Response to Critics Jeremy Waldron 1, Introduction Lam grateful to all the participants in this symposium for the attention they have paid to my arguments in God, Locke, and Equality (GLE)! and for the kind things they say about the book. I am grateful, too, to the editors of this Review for offering me the opportunity to respond. In this brief note, I want to answer some of the criticisms that have been made of my interpretation, particularly in regard to Locke's account of the underpinnings of basic equality. I shall not say much about the suggestion which I advanced at the beginning and the end of GLE to the effect that we—even now, in the twenty-first century—ought to take seriously the view that the principle of basic equality requires for its elaboration and support something along the lines of Locke's religious views and that, just as basic equality was not conceived or nurtured on purely secular premises, so it cannot be sustained on purely secular premises. A full elaboration and defense of this suggestion would require much more space than J allotted it in GLE or than I can allot it here. I hope eventually to provide this in a book, which will deal with basic equality directly rather than through the lens of John Locke's work. Here I will discuss this aspect only by way of brief response to the efforts by Professors Zuckert and Reiman to show (not just to say) that basic equality can be supported on purely secular foundations. 2. Cambridge School T begin with some remarks about methodology. In GLE, I treat John Locke's writings not just as the site for historical excavation, but as a force to be reckoned with even in modern discussions of equality. In a number of places I express impatience with the view that Locke‘s political writings should be confined to their historical context and not brought into relation with his other more abstract 1. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) — referred to hereinafter as “GLE.” NEXTPREV 496 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS philosophical work. However, as Paul Sigmund notes, I follow this with “an admission that the knowledge of historical context is useful for the philosopher.” So what is going on? The claim that historical context is important and the claim that the influence of a work should be regarded as confined to its historical context are plainly distinct, and it was the latter that I was attacking. Evidently Locke's work has had immense influence in the centuries since its publication in 1690, and in my view this influence does not necessarily involve any mistake or misapprehension of the work. Of course some subsequent invocations of Locke's political philosophy are based on and perpetuate misunderstandings, but many do not. And they need not: I wanted to argue that in this most difficult area of the study of basic equality, we can still learn a lot from Locke's work and profit from a careful calibration of his claims about equality and the philosophical claims about equality that we are inclined to pursue. I do not think John Dunn would disagree with this. Professor Dunn wants me to stop short of saying that the historians’ approach to Locke’s Two Treatises is useless or obfuscating, and he generously interprets me as notsaying that. | hope did not say anything in GLE which might lead readers to believe that I think there is anything “intrinsically self-frustrating” about that approach or that I think, as, he put it, that there is “something within the historical perspective which rendered aspects of its object opaque which would be trans- parent enough toa trained intelligence unmoved by their stubborn location in the past.” Professor Dunn is right to say that the crucial point is “that there are elements in [Locke's] thinking which are more likely to be noticed by those who look carefully to see whether they are there.” It is the motivation to do so that is all-important, and here we see the difference between historians of political thought and historically-minded political philosophers. The fact is many historians are uninterested in seeing whether there is anything in a work written 350 years ago which could possibly contribute to our current understanding of equality in normative political philosophy. And why should they be interested in this? They have their own concerns. But then, what they say about the work should be made relative to those concerns and not used te discredit the 2, Paul Sigmund, “Jeremy Waldron and the Religious Turn in Locke Scholarship"—referred to hereinafter as “Sigmund"—p. 415. 3. John Dunn, “What History Can Show: Jeremy Waldron’s Reading of Locke's Christian Politics” referred to hereinafter as “Dunn.”—at p. 433. NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 497 interests of others, who are not historians. In addition there is a point about specialization and the division of labor. To see elements in Locke's political writings that are philosophically interesting, it is sometimes important to know the detail of modern political philosophy. This is not because we want to rewrite Locke in the image of John Rawls, but because some of the ways in which philosophers have found it worth discussing equality are not necessarily evident to anyone who has only a casual acquaintance with equality as a political ideal. Yet these ways of discussing it may be exactly what Locke can help us with. (It is quite wrong to assume that since these detailed philosophical elaborations are recent, therefore Locke's contribution can only be at a general or casual level.) So, for example, I was able to argue in several places in GLE that Locke’s admitted concessions to inequality should be related to the modern distinction between equal treatment and treatment as an equal rather than regarded as antithetical to egalitarianism. A historical perspective does not prevent us from making this connection, but in the great division of labor the historian may not have the specialist’s knowledge that enables him to see it, There is-one other point that Professor Dunn can help us with. Ifa historian is determined to discomfort philosophical readers of Locke's political writings by ferreting out aspects of Locke's work which are vividly at odds with our own, he will not find it difficult to do so, The detailed scriptural exegesis of the First Treatise, to which Robert Faulkner devotes the argument of his essay, is a good example of this. But the glare of this sort of scrutiny might simply sweep unseeingly over the philosophically more interesting parts of the work, including the philosophically more interesting aspects of what the historian is saying is alien to our concerns. To use another example (though what I am about to say is also true of the First Treatise), Locke's Paraplrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul is not just a set of sermons.’ It looks alien to modern secular philosophy: in fact it is a dense and multilayered tissue of argument and interpretation in which we find embedded a tremendous amount of interesting political, philosophical, and hermeneutical theory. But this has to be teased out carefully and patiently, and lam afraid that will not happen if readers are in the grip of a mentality which begins by assuming that it is necessarily uninteresting to us and our concerns. 5. John Locke, A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paui, two volumes, ed. Arthir W Wainwrieht (Oxford: Clarendan Perss, 1987) NEXTPREV 498 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS. am not saying that this is true of Professor Dunn's own article “What is Living and What is Dead in Locke.”* I have learned more from John Dunn's study of Locke than from anyone else’; indeed it was Professor Dunn who set me off on this project with his startling claim that “Jesus Christ (and Saint Paul) may not appear in person in the text of the Tivo Treatises but their presence can hardly be missed when we come upon the normative creaturely equality of all men in virtue of their shared species-membership.”” Dunn did not ap- proach Locke in the certainty that he had little or nothing to offer usand then read the Tivo Treatises in the glare of that preconception. His was a considered conclusion by a reader who cared as deeply as any student of Locke about the relevance of the work, and it is a conclusion (about the Treatises’ religious orientation) which is shared by many who take Locke’s political writings seriously and who as a consequence are conscious of having to rewrite them or reconstruct them in order to relate them to modern concerns. As Paul Sigmund notes, I disagree with Dunn on this,’ but it is partly because I personally take the religious perspective more seriously than many of Locke’s modern readers and in doing so, I see that perspective as more nuanced and intellectually richer than they do. I worry about Professor Dunn’s view of my book asa “transgressive” pandering to “those who hope to reinsert an explicitly Christian basis for ultimate normative judgment into the delicate structures of America’s long term political accommodation.”* I had hoped to ‘be doing something different: to show that religious-based politics might have a depth, a complexity, and above all a liberalism that much evangelical Christianity simply washes away. Maybe 1 am being too conciliatory in these comments. I do think that some of what has been done with Locke by historians of political thought has made it harder, not easier to read the Two Treatises intelligently and to profit from that reading. Peter Laslett’s insistence that the Treatises are not to be read in light of the Essay or related systematically to Locke’s epistemology, and that we are to read these two books as though their different contexts meant they were written in effect by different authors, was based on the 6, John Dunn, “What is Living and What is Dead in the Political Theory of John Locke,” in his collection Interpreting Political Responsibility: Essays 1981-1989 (Oxford: Pality, 1990), 7. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke: An Historical Account of the Argument of the ‘Two Treatises of Government” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 99, cited in GLE, p. 26 8 Sigmund, p. 415. 9. Dunn. v. 442. NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 499 slenderest evidence of textual inconsistency. And it was exaggerated by a refusal to look beneath the surface of apparent inconsistency using the very philosophical tools that Laslett was advising his students to put aside. Laslett did not use the apparent contradic tion between Locke's “speciesist” account of equality in the Second Treatise and his skepticism about species in the Essay as an example of Locke's inconsistency. (His main example was a trivial one about innate knowledge and capital punishment.) But J found, in the course of working up the lectures (the Carlyle Lectures at Oxford) on which GLE was based, that a tremendous amount of progress in understanding Locke could be made by, first, treating this apparent inconsistency as a serious tension not justas evidence of an historical disconnect, and, secondly, by using the detailed study of both texts to arrive at a deeper understanding of a consistent position that could be attributed to Locke. And here's the point: I do not think [would have bothered with this or bothered to acquire the tools to do it, had I been immersed in the Cambridge historians’ perspective, of which Laslett’s extreme views about the relation between the Essay and the Treatises are simply the most egregious expression.” Whether got Locke right on this issue of species and equality is of course another matter. It is to that question—and to the critiques of Michael Zuckert and Jeffrey Reiman—that I now turn. 3. Locke’s Argument about Equality Professor Reiman says that Locke had several principles of equality and he complains that I neglect this. He says that Locke had what he called a negative principle of equality which says that “no one has naturally (that is, in the nature of things) more authority over others than he or she has over them.” (This is negative, says Reiman, because it simply denies any basis for authority) And, he tells us, Locke had a quite separate positive principle—the right not to be subjugated, harmed, or restricted by others. (This is positive, because it positively imposes obligations.) Reiman says that these two principles have quite different bases and