Pirates, Kings and Reasons to Act: Moral Motivation and the Role of Sanctions in Locke's Moral Theory

Locke's moral theory consists of two explicit and distinct elements — a broadly rationalist theory of natural law and a hedonistic conception of moral good. The rationalist account, which we find most prominently in his early Essays on the Law of Nature, is generally taken to consist in three things. First, Locke holds that our moral rules are founded on universal, divine natural laws. Second, such moral laws are taken to be discoverable by reason. Third, by dint of their divine authorship, moral laws are obligatory and rationally discernible as such. Locke's hedonism, which is developed most fully in his later Essay Concerning Human Understanding, consists in the view that all good amounts to pleasure, with specifically moral good taken to consist in the pleasurable consequences of discharging one's moral duties. The normative or 'action-guiding' force of moral rules arises from the manner in which morally regulated actions affect the utility (hedonistically construed) of the moral agent. Commentators have had a difficult time deciding just how, or if, these two distinct elements can work together in Locke's account. Certain commentators view the rationalist and hedonist elements of Locke's account of morality as significantly mismatched. For instance, both W. von Leyden and Richard Aaron have argued that the rationalist account of the Essays on the Law of Nature gives way, by the time of the Essay, to a more strongly hedonistic position. Though they acknowledge the apparent persistence of Locke's rationalism in later works, they see it as standing in tension with the hedonistic doctrine of the Essay.²

However, a different strain of interpretation suggests that Locke's moral theory suffers from no such internal tension. Commentators such as John Colman and Stephen Darwall have argued that Locke's hedonism should be understood strictly as a theory of moral motivation — one that works alongside his broadly rationalist account of natural law and moral obligation. On this view, Locke's hedonism was introduced in order to account for the practical force of the obligations arising from natural law (i.e. their effectiveness in guiding conduct), but it was not meant to supplant the rationalistic grounding of natural law proposed in earlier works. Though I am generally sympathetic to this line of interpretation, I will argue in what follows that its detailed articulation, particularly in Darwall's work but to some extent in Colman's as well, stands to exaggerate the gap between moral obligation and moral motivation that evolves in Locke's moral philosophy. The problem is most conspicuous, I will suggest, in the account's view of the function of divine rewards and punishments in Locke's broader moral theory. For both Darwall and Colman, Locke's motivational hedonism requires that natural law be enforced by a system of divine rewards and punishments since, in the absence of any such system, the obligations specified by natural law would be motivationally inert. I shall argue that Locke envisioned (compatibly with his general motivational hedonism) a stronger connection between moral obligation and moral motivation than this view suggests. I will further argue that Locke's insistence on the essentiality of rewards and punishments to the system of natural law, though clearly speaking to the issue of moral motivation, can be explained without appeal to the deep motivational gap that Darwall and Colman see it as bridging.

I Natural law and moral obligation

Locke's Essays on the Law of Nature (hereafter referred to as the ELN), written in the 1660s, is a collection of eight essays devoted to defining natural law and establishing the basis of a moral epistemology suitable to its discovery. In these essays, Locke defines natural law as 'the decree of the divine will discernible by the light of nature and indicating what is and what is not in conformity with rational nature, and for this very reason commanding or prohibiting' (ELN, 82).³ Locke's argument for the existence of natural law rests upon an analogy between moral laws and physical laws. Just as things...