.Footnote 141 As Grant explains, these individual shortcomings are bound up with the oftentimes pernicious influence of custom, including received opinion, habitual and socialized behavior, and orthodoxy.Footnote 142 Custom shapes thinking and actions, and our capacity for moral judgments, as it “settles habits of Thinking in the Understanding, as well as of Determining in the Will, and of Motions in the Body.”Footnote 143 Unquestioned custom causes errors and potential evils contrary to true moral duties.Footnote 144 But they remain compelling, given the pleasures of social validation provided from adopting received opinion and orthodoxyFootnote 145 and avoidance of displeasure in admitting one’s longstanding beliefs are in error.Footnote 146
As scholars have argued, Locke did not pit individual reason against social customs and habituation, but prescribed measures to reform and reconstruct them in service of reason and autonomy.Footnote 147 Grant notes in this vein, “Custom is powerful, but not authoritative. Reason is authoritative, but largely ineffectual.” To adapt, “one must create a culture where customs are reasonable, which is to say both that they support the authority of reason and that there are good reasons for them.”Footnote 148 Acceptance of reason’s authority is neither innate nor easy. In addition to a society where reasonable customs are encouraged, reasonableness requires education from parents and tutors for children to develop virtuous habits and an intellectual disposition oriented toward truth, open-mindedness, evidence and revision of errors.Footnote 149 As Alex Neill writes, Lockean habituation “is not only responsible for man’s failure to be both rational and virtuous, but is the means through which his potential to become both of these can be fulfilled.”Footnote 150
When children mature, their dispositions should fortify an intellectual discipline that must be continually exercised. “[W]e are born to be, if we please, rational creatures, but it is use and exercise only that makes us so.”Footnote 151 Locke seemed to downplay the theological import of innate traits or being born with a potential to reason, especially as sufficient bases of moral equality. Our status as rational creatures is defined by reason’s often neglected exercise. Even beyond infancy, ongoing practice in mathematical reasoning, for example, provides the type of consistent cultivation of logical skills that conduce to the rational pursuit of higher truths. Those pursuits require practice, not dogmatic belief in any rule or doctrine.Footnote 152
Treating others as equals reflects the “general good will and regard for all people”Footnote 153 and Locke’s concern to “instill sentiments of humanity” even toward “inferiors… particularly servants,” whom children must not treat “as if they were of another race and species beneath them.”Footnote 154 Children’s early inclinations toward domination must be broken,Footnote 155 and give way to what Nathan Tarcov emphasizes as Locke’s gentlemanly virtues of wisdom, good breeding, and learning.Footnote 156 While God remained the foundation of virtue, Locke cautioned against children pursuing otherwise useless “inquiries into his inscrutable essence and being.”Footnote 157 He discussed the need for early religious instruction,Footnote 158 but the inculcation of specific Christian doctrines beyond basics like “a love and reverence”Footnote 159 for God and brief prayers did not play a role in the early education that shapes equal moral regard. As Forde concludes, Locke’s education “solves the problem of moral motivation by identifying the life of sociable virtue as the happy life, with remarkably little reliance on theology in particular.”Footnote 160
Locke’s Christian premises might explain the normative valence behind the capacity to abstract, as a matter of demonstrative moral truth. But for Locke, belief in Christian doctrines alone could not produce that capacity with any reliability or reasoned moral judgment and normative compulsion. The ability to effectuate moral truths required inculcated habits and virtues, intellectual discipline, and a general culture of reasonableness. Only with a suitable disposition was it possible “to graft the true principles of morality and religion” onto the understanding.Footnote 161 Locke’s prescriptions, like evidence-based reasoning and impartiality in judgments, were aimed at mitigating reason’s precarity as an empirically real capacity. While theological truths grounded his moral system, Locke’s education was not rooted in theological knowledge. The path to moral personhood and the realization of egalitarianism as lived reality were possible only via practical experience. Locke attempted to bridge his skeptical epistemology and the “suave assurance” of his moral and political claims by prescribing ongoing, everyday interventions. Only through such pragmatic efforts could imperfect agents be oriented towards equality and its attendant demands.
Conclusion
Despite the longstanding hold of the Two Lockes problem, Locke’s political doctrines and philosophy offer tools for realizing normative prescriptions even though we have epistemic limitations. His foundationalism relied on the clarity of mixed mode reasoning and its relevance in empirical reality. Locke offered a formal defense of equality, which ought to challenge the role played by naturalistic resemblances versus mixed modes in his philosophy. The viability of Locke’s egalitarianism did not rely solely on a commitment to absolute and certain theological premises but was buttressed by his recognition of reason’s weaknesses given an array of individual and cultural shortcomings. His practical response turned to factors like social and political conventions, intellectual discipline, and virtuous habits, to effectuate moral judgments and provide normative compulsion.
These facts tend to undermine Rasmussen’s view of Locke as anti-pragmatist and Waldron’s claim that “Locke is not a pragmatist … proposing to keep a whole moral system afloat by using some conventional commitments to evaluate others.”Footnote 162 Against these readings, Locke clearly shares basic affinities with pragmatists like John Dewey,Footnote 163 and the critics of non-cognitivism to whom Waldron turns, in finding normative values affirmed through the intelligent judgments that emerge in the course of shared ethical life. Those values can be given coherence and guide conduct through more critical and reasonable social practices and shared commitment to values like evidence-based thought and basic civility.
