Philosophy E166: Ethical Theory Week Six: Locke on the Other Threats to Morality: Materialism, Relativism, Egoism, Determinism

Philosophy E166: Ethical Theory

Week Six: Locke on the Other Threats to

Morality: Materialism, Relativism, Egoism, Determinism

Perceived Hobbesian Threat

to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True

PositionLocke’s Position

Materialism, naturalism

Dualism, supernaturalism

Unorthodox Christianity

Atheism Voluntarism or intellectualism

Secularism moralism

Psychological egoism

Existence of morality and altruism, with God’s help

Compatibility of egoism and morality

Relativism Moral objectivity Distinction between divine justice & human justice, natural law & civil law

Determinism Libertarianism Metaphysical compatibilism


to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True






Secularism moralism

Intellectualism






Source of Our Knowledge of Morality

AN EXERCISE

METHOD AND RESULTS

Locke Rejects Innateness, Embraces Reason

• Locke rejects innateness in Book I of Essay– Justice, seemingly practiced by thieves, but really “as rules of

convenience within their own communities”– Why say those who “live by fraud and rapine” have innate principles of

justice?– Moral rules need proof – thus reasons– Christians, Hobbists & heathens have different reasons to keep

agreements (God requires it; the public does; dignity & virtue)– The public likes virtue not for its innate morality but for profitability– The “notion of his Maker, as a mark God set on his own workmanship,

to mind man of his dependence and duty” – “how late … discoverable in children?” (I iv 13)

Knowledge of God from Reason

• For Locke, the knowledge of God comes from reason, just as it does for Hobbes

• But for Locke, it is a thicker knowledge than Hobbes’s deism

• It is knowledge of God as Maker

• And thus of a source of moral knowledge

• The Workmanship Principle

The Threat to Ethics from Materialism

• Recall Hobbes’s problem of materialism & morality – materialism seems incompatible to Christians with theism and thus morality

• Hobbes had two replies:

• Secular moralism, the compatibility of atheism & morality

• An unorthodox materialist Christianity


to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True





Mysterianism, nonreductivism


Secularism moralism

Intellectualism






The Threat from Materialism: Locke’s Position

• Creationism: God is our Maker• Mysterianism: that we cannot know if God

“superadded” consciousness to matter• Nonreductionism about personal identity:

that neither dualism nor physicalism is required by the facts about selves (personal identity)

• Autonomy of morality: Settling metaphysical questions about self is irrelevant to religion

The Threat from Materialism: Locke’s Argument

• Consider the following argument by John Locke in Book IV, chapter X, sec.10 of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding about how such chains begin:

• “So if we will suppose nothing first, or eternal: Matter can never begin to be: If we suppose bare Matter, without Motion, eternal: Motion can never begin to be: If we suppose only Matter and Motion first, and eternal: Thought can never begin to be: For it is impossible to conceive that Matter either with or without Motion could have originated in and from itself Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, as is evident from hence, that then Sense, Perception, and Knowledge must be a property eternally inseparable from Matter and every particle of it.”

Parallels with Hobbes’s Cosmological Argument & Design Arguments

• Whatever you think, it is true that creatures with minds come from other creatures with mind. The only way we know to create a mind is by the activity of another creature with a mind.

• A creature with a mind has to do something in order to create another creature with a mind. So you might think that just like the causal chain we have in Hobbes’s Cosmological Argument –

First Cause → ... → Cause2 → Cause1 → Given Event

and the causal chain we have in some arguments from design –

First Designer → ... → Designer2 → Designer1 → Given Design

-- similarly in the case of mind we have a causal chain –

First Mind → ... → Mind2 → Mind1 → Given Mind.

Locke on Materialism

• Essay 4, 3, 6: “We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us, by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power to perceive and think, or else joined and fixed to matter, so disposed, a thinking immaterial substance: it being, in respect of our notions, not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking, than that he should superadd to it another substance with a faculty of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power, which cannot be in any created being, but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator….”

More by Locke on Materialism

• “… Whether Matter may not be made by God to think is more than man can know. For I see no contradiction in it, that the first Eternal thinking Being, or Omnipotent Spirit, should, if he pleased, give to certain systems of created senseless matter, put together as he thinks fit, some degrees of sense, perception, and thought….”

Locke on Why It Does Not Matter

• Essay 4, 3, 6: “All the great ends of Morality and Religion, are well enough secured without the philosophical Proofs of the Soul's Immateriality; since it is evident that he who, at first made us beings to subsist here, sensible intelligent Beings, and for several years continued us in such a state, can and will restore us to a like state of Sensibility in another World, and make us there capable to receive the Retribution he has designed to men, according to the doings in this life. And therefore tis not a mighty necessity to determine one way or t'other, as some overzealous for or against the Immateriality of the Soul, have been foreward to make the World believe.”