implications in Locke’s theory." [ think Reiman is wrong about this. Certainly Locke’s egalitarianism is complex, and I spent most of GLE plumbing the 10. Professor Dunn (p. 439) may be right that Laslett never really intended his remarks about the Treatises and the Essay to be “treated as all-purpose standing constraints on interpretive heuristics.” But he agrees that to the extent that they have been treated in that way, they have had a deleterious effect on Locke scholarship. IL. Jeffrey Reiman, “Towards a Secular Lockean Liberalism—referred to harainafher 20 "Reiman" nn AT&T NEXTPREV 500 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS depths and dimensions of that complexity—the relation between basic ‘equality and equality of concern, the relation between basic equality and rights, the relation between basic equality and political equality (and inequality), the relation between basic equality and economic ‘equality (and inequality), and soon. The two claims Reiman mentions are important but they do not stand independently of one another. ‘They are interlocking parts of a complex position, and we should pay attention to the way in which one is derived from the other or the way in which one is developed and defended in order to provide part of the basis for the development and defense of the other. Reiman says that the negative principle is defended on a wholly secular ground. He says I neglect this secular argument for one of Locke's egalitarian principles and that this is because I spend too much time on Locke's workmanship argument. (The workmanship argument, which I shall discuss in a moment, holds that we are all each other‘s equals because we are all equally God’s workmanship and thus God’s property.) What Locke writes in what Reiman reads as a secular argument is the following. He says that man’s natural state is [a] state ... of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no-one having more than another, 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.” Now Reiman sees of course that this passage does refer to God, the lord and master of us all. But, he says, its argument is based on God's silence, and so we can treat it as a secular argument. (Reiman keeps a sort of scorecard: “secular arguments 3, theological arguments 1.”)" I think it is a mistake to categorize the above argument as secular. Ananalogy will show why. Suppose I were tosay that the law of the land does not distinguish between case A and case B, and I were to conclude that therefore A and B are to be treated the same. Would this count as a nonlegal argument, simply because it relies on the law‘s silence? Plainly not: it assumes that the law’s distinctions (or lack of distinctions) are the be-all and end-all of our treatment of Aand B. Someone who wanted to distinguish between A and B on nonlegal grounds would be unfazed by this argument. They would 12. John Locke, Ttvo Treatises of Government, Il, sect. 4. 18 Reimann det NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 501 only accept it if they were persuaded that the law’s approach to A and B was all-important. And similarly we would only accept the argument of Locke's section 4 if we were already persuaded that God's voice or God’s silence was all that counted in determining people's status in regard to one another." Michael Zuckert does not agree with Reiman that I spend too much time on the workmanship argument. He thinks I do not take it seriously at all: “It is striking that Waldron’s reconstruction omits the workmanship argument." According to Professor Zuckert, the workmanship argument is the core of Locke's case for equality, and much more important than the various things about the defining attributes of the human species to which I devote so much atten- tion in the third chapter of GLE. But Zuckert knows very well that the workmanship argument cannot be a ground for the principle of basic equality—since all animals are God’s workmanship and thus God’s property. Locke thinks rabbits are God’s workmanship and he thinks we are too; but he does not think we are the equals of rabbits (in any respect other than this creaturely origin). So Zuckert has to add something to patch this gap. Now what he adds is more or less exactly what my interpretation rests on—namely, Locke’s specification ofa certain degree of rationality. Zuckert says: “The simplest solution to this problem lies in Locke’s appeal in the First Treatise (130) toman as special and superior to the other creatures, for man is the image of God.””"" Like him, [think this is tremendously important passage. But it takes us right back to the issue of what are the common intellectual attributes of those who are said to be one another’s equals—that is, humans. To answer that, we have to do exactly what I did in GLE: we have to concoct a definition of man’s intellectual superiority, the degree of his God-likeness, which can sustain equality but at the same time not lead us to attribute overriding significance to the massive intellectual differences among human beings. Locke does use the argument from God’s workmanship to God’s property to establish important ethical conclusions: he says it is the basis of God’s right to command us. But in the context of the argument for basic equality at the beginning of the Second Treatise, the workmanship argument plays a different role. All 14, We must not forget that the passage quoted above does not stand on its own. Locke devotes the whole of the First Treatise to a demonstration that there is not the warrant in scripture for subordination among us that royalists like Robert Filmer suppose. The brief statement of section four of the Second Treatise explains, in effect, why that protracted biblical excursus was necessary. 