1. Locke's Attack

Locke famously states that we are able to ‘conceive that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking’ (4.3.6). In order to refute the claim that conceivability is here primarily invoked with the aim of strengthening the belief in thinking matter, I will first draw attention to the specific way in which Locke addresses the issue of conceivability, before pointing out that the attempt to read Locke's agnosticism as a form of hidden materialism conflicts with the general agenda of the Essay.

When proposing that we can conceive of thinking matter, Locke stresses that we can do so only in accordance with our ‘Notions’ (4.3.6). Furthermore, he emphasises that our conception of body depends on the ‘utmost reach of our Ideas’ (ibid.). This suggests that claims about the inconceivability of x always go hand in hand with considerations about the availability of ideas by means of which x could be conceived. Downing's interpretation, as outlined in the introduction, acknowledges this connection between the inability to conceive of matter as capable of thought and the absence of ideas through which we could conceive of non-mechanical properties of the body. It regards the incompleteness of the Lockean idea of the body as a result of the mind's inability to understand all there is to the essence of material beings.Footnote ⁸ Our inability to conceive of thinking matter here results from the mind's limited grasp of the thing in question, not from the thing's metaphysical impossibility.Footnote ⁹

Yet, even if it is granted that the inconceivability of x merely informs us about the ‘Scantiness of our knowledge’ (4.3.6), one could think that the conceivability of x translates into the metaphysical possibility of x. After all, if I am able to conceive of x, it seems to follow that the thing of which I am able to conceive is logically possible and hence capable of existence. Interpreted this way, the conceivability test appears to have positive metaphysical implications for things that we are capable of conceiving quite independently of the fact that the inconceivability of something merely informs us about the limits of our own minds.

To refute this reading of the merits of the conceivability test, we need only consider that even when it is possible to conceive of thing x the Lockean mind operates within the confined limits of its imperfect ideas and is confronted with its inability to penetrate into the essence of things affecting its perception. For this reason it cannot be ruled out that the mind's ideas, which are constitutive of the conception of entity x lack a representation of what essentially pertains to x, and so in this sense fail to capture what makes this x's existence possible. Given this chance of misrepresenting the thing about which I take myself to be thinking when employing ideas a, b, and c, it follows that my ability to conceive of x does not prove that this x is able to exist in accordance with my conception of it. All this test reveals is the compatibility of the ideas figuring in my conception of x.Footnote ¹⁰

By acknowledging this limited use of the conceivability test when concerned with claims that take us beyond the realm of ideas, it becomes evident that the aim of Locke's engagement with the possibility of thinking matter is to challenge belief rather than to establish it. It confronts us with a situation in which it is no more justified to lean towards one alternative (the belief that matter can think) than another (the belief that thinking requires an immaterial substance). He writes: ‘It being in respect of our Notions, not much more remote from our Comprehension to conceive, that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to Matter a Faculty of Thinking, than he should superadd to it another Substance, with a faculty of thinking’ (4.3.6). This suggests that the conceivability test is invoked in order to create an equipollence of argument: it sheds doubts on beliefs about the substantial underpinnings of thought, but does not put in place a belief we should adopt as the most likely option.

Having proposed reasons for regarding the aim of the conceivability test as negative in that it undermines certainty with regard to matters of thinking, I will now argue that for Locke our positive claims about the mind's cognitive powers should derive from experiences of thinking. Squaring this positive account of how we ought to proceed with Locke's belief-undermining, and in this sense negative, arguments pursues the following goal. It aims to reveal that in the discussion of thinking matter it is not so much the content of our beliefs that Locke attacks – that is, the belief that thinking is caused by an immaterial soul substance – but the method used to arrive at these beliefs. Another way of putting this is to say that Locke's discussion of thinking matter is designed to alert us to the futility of a class of philosophical explanations that relies on the wrong method rather than the untenability of a specific philosophical position.

