The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity

4: Locke's Theistic Liberalism

61 From the standpoint of John Paul II’s concerns, the political philosophy of John Locke must appear, at least at first glance, as altogether more sound than that of Hobbes. To begin with, unlike Hobbes, Locke undertakes in his primary and most public political works—the Two Treatises of Government—no rejection of free will or express demotion of reason to mere calculation. Locke offers no explicit Hobbesian denial of man’s natural sociability, nor of reason’s natural ability to discern the difference between good and evil. Indeed, Locke famously differs from Hobbes both in the starting point of his political reasoning and in its conclusion. While Locke, like Hobbes, posits a prepolitical state of nature, he also contends that there is a law of nature that obliges man even in this state. And while the combination of Hobbes’s moral relativism with his advocacy of absolute sovereignty makes it easy to charge his system with an openness to tyranny, Locke forthrightly departs from Hobbes in advocating limited government, in naming government that surpasses those limits tyrannical, and in countenancing disobedience and even rebellion as justifiable responses to the radical abuse of public power. Nevertheless, there are aspects of Locke’s thought that appear, on John Paul II’s account, problematic. Locke clearly does not simply recapitulate, but instead appears to revise, the Aristotelian and Catholic Chapter 4 LOCKE’S THEISTIC LIBERALISM 62 / The Way of Life understanding of human nature and the nature of morality on which John Paul II draws. To the extent that our understanding of these things is, for John Paul II, essential to sustaining a proper respect for the dignity of human life, we may wonder whether he would regard Locke’s teaching as providing some opening to the culture of death. We turn to Locke’s political teaching with a view to exploring this question. LOCKE’S THEISTIC NATURAL LAW Locke differs most obviously from Hobbes, and seems to move in the direction of John Paul II, in that he repeatedly affirms the existence of an objective natural law rooted in the will of God the creator. Locke is, to be sure, a state of nature theorist, and accordingly he begins from presuppositions that are in some respects similar to those of Hobbes. Locke holds that men are by nature in a prepolitical state of perfect freedom and equality. In this state all men may “order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man.” Moreover, among men in the state of nature “all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another.”1 Nevertheless, Locke departs radically from Hobbes in his understanding of the status of morality in the state of nature. Hobbes, as we have seen, holds that the state of nature is utterly lawless. Terms like justice and injustice, good and evil, have no place there. Such principles can only come into existence with the creation, by agreement, of a sovereign who will make laws defining and enforcing principles of right and wrong. Hobbes does not merely claim that justice cannot be vindicated in the state of nature; rather, it has no existence at all. Hence his argument that human reason is powerless to discern the difference between good and evil, notions of which are merely fleeting manifestations of men’s constantly changing passions. In contrast, Locke insists that the state of nature contains a law of nature that is accessible to human reason and that imposes certain obligations on men to one another, most especially an obligation to preserve human life. Locke’s initial description of the state of nature offers a qualification of man’s natural freedom not found in Hobbes: men are free to dispose of themselves and their possessions, Locke says, “within Locke’s Theistic Liberalism / 63 the bounds of the Law of Nature.”2 Thus the state of nature, while a “State of Liberty,” is emphatically not a “State of License” in which men may simply do anything they wish in the absence of any moral restraints. While men in the state of nature possess liberty to dispose of themselves and their property according to their own judgment, this liberty is not absolute : for man in the state of nature “has not Liberty to destroy himself, or so much as any Creature in...