15. Zuckert, “Locke—Religion—Equality”—p. 424. NEXTPREV 502 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS nature is created for a purpose; and humans are intricate and in- teresting pieces of nature.!" But humans have remarkable abilities that lead to a quite striking conception of what God’s purpose for them might be. Having the intellectual capacity to know God and to contemplate the possibility of His having a purpose for us, we are in the position of possibly being intended to carry forward His purposes consciously not just causally. We are not just here for God's purposes; our attributes seem to indicate that we are, in Locke’s words, “all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business.” That's a different status, a higher status than that of God’s nonhuman workmanship, and (as far as anyone can tell) an equal status among us human beings. I say “as far as anyone can tell.” It is possible that beings of this high status might be subordinated one to another, But that’s where the passage that Reiman emphasizes comes in: there is no clear evidence of such subordination among us by God. In all of this, the things that Reiman and Zuckert identify as different principles of equality and different arguments for equality—remember Reiman’s scorecard?—are in fact complementary strands of a complex case. We may analyze them separately, but only to see how they fit together and what role each is capable of playing. They work as a whole and the whole is suffused with a conception of God as creator and a conception of God's business for beings like us. Even were Reiman or Zuckert to accept what I have said so far, they would still see troubling gaps in the argument. Zuckert wonders whether the attribute that I have identified as crucial to Locke's ac- count of human equality is actualized knowledge of Ged and moral duty or the mere potentiality for that knowledge. If it is the former, then maybe only those who believe in God are one anather's equals.” 18. For Locke’s basic teleology of the human, see Locke, Too Treatises, I, sect. 86: “God ... made man, and planted in him, as in all other animals, a strong desire of self-preservation, and furnished the world with things fit for food and raiment, and other necessaries of life, subservient to-his design, that man should live and abide for some time upon the face of the earth, and not that so curious and wonderful a piece of workmanship, by his own negligence, or want of necessaries, should perish again, presently after a few moments continuance.” 19.1 think Zuckert is wondering whether I want to impute to Locke the view that atheists are less equal than the rest of us, because they lack this actualized knowledge; see Zuckert, p. 426, Naw as I argued in the final chapter of GLE, Locke held very firm views on atheists. But he did not argue, nor did Limpute to him the argument, that they are less than the equals of their theistic fellow-humans, They are a menace because they dan’t believe in Gad. but their status remains fully human. NexTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 503 1 was careless in the formulations I used in the book, but I can say here that the potentiality interpretation is the correct one. All who have the power of abstraction, which, on Locke's view, is what one needs to figure out that there is a God, are in the position of having been created in this special teleological sense—not just for God's purposes, but about God’s business. Particular individuals among them may not have figured this out yet. They may not have awoken to the fact that they are sent into the world about God’s business. If one may speak irreverently, God may be waiting for them to figure that out. But their status, so far as the rest of us are concerned, is that we are to regard their creation and existence in that light, whether they see itor not, Both Reiman and Zuckert have doubts about how much one can infer from these elementary facts about our status. Is our ca- pacity to see ourselves as special creatures of God the same as a capacity to reason morally? I think it is not the same, on Locke’s view, though the former capacity is necessary for the latter. So many theories make our ability to reason morally the key to our equality—Kant' s is the most prominent—that itis hard to convince people that this is not the account I am attributing to Locke. Locke's view is that since humans can understand their creation, they have a special (and equal) status in creation, which morality must take account of. That isnot the same as saying that they have that status because they can reason morally. Locke’s views varied over time as to how much morality one could reason to on the basis of the sort of insight that defines human rationality. In the Essay, he says that adult humans have “light enough to lead them to the knowledge of their maker, and the sight of their own duties.” In section 6 of the Second Treatise, he believes some fairly elementary propositions about not harming one another can be inferred from the tight wad ‘of argument I referred to earlier, about our being not just created for God’s purposes but being sent into the world about His business: “there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy one another, as if we were made for ‘one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.””" In The Reasonableness of Christianity, however, he takes the view that the presence and the mission of Jesus Christ were necessary 20. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. Hi. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), Introduction, p. 45, cited in GLE at p. 79, 21. In section 5 of the Second Treatise, Locke also infers a principle of equal ‘concern from these elementary facts about our status. Unlike Professor Reiman— Reiman, p. 479—1 attribute no secret significance to the fact that Locke credits NEXTPREV 504 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS for men to know the content and see the force of their natural law duties. Zuckert thinks I ought to be embarrassed by this vacilla- tion.” [ am not. I acknowledge several times in GLE that there are some dissonances between the Essay and the Treatises, on the one hand, and The Reasonableness of Christianity, on the other. But I do not think this dissonance is particularly significant in the present context, The difference that is made to our actual status by equal- ity in our potential to know that there is a God and that we are his special creatures is one thing; equality in our detailed knowledge of the moral implications of that significance is another. Doubts about the latter in The Reasonableness of Christianity do not affect the former. As I have emphasized