To reveal this, let us have a closer look at the classes of ideas cited to endorse claims about the conceivability of thinking substances. It is striking that in passages outlining the possibility of thinking matter Locke usually refers us to ideas different from those figuring in passages concerned with the plausibility of the existence of the soul. Thus, when arguing that we cannot rule out that God has given matter the power to think, he refers us to our idea of God and his omnipotence (cf. 4.3.6 & 4.10.10); whereas in passages concerned with the commonly held belief that thinking indicates the existence of the soul, he refers us to ideas stemming from the experience of the ‘Operations of the Mind, viz. Thinking, Reasoning, Fearing’ (2.23.5). In his fitst letter to Stillingfleet, Locke renders this connection between claims about the nature of thinking and experiences of concrete instances of thinking even more explicit: ‘From thinking experimented in us, we have a proof of a thinking substance in us, which in my sense is a spirit.’Footnote ¹¹ This neat division between sets of ideas invoked to argue for different purposes suggests that Locke believed that ideas of thinking related to experiences of thought are the right candidates for grounding claims about the prerequisites of thinking, while ideas of God are best suited to illustrate possibilities remote from our ordinary intuitions.

To be sure, even in his letter to Stillingfleet written to avert the charge of materialism Locke talks about experiences of thinking as suggesting no more than the probability of the existence of the soul: ‘From our ideas . . . it may be proved, that it is to the highest degree probable that it [the thinking substance] is immaterial.’Footnote ¹² However, despite his reluctance to formulate definite statements about the existence of an immaterial soul substance, Locke's leanings towards dualism should be taken seriously and not simply be treated as a faux pas to be overlooked for reasons of consistency, as Ayers seems to think: ‘If there is anything mysterious in his [Locke's] attitudes it lies in his concession, made at the very moment of his rebuttal of the arguments of dogmatic dualism, that dualism is nevertheless highly probable.’Footnote ¹³ Locke's reasons for hanging on to tentative dualism will become clear once we have related Locke's acknowledgement of the probability of the soul's existence to general considerations formulated in the Epistle to the Reader.

In the Epistle Locke urges that the way we think and speak about the world and ourselves has to reflect what our ideas represent to us. Furthermore, he explains that the principal aim of the Essay is to clear away ‘vague and insignificant Forms of Speech, and Abuse of Language’ (Epistle 10) that do not relate to ‘determinate or determined’ (Epistle 13) ideas:

Besides clarifying what Locke understands by determinate ideas, this passage contains the crucial message that there must be a stable relation between concrete mental representations of objects and the concepts employed to think and talk about these objects. Otherwise we risk becoming guilty of the abuse of language so typical among philosophers of Locke's times.

Now, as we have seen, in the letter to Stillingfleet Locke relates our concept of thinking to experiences of thinking. He thereby legitimizes a concept of thinking that relates to the very idea we ‘see and perceive’ in our minds when engaged in processes of thought. Here thought does not stand so much for specific thoughts with a designated content as for the experience of thinking as such. Given that this is the way we ought to come to form claims about thinking, a concept of thought exclusively based on our idea of an omnipotent God that fails to link up with ideas connected with our experience of thinking turns out to be objectionable. Such a concept would not abide by the principles formulated in the Epistle in that it would not reflect the connection between ideas usually encountered when engaged in processes of thought and the concept of thinking in use in our ordinary language. It would therefore count as indeterminate and abusive.

This reconstruction of Locke's broader philosophical intentions in the Essay suggests that it makes good sense to refrain from regarding his agnosticism as a position that rules out tentative dualism and in this sense qualifies as a mere strategy employed to conceal materialist inclinations.Footnote ¹⁴ If we interpret him in this way, we are forced to attribute to Locke the view that claims of God's omnipotence, and the possibilities emerging from it, count as legitimate grounds for claims about the nature of thinking. On the one hand, this would require us to ignore what Locke says about the importance of a stable connection between concepts and experientially based ideas. On the other hand, we would have to accept the conceivability test as an appropriate tool for encouraging positive beliefs. For the reasons given above both claims are problematic: the first fails to do justice to Locke's assessment of the overarching aim of the Essay, while the second overlooks that the primary use of the conceivability test consists in destabilising beliefs.

