Locke's Moral Man

In this short but rich book, Antonia LoLordo explores Locke's account of moral agency. For Locke, to be a “moral man” is to be a free, rational person. LoLordo devotes one chapter each to his accounts of liberty, persons, and rationality, in that order. These follow an introduction that is, in effect, another short chapter on Locke's account of natural law.In chapter 1, LoLordo argues that Locke thinks of nonhuman animals as possessing thought, some degree of reason, and even the power to will. She says that animals fail to qualify as moral agents for Locke because they lack the ability to suspend the prosecution of their desires and to deliberate about the best course of action. Indeed, on LoLordo's view, we can say that this is all that keeps animals from counting as moral men, because anything capable of suspension and deliberation would of necessity be rational and a person. She bolsters this claim in chapter 3, where she argues that the capacities to suspend and to deliberate presuppose abilities that nonhuman animals, and even young children, lack: the ability to form abstract ideas and the ability to retain lasting ideas of reflection. Locke's suggestion that brutes do not abstract is plain enough, but LoLordo does a nice job of sorting out his murky distinctions between consciousness, reflection, memory, and retention.I suspect that it is this book's second chapter, on persons and personal identity, that readers will find most provocative. That is because LoLordo argues that Locke takes persons to be modes rather than substances. She tells us that she is not the first to advance this reading, that Edmund Law did it in 1769 (in an essay that for some reason appears in various editions of Locke's Works, along with an appendix by an unnamed friend of Law's). In fact, Law seems to vacillate between two views, and it is not clear that either of them is the one that LoLordo advances.Law sometimes says that ‘person’ should be understood to refer not to a thing, but to a feature: to “some such quality or modification in man as denominates him a moral agent” (Law 1823, 179), to “an especial property of that thing or being, separated from all the rest that do or may attend it in real existence” (Law 1823, 189). At other times, Law suggests that ‘person’ refers to a thing considered in a particular light. He draws the distinction between treating of a man “absolutely, and in gross,” and treating of him “under a particular relation or precision” (Law 1823, 180). When we treat of a man in the second way, he says, we “arbitrarily abstract one single quality or mode from all the rest, and view him from under that distinct precision only” (ibid.).So far as I can tell, Law consistently takes modes or modifications to be features and vacillates between (i) suggesting that ‘person’ refers to some such feature, and (ii) suggesting that it refers to a man considered specifically as a possessor of some such feature. LoLordo, on the other hand, does not think that all Lockean modes are features, and she is not suggesting that a Lockean person is a feature. She thinks that for Locke “mode” is a mongrel category: some modes are properties, some are events, and some are things. She thinks that Locke takes qualities and modes to be mutually exclusive and that anything that is not a substance, a quality, or a relation is a mode. LoLordo holds that the definitive feature of modes is that our ideas of them are not supposed to be modeled on external archetypes. As she acknowledges, her understanding of Locke's substance/mode distinction owes much to an essay by Martha Brandt Bolton (1976) that appeared in this journal. For both of them, I think, terms that name what we might call natural kinds are the names of substances, whereas those that stand for other sorts of things name modes. Horses, human beings, and lead are substances; dentists, bicycles, and modeling glue are modes.I think that neither Law nor LoLordo is right about what Locke's modes are: his modes are all “Dependences on” substances (2.12.4),1 and he includes in this category (i) features or qualities that depend on the things that have them, and (ii) events that depend on the things that are their constituents. If you agree with me about this, then the suggestion that Lockean persons are modes looks like a nonstarter. Lockean persons are not features, and they are continuants rather than events.LoLordo's account of Lockean modes is, of course, one part of a larger package; the attractions of the entire package depend on whether it does better than its competitors at accommodating texts and solving puzzles. LoLordo effectively parades the attractions of her reading. If you accept her account of what Lockean modes are and her claim that Lockean persons are modes, then you can explain how persons and substances can be at the same place at the same time and yet have different identity conditions. You can explain why 2.27 is full of outlandish thought experiments though the rest of the Essay is not. You can reconcile Locke's account of personal identity with his rejection of essentialism. You can explain why Locke thinks that a demonstrative science of ethics is possible. LoLordo regards this last piece as decisive. She claims that a demonstrative science of ethics would require knowledge of the real essences of persons, and that this is possible only if persons are modes. I think that there is room for doubt here. Why must we have knowledge of the real essences of persons to establish conceptual truths (if such there be) about how persons ought to act?Though more than half of this book is concerned with Lockean metaphysics, LoLordo highlights the fact that Locke's moral men do not have much need for metaphysics. She sees Locke as noncommittal about whether determinism is true and about whether we have immaterial souls. She notes that he does not think that we need to settle these questions to develop a science of ethics. That seems right, but LoLordo overreaches when she concludes that he “is not offering a metaphysic but a critique of metaphysics” (134). She allows that Locke “isn't primarily arguing that metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, is vacuous or impossible,” but claims that he is arguing that “metaphysics, as traditionally conceived, is unnecessary” (134). The trouble is that it is not much of a critique of metaphysics to say that we can do ethics without answering every metaphysical question. Locke can afford to be noncommittal about determinism and about whether we have souls precisely because of the stances he takes on other metaphysical questions. He defends an account of freedom that is compatible with determinism, and so secures agency and responsibility whether determinism is true or not. He defends an account of personal identity that allows for the possibility of surviving biological death whether we have immaterial souls or not.Though slim, this volume contains interesting contributions on other topics as well, including Locke's views about active power, rational self-determination, the ownership of past experiences, and the relationship of ethics to theology. Anyone with a serious interest in Locke will want to read this book

Agency (philosophy) · Consciousness · Criminology · Deliberation · Epistemology · Free will · Moral agency · Natural (archaeology) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rationality · Suspect · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

• Substances, Substrata, and Names of Substances in Locke's Essay

  Martha Brandt Bolton•The Philosophical Review•1976

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