already, the basis for equality is not our moral knowledge or our capacity for moral knowledge, but the theological significance of the fact that we are capable of apprehending our relation to God. 4. Natural Religion and Christianity On these grounds, I claim that Locke's argument for basic equality is religious in its foundations, But what is it to be a reli- gious argument? Terminology is a difficulty here, and I struggled with it when I was writing the book. “Theological” seems to refer to a different scholarly discipline, and Locke was not writing in the Second Treatise as a theologian (though he wrote as an amateur theologian elsewhere). “Religious” misleadingly connotes orga- nized religion—institutions involved in the communal practice of worship—and that might make it seem as though I am arguing that Locke bases his account of equality on church teaching. I am not arguing that. Robert Faulkner thinks Locke actually repudiates the notion of a church, as part of his enterprise to lead his readers from Christendom to liberalism.” But I do not see this in A Letter Concern- ing Toleration. Locke certainly criticizes church practice, however. And in the Two Treatises, he attacks the teaching of “the divinity of this last age,” meaning royalist Anglican churchmen.” “Religious” can also connote “faith-based.” To call an argument religious might suggest that it is supposed to be based on revela- tion. But most of Locke’s argument in the Second Treatise is not based on revelation, though he appeals to revelation here and there ina 22, Zuckert, p. 429, 23, Robert Faulkner, “Preface to Liberalism: Locke's First Treatise and the Bible” —referred to hereinafter as “Faulkner”—p. 455_ 24. Locke. Tuw Treatices I sect. 112: see also Faulkner 0. 463. NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 505 confirmatory role.* The key to my argument is that Locke thinks we can reason to the existence of God and to the significance of our relation to Him, Zuckert suspects that I cannot possibility agree with Locke on this, He says: [lt is a rash philosopher indeed who believes reason can “easily” establish the existence of a creating, legislating God. Waldron is no rash philosopher. | suspect, indeed, that he is so non-rash that he does not seriously entertain the thought that reason can do what Locke appears to think it can. But if 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; so Waldron believes, and such is the view that he projects back on Locke (sub silentio) when he calls Locke's position Christian. Zuckert is right that of course, like everyone else, [have my doubts about the possibility of a rational proof of the existence of God. But Thave no doubt that Locke believed that reason could lead one to a belief in the deity. And I certainly had no intention to attribute to Locke, through my silence on this matter, a view opposite to the ‘one that Locke espoused. This might be the place to say something about Straussianism, and the practice of discerning secret meanings in texts that appear to be silent on a given point or to point in the opposite direction. As Paul Sigmund notes, “God, Locke, and Equality spends very little time ‘on Strauss and none on the secondary literature of the Straussian school.”” [had the good fortune to receive my education in political philosophy outside the United States, and although I had a vague sense that there was something called Straussianism and one ought be against it, I was in something like the position of Daniel Defoe’s ‘opponents of Catholicism: “Defoe says that there were a hundred thousand country fellows in his time ready to fight to the death against popery, without knowing whether popery was a man or a horse.”* | knew—and know—very little about the Straussian approach. Maybe it is a serious omission in my thinking on Locke not to have come to terms with this. But I would say I have my doubts about the effectiveness of an approach that focuses on the relationship between the middle section of the Second Treatise and 25. See, eg., Locke, Two Treatises, Il, sect. 24, at the basis of his theory of ‘property. 26. Zuckert, pp. 429. 27. Sigmund, p. 415. 28, William Hazlitt, “On Prejudice” in Sketches and Essays (London: Richards, sana NexTPREV 506 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS. the missing riddle of the Two Treatises (namely the lost portion of the First Treatise) Other aspects of Faulkner’s paper were interesting. He is right to see in the First Treatise a more radical approach by Locke than his orientation towards scriptural exegesis might suggest. But | do not think his radicalism is directed particularly at scripture. A lot of what Locke says in the First Treatise as in the Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, is that scripture has very little to offer us on the issue of appropriate political arrangements.” Most of his work with scripture is negative: it does not prove what his opponents think it proves. But this is not an anti-scripture position. Verte: is not saying that scripture misleads us or points us in an inappropriate direction. Instead he says that in this matter, we have tol ink for ourselves (which includes thinking for ourselves about God's business with us) I devoted a chapter in GLE to the question of why Locke used so little New Testament material in the Two Treatises whereas he used a considerable amount of New Testament material in the Letter Concern- ing Toleration. I had no particular axe to grind here; I just wanted to figure out what the conventions of this kind of argumentation were in the seventeenth century. (And so I compared Locke in this regard with Hugo Grotius, for example.)"' My conclusion, if I recollect, was simply “I don’t know; I can’t figure it out.” I think saying that is usually better than speculating about a secret esoteric agenda.” 29, Faulkner, pp. 456-57: “The final paragraph of the First Treatise recounts the ‘destruction’ of the Jews by the Romans (1. 