To understand that Locke cannot legitimately be regarded as a proto-materialist is not merely important in order to explain Locke's acknowledgement of the probability of the existence of the soul as a perfectly consistent claim. It also enables us to see that his discussion of thinking matter is supported by, and feeds back into his general endeavour to focus the inquirer's attention on the realm of experience. Locke, as has been argued, utilises reflections on the conceivability of two contrary positions to reveal the pointlessness of each one of them. The test thus serves the very purpose of reinforcing the need to abandon speculations about questions we cannot answer and pushes us towards an investigation of what is accessible in the experience of those things we wish to understand better. Conceived in this way, Locke's discussion of thinking matter aims at more than the mere destabilisation of one particular belief, that is, the belief in the existence of the soul; it seeks to introduce new methods and explanatory models. I will further explain this point in the next two sections by turning to Locke's attempt to shift our attention from the soul conceived as a metaphysical substance towards the mind essentially marked by the transparency of consciousness.

2. Relegating the Soul's Cognitive Function

Locke's attack on Descartes can be read as a discussion of the shortcomings of soul-focused explanations of the mind. Each time Locke ridicules Descartes' concept of the soul for its untenable logical implications, he directs our attention away from the realm of material or immaterial substances and towards the realm of introspectively accessible thoughts. Locke's objections against Descartes thus illustrate the plausibility of claims advanced in section one. They reveal that Locke is not interested in arguing against the existence of the soul, but in altering the way we explicate mental phenomena and ground our claims about them. To establish this, I will argue below that Locke rids the concept of the soul of some of its traditional content: thinking becomes a power of the mind and is no longer conceived as the essential property of a hidden soul.

In his objections against the Cartesian conception of the soul in Book II of the Essay, Locke finds fault with the idea that it is ‘necessary for the Soul always to think’ (2.1.10). This claim, he argues, would contradict the observation that in everyone's life there are large stretches of time, namely, during dreamless sleep, where no thought can be perceived to take place. Descartes would be led to this claim, Locke continues, by his conception of the soul as essentially constituted by thought. Locke himself proposes that a more fruitful way of conceiving of thought consists in recognising it as necessarily conscious: ‘I do not say there is no Soul in a Man, because he is not sensible of it in his sleep; But I do say, that he cannot think at any time waking or sleeping, without being sensible of it. Our being sensible of it is not necessary to any thing, but to our thoughts; and to them it is; and to them it will always be necessary, till we can think without being conscious of it.’ (2.1.10)

The interesting point about this argument is that Locke uses traditional intuitions about the existence of the soul as a scaffold to draw a wedge between the concepts of soul and thought. In pointing out that thought is necessarily conscious – whenever we think we must be aware of it – he rules out the possibility of unconscious ideas. Consciousness is here conceived as a necessary ingredient in thought, but as unrelated to the thing that does the thinking in us. At first glance, this suggests that it is possible to believe in the soul's existence, regardless of the fact that at times we have no evidence of its existence through being conscious of its activity. However, note that Locke merely claims that he does not want to deny the existence of the soul on the basis of lacking evidence for its activity during sleep without providing a positive argument for the soul's existence. This suggests that Locke's major concern lies not so much with the question of whether the soul's exists as with an investigation of the phenomenon of thought.

Locke's attempt to provide an account of thinking that focuses on the role of consciousness rather than the soul is rendered even more explicit when he raises the question ‘Can the Soul think, and not the Man? Or a Man think, and not be conscious of it?’ (2.1.19) Locke brings out the absurdity of these questions by drawing an analogy between the conception of thinking as necessarily conscious and the conception of the body as necessarily extended, before maintaining that ‘Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a Man's own mind’ (ibid.). The argumentative move here consists in presenting the activity of thought as necessarily conscious in order to challenge the idea that a person's soul (I here use ‘person’ synonymously with ‘Man’) could be active such that it produces thoughts of which the related person is not conscious: ‘To suppose the Soul to think, and the Man not to perceive it, is as has been said, to make two Person's in one Man’ (2.1.19). Consciousness, conceived as ‘the perception of what passes in a Man's own mind’, here functions as the link that binds thoughts to a person such that these thoughts can be considered as hers. Thoughts of which a person is not aware therefore fail to qualify as her thoughts and must be attributed to someone else, namely, the second person that Locke invokes in this passage.