Given limitations in our understanding of the natural world and theological matters, Locke was committed to keeping afloat “a whole moral system” within the political and social domain through recourse to “conventional commitments to evaluate others.” While he clearly believed in the truth of his foundational Christian principles, he conceded the uncertain foundations of most people’s moral beliefs and inevitable fallibility in applying moral reasoning to empirical realities. A pragmatic reading shows Locke accepting the moral principle of equality as a non-linear achievement that requires persistent political, social, and individual interventions for its realization. No guarantee exists that such conditions ensure acceptance of equality’s truth, but bare identification of theological traits—even if animated by Christian premises—is insufficient for the task.
Waldron’s appeal to Christian foundations for contemporary egalitarianism, especially for theologically inclined individuals, may motivate equality and its demands, and offer a principled defense against challenges. But there are weaknesses in Waldron’s account and the normative strength he attributes to his Christian premises. We ought to question Waldron’s claim that Locke’s Christian bases provide a normatively superior account of basic equality. Waldron’s Christian egalitarianism may be claiming and defending the truth of equality as a dogmatic cipher, accessible to only a self-selected few. One can buy into an equality package only if one adopts an unverifiable first premise and claims of moral truth. Nor can Locke’s Christian premises avoid conventional line drawing in their application to empirical realities. Whether or which humans are granted equality based on a particular theologically relevant real resemblance, or race or gender, can never be known with certainty.
Defending equality without recourse to universally accepted or certain truths may never fully immunize it against detractors or those who wish to demarcate its bounds along exclusionary lines. But Locke did not believe universal or certain assent to moral truth to be possible. He instead provided insights relevant to secular readers on improving moral judgment and the rational evaluation of our egalitarian commitments. Those improvements are possible even if based on imperfect knowledge, which can be refined and debated as a matter of empirical experimentation, confirmation, and reasoned deliberation with others. Secular egalitarians may also build on McDowell’s views of ethical reflection as “Neurathian,”Footnote 164 where moral understanding can be refined from within a given conceptual scheme or the ongoing practices of ethical life. Such normative reasons need not rely on external sources of objective validation and may provide a framework for a normatively compelling alternative to Waldron’s Christian basis for equality. Cultivating a capacity and willingness to see and act on equality may ultimately prove more essential today to equality’s viability than reliance on an unverifiable external source of truth.
We should doubt also Waldron’s claim that “one’s allegiance to the principle of human equality is as nothing until one has a way of delineating who the putative equals are.”Footnote 165 The “gray areas” and “open texture” around species, which Grant identifies and accepts in Locke’s account,Footnote 166 do not pose “I do not find her approach satisfactory” issues of “fundamental indeterminacy” about human equality like Waldron argues.Footnote 167 This is especially true if we acknowledge, with Locke, the inescapable epistemic indeterminacy in identifying a trait like a potential for abstraction amongst individuals or “particular bodies.” Waldron’s concern seems less pressing still if we consider equality to be a claim derived from the logic of preserving liberty and moral laws, not the theologically valent traits of putative equals.
As Lee Ward argues, Locke’s works exposed the risk of anti-scientific and systemic exclusion if equality was based on “the most superficial features”Footnote 168 of humans or their claimed moral essence. Identifying a morally relevant “range property” may be necessarily exclusionary because it is a determinate property imposed on a heterogeneous, non-unified genus that continues to defy even a non-controversial biological or physico-chemical essentialization. As Philip Kitcher has argued, identifying a range to uphold our sense of equal worth and dignity returns to the quest for the essence of moral man, if not a human species, which is outmoded in its indefensibly theological, anti-modern, and neo-scholastic premises.Footnote 169 This was not Locke’s enterprise and fails to overcome what he saw as the impossible task of pinpointing a real essence with certainty. If there is a trait behind our equality, even if animated by Christian faith, it may be evocative of Montaigne’s epigraph, which Waldron rebuffs in explaining equality: “If a man urged me to tell him wherefore I loved him, I feel it cannot be expressed but by telling him: because it is you.”Footnote 170 Love and morality may not be a matter of unmoored decisionism or merely a “stance” we assume, but no list of traits can ever fully explain why we love who we love, or why we see each other as moral equals.
In considering Locke’s relevance today, Dunn and Waldron agree that his Christian commitments are key to understanding his works or his particular “Lockean attitude.” Ultimately, Locke’s continued relevance may derive from his engagement with the limits of empirical knowledge and the imperfect actualization of our moral and political claims. To combat reason’s precarity, he sought non-dogmatic, practical solutions through recourse to politics, education, and experience. His works reaffirmed the timely imperative to exercise divinely given reason, despite the constant pull of illogical and biased beliefs and intellectual and moral complacency. With Locke, we must question, improve, and occasionally revolt against our conventions and beliefs, because of our fallible understanding and conduct in the world.
Acknowledgments
For their comments on an early version of this paper, I thank Emily Nacol and Nathaniel Mull, as well as participants at the 2018 Northeastern Political Science Association and 2019 American Political Science Association conferences. I am especially grateful to Jeremy Waldron, who served as discussant at the latter. I also thank Ruth Abbey and the anonymous reviewers for their careful and patient feedback. Any remaining errors are my own.
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