169) and hence their demise as ‘God's. peculiar People." Consider. Jews, Chosen by God, could never agree that their divine significance had been erased by a political event. And Christians, who are of course Locke's chief audience, would expect a turn from the defects of Jehovah to the saving Messiah. Yet the suppositions of a righteous God and a saving Jesus are missing. ... [TJhe veiled disappearance of the biblical God is the truth hidden by the missing middle, but indicated by ‘evidence’ elsewhere in the Treatises, and the central teachings of Christians as well as Jews are replaced by Locke's central teachings of natural freedom and civil government. Oneis then led to wonder, then, whether it is merely coincidence that the argument for natural freedom begins just after the central section of the first Treatise ([. 86), and the argument for ‘Dominion and Control’ by government, at the central section of the second (II. 223).” 30. I discuss this especially with regard to the Paraphrase and Notes in GLE at pp. 195-98. 31. GLE, p. 208. 32, GLE, pp. 215-16. 33. About the closest I got to anything esoteric was to toy with a political explanation of why the Second Treatise makes no reference to toleration: arguing for toleration at the time the Second Treatise was drafted might have played into the hands of the Stuarts’ cynical use of the tolerationist agenda at that stage. “lames II was trving to enlist the sunvort of Dissenters in favor of the reveal NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 507 So why is my book subtitled “Christian Foundations of Locke's Political Thought”? One possibility is that I am claiming to have discovered Christian foundations and to have refuted all claims about the foundations of Locke's political thought that are at odds with that. “Waldron declares himself in possession of ‘the Christian foundations of Locke’s political thought,” says Professor Zuck- ert. However, the central argument of the book, the ent about God and species equality, is not a Christian argument in the least. It contains no reference to Christ, much less to any specifically Christian doctrine, text, or article of faith. It certainly is possible to endorse Waldron’s position and not be a Christian This is my fault. I created the impression that the subtitle of GLE was an assertion, rather than a topic for inquiry. But my aim was to-explore the issue ofhow Christian Locke’s political thought actually was. It is not an unreasonable project. Robert Faulkner and the Straussians, notwithstanding, Locke was a Christian and itshowed in his moral and political writing. It showed explicitly in the Letter Concerning Taleration and, of course, it showed explicitly in The Reasonableness of Christianity. It shows also in the political-philosophical tenor of some of the notes in A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul. All of this 1 explored in detail; all of this is part and parcel of “Locke's political thought,” as referred to in my subtitle. I explored the issue, too, in regard to the Two Treatises, where there is also a lot of biblical material. You may say, “Well this is not specifically Christian.” But it is part of the Christian canon and both Filmer and Locke treated it as such. On my view, Christianity is strikingly and unqualifiedly committed to the basic equality of all human souls. Sois the Second Treatise. And so it made sense to my mind to explore the character and basis of this foundational commitment, even if it wasn’t pre- sented explicitly in the words of Jesus Christ or St. Paul. of Test Acts against Catholics, which meant that during the mid-1680s, tolerationist thetoric was being used against the Whigs. So there was every reason for those opposed to James ... to play down this aspect of their overall position” (GLE, p. 212). But I now don't think that can be right. It doesn’t explain why Lacke failed to insert anything on toleration at the time—years later—when the book was put into-its final form and published, (We know that a certain amount of rewriting and reassembly did go-on at that time.) And anyway it neglects the fact that Locke's tolerationist view was always and easily able to distinguish itself from the pro- Catholic agenda of the Stuarts, 34. Zuckert, pp. 428 and 429. NEXT508 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS Professor Zuckert distinguishes between natural religion and. positive religion, and says that Locke’s argument as I present it is natural religion. It has to be, he says, because Locke insists that: PREV NEXT {wleare to “steer by reason,” not by faith. ... [W]e are to interpret revelation in rational terms so long as the matters in hand are within the scope of reason. Purported revelations which cross truths of reason are to be dismissed either as pseudo-revelations or as misunderstood revelations. The proper sphere of faith is those matters above and beyond reason ~ for example, the proposition: “the dead shall rise, and live again” is “beyond the discovery of reason” and therefore “purely a matter of faith.” Locke gives every indication that he considers politics one of the topics within the purview of reason. I think this is right, but important to note that natural religion, at least in Locke's hands, is theism, not deism. I myself would use the term “natural law reasoning” to refer to what Locke is doing in the Second Treatise, mainly because that’s the term Locke would have used. Natural law reasoning, in his hands, involves what we can figure out about what God requires of us using our own reason. It does not justinvolve what we can figure out about what is required of us independent of the proposition that there is a God. Grotius is sometimes cited as authority to the contrary in his proposition that some elements of natural law could be known to be true even if we were to concede (etiamsi daremus) that God does not exist or that He has no interest in human affairs.” But Grotius was there referring to some very elemental notions of natural law, such as the laws of procreation and self-defense, which we share with the animals. He certainly was not arguing that natural law generally could be grasped on this basis. So I don’t accept Professor Reiman’s sugges- tion that the natural religion aspect of the argument I am attributing to Locke means that God can drop out of the picture altogether: [S]ince Waldron’s theological understanding of Locke’s moral doctrine is not based on revelation, —even on Waldron’s account—that doctrine will ultimately amount to what it would be reasonable to expect God to want of us. And that will be just what it is reasonable tout court for us. todo* The mistake he makes here is roughly the same as the mistake he made earlier about section 4 of the Second Treatise. What is reason- able for God to require of us is not at all the same as what it would 36. Zuckert, pp, 422-236. 