The importance of this discussion is not so much whether thought is possible without the involvement of the soul or whether the soul needs to be regarded as the underlying substratum that enables the production of thought. What matters is that Locke shifts our attention from the soul to the mind of man. He does so by organising his conception of thought around the concept of consciousness. The person (or Locke's ‘Man’) here emerges as the primary bearer of mind with the effect that considerations about the soul as the seat of thought are pushed into the background. As such, it becomes possible to investigate the human mind, its cognitive and non-cognitive functions, without having to refer to obscure entities whose existence is merely probable. Locke's attack on the Cartesian soul thus paves the way for an account of mind that stands independently of the difficulties pertaining to our knowledge of the existence and nature of the soul.

Interestingly, this explanation of the power of thinking is possible not so much despite the cognitive limits of the human mind, but rather because of them. Since it is the accessibility of thought and the possibility to examine the contents of one's consciousness that accounts for the possibility of formulating claims about the mind, the cognitive limits of the human mind define what falls within the purview of philosophy. Thus it is Locke's uncompromising readiness to turn to the world open to investigation that motivates his lobbying for a readjustment of the focus of philosophical inquiry, rather than the pessimistic conviction that we fail to know the things we ought know.

Bearing this connection with Locke's general philosophical agenda in mind helps us to see that Locke's attack on Descartes provides another instance where arguments are invoked to undermine the plausibility of a certain position (in his discussion of thinking matter this target position is marked by the belief that thinking substances are immaterial), however without the intention of defending the implied counter position (the view that thinking substances are not immaterial). This is further revealed if we focus on Locke's consideration that souls could come apart from bodies during sleep. Locke raises this thought in order to evaluate whether Descartes could defend himself by referring to dreams as activities of thinking of which we are conscious although performed during sleep. To refute this rejoinder, Locke argues that dream episodes, that is, mental activity produced during the supposed detachment of the soul from the body, are ‘extravagant and incoherent’ (2.1.16). This circumstance would force Cartesians to accept that the soul owes ‘the perfection of rational thinking to the Body’ (2.1.16) and as such reveal the absurdum of their concept of the soul as the seat of rational thought.

If Locke embraced the idea that the soul detached itself from the body during sleep, he could in principle argue that souls in isolation from bodies do not think and in this way strengthen his critique of the Cartesian concept of the soul as the thing sufficient for the production of thought. The reason for this is that according to Locke the thing able to produce thoughts is also able to remember them, that is, regardless of whether or not this thing is attached to the body: ‘Whatever Ideas the Mind can receive, and contemplate without the help of the Body, it is reasonable to conclude, that it can retain without the help of the Body too’ (2.1.15). The fact that we have no memories of the soul's activities performed in dreamless sleep, a time when the soul is supposed to act in isolation from the body, must therefore be taken to indicate that no such activity has taken place, suggesting the implausibility of the claim that the soul's existence is sufficient for the production of thought.

Although Locke could take up this line of argument to increase the pressure on Descartes' concept of the soul, he is reluctant to do so. He neither appears to be particularly interested in defending the claim that souls are in fact the things enabling thought, nor in outlining the conditions under which souls can be conceived to exert their power of thinking. At the point where he could formulate such positive statements – namely, after the disclaimer ‘I do not say there is no Soul in Man, because he is not sensible of it in sleep’ – he merely reinforces the claim that all thought is necessarily conscious. Locke's lack of commitment to positive claims about the soul's activity makes perfect sense if we remember that his philosophical interests revolve around the question of how we can understand our concept of mind in relation to the experience of thought. In this context conjectures about possible detachments of soul substances during sleep have no role to play. Surmising that Locke was nevertheless sympathetic to the idea that during sleep body and soul do in fact come apart would ignore this. It would fix our attention on precisely the realm of substantial underpinnings that he deems irrelevant to questions about mind and thinking.

