Locke’s view of ethics and government

John Locke (1632–1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern
period.
2 СЛАЙД

In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and
equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He
argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a
foundation independent of the laws of any particular society. Locke used the claim that men
are naturally free and equal as part of the justification for understanding legitimate political
government as the result of a social contract where people in the state of nature
conditionally transfer some of their rights to the government in order to better ensure the
stable, comfortable enjoyment of their lives, liberty, and property. Since governments exist
by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the
public good, governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new
governments. Locke elaborated on these themes in his later political writings, such as the
Second Letter on Toleration and Third Letter on Toleration.

3 СЛАЙД

In his essay Of Ethick in General (c. 1686–88) Locke affirms the hedonist view that
happiness and misery consist only in pleasure and pain, and that we all naturally seek
happiness. But in the very next paragraph, he states that there is an important difference
between moral and natural good and evil—the pleasure and pain that are consequences of
virtuous and vicious behavior are grounded in the divine will. Locke notes that drinking to
excess leads to pain in the form of headache or nausea. This is an example of a natural evil.
By contrast, transgressing a law would not have any painful consequences if the law were
not decreed by a superior lawmaker. He adds that it is impossible to motivate the actions of
rational agents without the promise of pain or pleasure (Of Ethick in General, §8). From
these considerations, Locke suggests that the proper foundation of morality, a foundation
that will entail an obligation to moral principles, needs two things. First, we need the proof of
a law, which presupposes the existence of a lawmaker who is superior to those to whom the
law is decreed. The lawmaker has the right to ordain the law and the power to reward and
punish. Second, it must be shown that the content of the law is discoverable to humankind
(Of Ethick in General, §12). In this text it seems that Locke suggests that both the force and
authority of the divine decree and the promise of reward and punishment are necessary for
the proper foundation of an obligating moral law.

4 СЛАЙД

Again, Locke is not suggesting that we do this from considerations of rewards and
punishments, but because it is the fulfillment of our divinely-created natures. Despite failures
to comply, the normative force of morality is undeniable, for Locke, on these teleogical
grounds. Though Locke seems to believe that our failings with regards to moral knowledge
result from a failure to engage our minds in the right direction, he does however
acknowledge that the discovery of moral truths is difficult and laborious. And this is where
sanctions come into play.