37. Grotius, “Prolegomenon” to The Laws of War and Peace, __ AR Roiman.n. aR.PREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 509 be reasonable for us to do in a Godless world, since the existence of God might itself make a difference to what it is reasonable for Him to require of us. If we can figure out using our reason—as Locke thought we could®—that God will hold us responsible for our actions, then the existence of God simply changes the stakes in our thinking about what is reasonable and unduly demanding. Commandments that would seem preposterously demanding on the assumption that God does not exist—that a man love his enemies, for example, or be ready to lay down his life for his friends—may seem quite reasonable in the light of the existence of a divine com- mander.® Thus, in A Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke writes: Every man has an immortal soul, capable of eternal happiness or misery; whose happiness depending upon his believing and doing those in this life which are necessary to the obtaining of God’s favour, and are prescribed by God to that end. It follows from thence, first, that the observance of these thingsis the highest obligation that lies upon mankind and that our utmost care, application, and diligence ought to be exercised in the search and performance of them; because there is nothing in this world that is of any consideration in comparison with eternity.’ There is no reason to think of the demands referred to here as un- reasonable, though they would be not only unreasonable but insane form a purely secular point of view. My point is that Locke’s moral- ity and politics cannot properly be understood without seeing how certain propositions about God and his interests in human affairs transform the picture for us entirely. And I think his principle of basic equality is one important product of that transformation. 6. Secular Arguments for Equality Many people have been annoyed by the suggestion I made at the beginning of GLE and at the end that perhaps Locke is right and basic equality cannot be sustained on purely secular premises. 39, Se CLE, p. 96, 40, Professor Zuckert says that “Locke famously declared Christianity ‘reasonable,’ ie, in accord with reason” (Zuckert, p. 424). But as I am sure he knows, The Reasonableness of Christianity is nat at all a work like Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. What Locke argues in this book is that Christianity is not unreasonable in the demands that it makes on our beliefs. He doesn’t mean. it demands only beliefs that accord with secular reason, but that it involves only a fairly small—though certainly a significant and far-reaching—set of non-secular propositions (such as that Jesus is the Messiah). 41, Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. James H. Tully (Indianapolis: NEXTPREV 510 THE REVIEW OF POLITICS I feel compelled to point out that this was a suggestion only, and I put it in the most tentative terms. In a passage that Reiman quotes I said: “I actually don’t think it is clear that we—now—can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation.”“ | meant: “I actually don’t think it is clear that ...” in a literal sense, not the usual philosopher's meaning of “I'm pretty sure (though I won't bother to show) that it’s obviously not the case that.” Still, people are entitled to hold my feet to the fire on this suggestion. Paul Sigmund asks: Must a commitment to human dignity and moral capacity be founded ona belief in God? Waldron maintains that an atheist “has no philosophy” for treating human beings as “special and sacre the nonbeliever embraces a commitment to human dignity and moral worth as the foundation of his value system that is sacred to him? Professor Sigmundis right in his suggestion that millions of people simply embrace a commitment to human dignity and moral worth without any religious conviction and their embrace of it seems to be perfectly effective without that religious underpinning. Locke was no doubt wrong to think that atheists necessarily behave badly. However, the position that a secular version of the principle of basic equality is always available for good-hearted atheists has to be handled carefully. Often it depends on an implausible disjunction between a principle and its grounds, For example, Professor Reiman insists that we can specify in secular terms the level of rationality that Locke thought was needed for human equality. But I never had any doubt that it could be specified. My worry was that the significance of this specified level of rationality could not be explained on secular grounds. Earlier I discussed Zuckert's suggestion that Locke could not really have believed in the availability of a rational proof of the existence of God. (He thought I didn’t believe this and that Icouldn’t really think Locke did either.) It must be the case, said Professor Zuckert, that the whole thing was really grounded on faith.“ But if the whole thing is founded on faith, then the specified intellectual attribute — the ability to abstract—no longer has the significance it had in relation to a rationalist theology. Receiving the deliverances of faith may require different attributes, and so it would define equality on a different basis. The point is that we cannot simply give up the ground and hang on to the secular specification. The 42. GLE, p. 13, quated by Reiman at p. 1. 43, Reiman, p. 481. 