Furthermore, as we have seen, Locke conceives of consciousness as tying thoughts to a specific person such that these thoughts can be considered as hers. And per definitionem it holds that activities of a detached soul do not translate into a sleeping person's conscious awareness of them. Activities performed during sleep must therefore be considered as belonging to someone/something different from the person whose capacity for thought is to be explained. For any account seeking to elucidate a person's mental powers, as opposed to the soul's mental powers, speculations about possible detachments of souls during sleep are therefore entirely futile. Given that Locke is concerned with the minds of persons rather than souls, the claim that souls come apart from the body during sleep lacks any significance for his philosophical endeavour if considered independently of his attack on Descartes.

Although Locke directs his argument against Descartes, it is interesting to note that in detaching the concepts of thought and soul from one another he takes up a trend that has been initiated by Descartes himself. As it is well known, Descartes is famous for denying that non-human animals possess a soul, while stating in his letter to Henry More that he is not denying them life:

Descartes here distances himself from the Aristotelian way of explaining life in plants and animals by attributing to them the less sophisticated vegetative and sensitive parts of the soul. He thereby narrows down and specifies the purpose for which souls are needed: he leaves with the soul only those functions characteristic of human mental life, namely thought and will, and subtracts from it everything responsible for the organisation of non-human life.

Locke's attack on Descartes follows a similar logic. By pointing to a host of problematic consequences emerging from Descartes' definition of the soul as the thinking thing, he undermines the plausibility of the claim that thinking is what essentially pertains to the soul and further reduces the content of the concept: he removes from it not merely its life functions, as Descartes does, but also its cognitive functions. In this way, Locke takes a further step in rendering references to the soul redundant, because he suggests that even human mental life can in fact be rendered intelligible without invoking the concept of the soul.Footnote ¹⁶

3. Relegating the Soul's Moral Function

In this section I will argue that Locke does not merely deprive the soul of its traditional cognitive functions but also of its moral functions. This becomes clear once we understand that ‘being aware of one's past’ amounts to a form of ‘seeing clearly’ what one has done and in this function figures as a precondition for legitimate attributions of responsibility. The aim of approaching Locke's discussion of personal identity from this angle is to provide further evidence for the claim that for him the belief in the soul is unproblematic as long as this belief does not figure in the conception of ourselves as cognitive and moral agents.

Locke maintains that ‘all the great Ends of Morality and Religion, are well enough secured, without philosophical Proofs of the Soul's Immateriality’ (4.3.6). One reason for this seems to be that, according to Locke, at the great day God will provide us with bodies – perhaps not with the same bodies we possessed in this life (2.27.15), but with some kind of body that will enable us to feel our rewards and punishments: ‘Since it is evident that he who made us first begin to subsist here, sensible intelligent Beings, and for several years continued us in such a state, can and will restore us to the like state of Sensibility in another World and make us capable there to receive the Retribution he has designed to Men, according to their doings in this Life’ (4.3.6). It here looks as if it is first and foremost the resurrection of the body and its sensibility that ensures the possibility of divine justice.Footnote ¹⁷ The persistence of the soul, traditionally assumed to ensure that we can be held responsible for the deeds committed during our earthly lives, seems to be irrelevant.

Of course, the case is not as simple as that. Locke claims that divine justice goes hand in hand with awareness of what we have done: ‘In the great Day, wherein the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open, it may be reasonable to think, no one shall be made to answer for what he knows nothing of; but shall receive his Doom, his Conscience accusing or excusing him.’ (2.27.22) Hence, for the execution of divine justice it is apparently not enough to bring us back into existence by giving us a sensible body that enables us to feel rewards and punishments. This kind of justice is possible only on the condition that we become aware of our previous actions.

