The Science of Modern Virtue: On Descartes, Darwin, and Locke

6 - The Problem of Humane Quality in Locke’s Political Philosophy

tHe ProBLeM of HuMan eQuaLity in LoCKe’s PoLitiCaL PHiLosoPHy Sara M. Henary neAR the BeGINNING of the SECOND TREATISE, John Locke offers a recapitulation of the First Treatise’s political teaching and its primary implication: pace Sir Robert filmer, God did not “manifest[ly]” “appoin[t]” a ruler over men, who must accordingly institute government for themselves.1 The Second Treatise proceeds to elaborate the “premise”2 of this position: a state of nature, or the “state all men are naturally in”—a premise that also serves as the point of departure for Locke’s alternative account of the “rise of government,” the “origin of political power,” and the means “of designing and knowing the persons that have it.”3 Locke describes the state of nature as a condition of “perfect freedom” and equality, with “no one having more [power and jurisdiction] than another.”4 Apparently more confident of the fact of natural freedom than that of natural equality, Locke twice asserts the “eviden[ce]” of the latter.5 At one point he invokes the authority of the “Judicious [Richard] Hooker,” according to whom natural equality cannot but be acknowledged.6 Nevertheless, Locke’s actual defense of equality is quite robust and depends on men’s belonging to the same “species” and occupying the same “rank”: 6 The Problem of Human Equality in Locke’s Political Philosophy 93 There being 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 amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment , an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.7 Although Locke does not explicitly elaborate these relations, it would seem that men’s possessing the “same faculties” places them in the same species, and their relative equality in using those faculties means that each stands in a roughly similar position with respect to Nature.8 Absent a “manifest declaration of [God’s] will” to the contrary, men so equipped and situated should be considered equal vis-à-vis one another. This talk of species and rank should sound somewhat curious to the reader of Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understanding, which engages in an unrelenting assault on the existence of natural species. Locke argues that we develop ideas about species of things, including the species “man,” for convenience’s sake, but he insists that such ideas are not grounded in the nature of things.9 From the perspective of the Essay, one might argue that nothing appears less “evident” than the notion of a species of beings that are, by Nature, equal. In this chapter I consider what I designate the problem of human equality in Locke’s thought, or the tension between the Second Treatise’s reliance on something like a notion of “shared species-membership”10 to ground the idea of equality and the Essay’s pronounced anti-essentialism concerning natural species. Among Locke scholars who recognize the problem of equality as such,11 the responses to this interpretive issue are, generally speaking, two. First, one could argue that the religious dimension of Locke’s thought figures prominently in overcoming this tension. The most compelling instance of such argument is Jeremy Waldron’s recent book, God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke’s Political Thought. Waldron argues that Locke’s theoretical commitment to human equality cannot be understood apart from his Christian belief that the human person is God’s special creature. More specifically, Waldron’s argument attempts to demonstrate that the “God stuff” is integrated into Locke’s broader philosophical framework in a way that reduces, if it does not altogether eliminate, the nettlesome problem of Locke’s species skepticism.12 94 Sara M. Henary Second, some scholars have argued that Locke offers a freestanding argument for equality that depends neither on the notion of species nor on the existence of a Creator God. Associated with the interpretation of Leo Strauss, the primary version of this thesis maintains that the common desire for “self-preservation” constitutes the ground of human equality.13 In this chapter, however, I will focus on Michael Zuckert’s variant of the thesis , in part because Zuckert’s interpretation points out...