44. See above. text accompanvine note 27. NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 511 secular specification (of the appropriate level of rationality) makes no sense apart from the ground that shapes it. As I said in chapter 8 of GLE, I found Locke’s comments on all this towards the end of The Reasonableness of Christianity very interesting. Locke suggested there was a lot of bad faith in those who adopt certain moral principles while purporting to repudiate the heritage of their justification; they cannot explain what gave the principle its shape and why exactly that principle is the one they purport to hold on secular grounds." The implication of this is that if we were to approach the question of basic human equality and inequality on purely secular grounds, without guidance from the Christian heritage, there is no reason to suppose that the resulting conception would look anything like the conception we have inher- ited. IEmay be more secure for what it is: a celebration of autonomy, the according of dignity, or an awe at Kantian moral capacity, But its status as a specifically egalitarian conception would look (as John Dunn suggests) “less stable or solid than that which Locke himself, quite reasonably ... supposed himself to have found." Reiman and Zuckert disagree too. They suggest that something quite like the intellectual capacity that Locke specifies as the key to human equality could be accorded significance, in a secular theory, on account of its connection with the ity to behave morally or ‘on account of its connection to the ability to act autonomously. Professor Reiman says that the capacity can be justified as “the necessary condition of peaceful and just social interaction.”*” But this utilitarian rationale is hardly going to be fundamental enough to secure equality in the basic work it has to do. Nor is it going to be robust enough to (as Dunn puts it) withstand “the endless and Pressing reasons which constantly bombard everyone” for seeing others as unequal, or to discipline “kaleidoscopic variety of ways” in which we are inclined to treat people as categorically different i in status, and in the claims that they have upon us. Both critics—Reiman and Zuckert—also suggest that the importance of something like Lockean rationality can be explained in terms of autonomy. Zuckert says “[t]he moral significance of this rationality derives from the fact that the self is constructed from it, and with the self, self-ownership and rights." And Reiman uses what he thinks are the attributes that matter to Locke, specified in a secular way, 45. See GLE, pp. 241-42. 46, Dunn, pp. 445-46. 47. Reiman, p. 482. a8 Trckert m ai NEXTPREV 512. THE REVIEW OF POLITICS to ground what he thinks is a compelling argument for Lockean equality that has no theological component: [Flrom their intense interest in what they believe and how they live and in having their needs and desires satisfied, and from the kinship of reason and freedom, we judge it to be evident that they are all positively equal im their right to form duireren beliefs and to act on them (up to the point that this conflicts with the like right of others). There are two questions to ask about this, but Reiman answers only one of them. The one he answers is about the basis of the judgment referred to in the passage above: How does it follow from the at- tributes mentioned that all are positively equal? Reiman’s response is that this can be viewed as a substantive judgment “that any rea- sonable person will make.”* It is no different in its logical quality from some of the moves that characterize Locke’s own approach, for example in the workmanship argument." It’s just something that seems clear. I have no problem with this. It was never my in- tention in suggesting that there might be problems with a purely secular defense of basic equality to raise the fact/value gap or any other strictly meta-ethical difficulty. The problem was always one of seeing how the principle of basic equality could acquire the fun- damental status that it has in the Lockean theory. And that leads us to the second question. Even if we grant Reiman’s judgment that there is significance to our possessing capacities for freedom and reason, what has to be explained and understood is the compelling and overriding nature of this significance. There are lots of reasons for not treating people as equals in these regards, reasons—of utility or meritocracy—that can also be established in the terms of Reiman’s meta-ethic. But if equality is to do anything like the work that it does in Locke’s account, it must be understood either as massively outweighing these other reasons or as governing and disciplining whatever work they do. The theologically grounded proposition that Locke invokes—that we are “all the servants of one sovereign Master, sent into the world by His order and about His business ... [and] made to last during His, not one another’s pleasure”*\—has what it takes to do this. But does Reiman’s more anodyne proposition of ordinary rationality, established in the or- dinary way, have what it takes? Again, the normative compulsion of the Lockean claim is evident: God’s purposes are normative for 49, Reiman, p. 488, 50. Reiman, p. 488. 51. Reiman, p. 483. BO Vnwken Tinn Treaticoc T coct NEXTPREV RESPONSE TO CRITICS 513. us, God's property is what we would be messing with if we were to slight this equality. Reiman relies on an analogy with the form of the argument (the workmanship argument) with which Locke establishes this normative compulsion. But that is not the same as getting the benefit of that normative compulsion. For all we know, the proposition that Reiman establishes might have the normative status of a rather good idea: other things equal, it would be a rather good idea to leave beings with these attributes to their own autono- mous devices. But how you get from that to the proposition that messing with beings like these is normatively out of the question is another mater. Locke’s argument has what it takes to explain that normative force; Reiman’s does not. As I said at the outset, there is more to say about this issue of whether we can concoct a secular defense of something that is sup- d to be as fundamental, as compelling, and as overriding as basic equality. I have been able to do little more in this paper than to respond to some of the suggestions my five critics have made. No doubt there is much in their papers to which I have not been able to do justice. I hope they will forgive that, and accept my thanks for the interest they have shown in what I wrote on these matters in God, Locke, and Equality.