Kenneth Winkler has claimed that mere awareness of past actions is insufficient for generating the right kind of link with the person I believe myself to be now; what is needed is the attribution of past actions to the self.Footnote ¹⁸ The key passage in support of this interpretation is Locke's claim that, ‘personality extends it self beyond present Existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable, owns and imputes to it self past Actions, just upon the same ground, and for the same reason, that it does the present’ (2.27.26). In many other passages, Locke is less specific than this, merely pointing out that something has to be within the reach of conscious awareness in order to be part of someone's personality: ‘Whatever has the consciousness of present and past Actions, is the same Person to whom they both belong’ (2.27.16). Note, however, that even in this second passage Locke insinuates that ownership of past actions comes in the guise of becoming aware of them such that it is possible for me to recognise them as having been performed by myself, that is, by the person I take myself to be now as I am reflecting on the past. This suggests that one's awareness of past actions as one's own figures as a necessary condition for one's ability to regard oneself as a person existing over time, even if no argument can be made for the claim that the appropriation of past actions comes separately from one's awareness of them.

Locke's emphasis on the importance of consciousness to questions of personal identity often goes hand in hand with claims about the irrelevance of substances (be they material or immaterial): ‘Self is that conscious thinking thing, (whatever Substance, whether Spiritual, or Material, Simple, or Compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of Pleasure or Pain, capable of Happiness or Misery, and so is concern'd for it self, as far as that consciousness extends’ (2.27.17). A consequence of these claims about the irrelevance of substances of course is that a Lockean resurrected person can legitimately be regarded as the same before and after her physical death only if her consciousness accounts for this identity, because neither body nor soul do so.Footnote ¹⁹

The question that arises here is how it is possible to remember one's past correctly such that problematic mismatches between pre- and post-mortem consciousness can be avoided. In the literature this problem has been discussed in relation to the unreliability of memory and so-called cases of paramnesia where people remember another person's action as their own.Footnote ²⁰ If my memory is unreliable such that I fail to remember some of my previous actions, my consciousness is impoverished and constitutes a person with a past less complex than that which I would consider mine if everything went correctly. On the contrary, if I happen to remember certain actions as my own although others have performed them, I turn myself into a person with a past richer than that which I would come to ascribe to myself if my mind worked properly.

Locke tries to cope with problems of this kind by referring us to God's goodness: ‘God, who as far as the Happiness and Misery of any of his sensible Creatures is concerned in it, will not by a fatal Error of theirs transfer from one to another, that consciousness that draws Reward and Punishment with it’ (2.27.13). God is here conceived as guaranteeing that after my physical death I retrieve precisely the consciousness I used to possess. Paul Helm has looked at this passage in combination with Locke's claim that ‘in the great Day . . . the Secrets of all Hearts shall be laid open’ (2.27.22). He suggests reading this as claiming that ‘at the Great Day, not only will memories be jogged, but false memory claims will be corrected … If I fail to remember doing an action which was performed by an individual whose consciousness is spatially and temporally continuous with my present consciousness at the Great Day my store of memories will be augmented’.Footnote ²¹ Helm's interpretation is interesting because it suggests a concept of personhood that binds pre- and post-mortem identity to the ability to have perfect memories. Perfect memory here means that in a state of post-mortem existence it is possible to remember all of the episodes, and only those episodes, that have once figured as occurrent mental sates in one's past consciousness.

One advantage of this conception of the identity of resurrected persons is that there is no need to choose one particular version of what was once present to a person's mind in order to enable the reproduction of this very person. This is because for such a reproduction it does not matter what was present to a person at a certain moment in time but rather what should be present if she remembered all of her experiences and thoughts correctly. Another advantage of this approach is that cases of amnesia and paramnesia no longer pose a problem, because the requirement that a person's memories of her previous life are correct and complete is inbuilt into the possibility of bringing this person back into existence. Despite these advantages, it is not clear, however, what sense can be made of claims that question the correctness of memory. Locke's definition of the person as being constituted by consciousness suggests that all mental episodes figuring in a given consciousness at time t are the mental episodes of the person that exists at t in virtue of having awareness of these mental episodes. The very conception of mistaken memories here turns out to be inconsistent, since the standard defining what truly belongs to the history of the person in question just is her awareness of this episode as an element of her past.

These are thorny issues in Locke scholarship and attempts to resolve the tension between Locke's account of self-authorising consciousness and the possibility of incorrect memories are abundant.Footnote ²² Without entering into this debate, I want to suggest that it might be fruitful to read Locke's reflections on the requirements for the reproduction of the same person as an account that elucidates how we should think about justice, not merely in heavenly matters but also in a rather secular context. To see that there is in fact a link between Locke's discussion of the great day, on the one hand, and how we ought to proceed in worldly affairs, on the other, only requires us to think of Locke's discussion of divine justice as an account of perfect justice. Conceived this way, Locke's claim that God does not punish us for things ‘we know nothing of’ expresses his belief that agents ought to be put in a position to see that for which they are to be punished. In a more worldly setting this amounts to the claim that the kind of justice to which we should aspire demands that judges lay open the ground for their verdict and in this way enable agents to understand the connection between their actions and subsequent punishment. In an ideal case, this leads agents to self-attribute responsibility, not so much because they are forced to do so, but because they become conscious of their previous deeds as crimes.

To stress the role of the judge in empowering the defendant's understanding of her situation is not to deny the legitimacy of Winkler's claim that the self has ‘authority over its own constitution’.Footnote ²³ If the defendant refuses to assume responsibility for the crime in question, she will keep thinking of herself as innocent regardless of the official verdict. Nor do I want to argue that the judge sets the standard for determining what I ought to accept as my responsibility. In Locke's context, such normative demands cannot be consistently formulated, as Udo Thiel has pointed out: ‘I do not have to accept authorship of actions which are not united to my personality through consciousness, and I cannot justly be punished for criminal acts which I do not ascribe to myself through consciousness’.Footnote ²⁴ The importance of revealing the role of the judge merely consists in emphasising that transparency and accessibility are the hallmarks of Locke's account of responsibility. After all, ‘being aware of one's own deeds’ is a form of seeing clearly what one has done. Consciousness here emerges as a mode of perception that gives access to relevant facts about oneself, while the ability to come to a reasonable self-assessment interlinks with the possibility of rendering transparent connections between oneself and the crime in question.

If we grant that many of Locke's arguments in his discussion of personal identity relate to his interest in attuning philosophical reflection to the realm of experiences, it seems perfectly acceptable that instead of appealing to the soul (or the body) as the substantial ground for continued and identical existence, he invokes a scenario in which an all-powerful authority guarantees the sameness of deceased and resurrected person. This solution directs our attention to the role of consciousness, emphasising that mysterious metaphysical substances, whose activities we cannot trace and about which we cannot say much, should not be invoked when trying to generate answers to important questions, such as those concerned with responsibility and justice.Footnote ²⁵ An appropriate treatment of these questions is possible only if we focus on that which is accessible to us, in this case what our consciousness reveals to us when we investigate the issue at hand. Soul-based theories of responsibility here contrast with consciousness-based approaches in terms of transparency: while the former essentially rely on the persistence of a hidden something, the former make the perspicuity of mental episodes key to the conception of how responsibility should be assigned.

Against this background, Locke's attempt to define the conditions for conceiving of a person as identical at different points in time independently of possible substantial underpinnings transforms itself into an attempt to establish the concept of responsibility on more transparent grounds. It does so by separating the conception of ourselves as conscious moral agents from the conception of ourselves as obscure immortal souls. Moreover, once we accept together with Locke that we have no reason to assume that the soul's persistence after our physical death matters to our accountability in an afterlife, references to the soul can no longer motivate morally valuable actions in this life, plainly because the soul no longer functions as the thing that transports responsibility into the afterlife. Here then it turns out that Locke's attack on the concept of the soul does not merely rid it of its cognitive function, as argued in the previous section, but also of its traditional moral function. With this in mind, John Yolton's claim that Locke hangs on to the idea that ‘the soul plays a prominent part in immortality’Footnote ²⁶ must be taken with care. Locke might have tentatively believed that the persistence of the soul after one's death somehow matters to divine processes of consciousness reallocation. However, his clear focus on consciousness in relation to the question of how responsibility for one's earthly life comes to be assumed clearly suggests that the belief in the soul's continued existence is not what should inform the idea of ourselves as morally responsible agents.