The Problem of the Self

• What is the problem of the self?

• Imagine a time line.

• Let it reflects the course of my life:

Change

• There are many kinds of change that occurred to me over this span of time:– Physical change.– Psychological change.– Experiential change.

The Problem of Personal Identity

• The problem is this: • Given that there has been this consistent turnover of

matter and this constant turnover of experience, where am I? Where am I in all of this change?

• By virtue of what have I remained the same person over time?

• This is the problem of personal identity.• To put it differently: What is it that remains identical, the

same—remains the person I call “me”—despite all these dramatic changes – physical, psychological and experiential – that I have undergone?

The Soul Theory

• According to the soul theory, what I am doesn’t have something to do with any physical thing; rather it is a soul—an invisible intangible thing.

• Certainly Plato’s view and it seems to be Descartes’s.• What’s attractive about the soul theory is that if the changes

in us that create the problem of personal identity depend entirely on physical aspects of me, appeal to souls as a source of identity avoids the problem, since souls are entirely nonphysical.

• However, the soul theory has a problem with knowledge – how can we know who each other is, how can I even know who I myself am, if I assume that we are all nonphysical, intangible, unobservable souls?

Resurrection and the Soul Theory

• The soul theory is not the official view of New Testament, despite what most people think. It was sort of added on from Platonism by the medieval church.

• Paul sets out the New Testament view in Corinthians, ch. 15: you are not a soul but a body and as God did Jesus in the Gospel of John God will resurrect you. – Likewise in Acts of the Apostles, ch. 17, Luke portrays

Paul as preaching that on the day of judgment God will resurrect your body just as he resurrected the body of Christ.

The Body Theory

• The soul theory:

[Person X = Person Y] → X has (or is) the same soul as Y

• The body theory:

[Person X = Person Y] → X has (or is) the same body as Y

• One thing that is attractive about the body theory is that, unlike the soul theory, it does not make what I am obscure or unintelligible by appealing to a nonphysical, intangible, unobservable thing, the soul, as the source of sameness.

• On the other hand, what makes it attractive also makes it unattractive: the facts of unlimited change that generate the problem of personal identity, facts about the unlimited possibility of change in the physical aspects of me, do not on the face of it get adequately addressed.

A Memory Theory of Personal Identity

• Suppose we define a memory theory in this way:[Person X = Person Y] ↔ X remembers Y’s experiences

• This definition would be problematical, since: –it implies no infant was the same person as me unless the infant could remember my current experiences; and–it implies that you cannot forget any of your experiences – since any experiences not remembered would not be yours.

• So we might weaken the principle in this way: [Person X remembers Person Y’s experiences] → X = Y

Compare Locke’s Theory of Personal Identity

(Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chap. 27, section 9)

Elements in Locke’s Statement

• The definition of a “person”: “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places.”

• Consciousness, Locke claims, is inseparable from thinking.• Self-consciousness, he claims, is inseparable from perception.• Thus, his account of sameness of person as sameness of

consciousness: “since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being.”

• Sameness of consciousness across times.• Sameness of consciousness across places.

Locke on Switching Bodies and Souls

• Thus, Locke contemplates body-switching. There could be two distinct bodies which were bodies of the same person, so long as they had the same consciousness.

• But he also, more controversially, contemplates soul-switching. There could, he argued, conceivably be two distinct souls which were souls of the same person, so long as they had the same consciousness.

The Self Is United by “Same Consciousness,” According to Locke

One Consciousness, Two Substances; One Substance, Two Consciousnesses• In this passage, Locke contemplates one

consciousness, and thus one self, across two substances, in this case bodies.

• In another (§13), he considers one consciousness, and thus one self, spanning two souls.

• In a third (§23), he considers a single substance having two souls, and thus having two selves: “Could we suppose two distinct incommunicable consciousnesses acting the same body, the one constantly by day, the other by night; … I ask … whether the day and the night-man would not be two as distinct persons as Socrates and Plato?”

Is “Same Consciousness” Just a Memory Connection?

• Although Locke writes that “the same consciousness can extend to actions past” (§10), he does not seem to mean by “sameness of consciousness” a memory connection.

• Many philosophers interpret him in passages like this one to be setting out a memory theory of personal identity.

• I can be said to be “conscious of my past actions,” and thus to remember them. Notice that there is no appeal to “sameness of consciousness” in my description of the memory.

• What Locke writes is different. He writes of “the same consciousness” extending to past actions. This suggests that he means not a memory of past actions but rather a sameness in experiences – a sameness of the consciousness in the past to the consciousness in the present.

Sameness of Consciousness Across Places

• Another indicator that “sameness of consciousness” is not inherently a memory connection is the fact that Locke writes of sameness of consciousness across places.

• He writes that “the same consciousness unit[es] … distant actions into the same person, whatever substances contributed to their production.”

• He illustrates this in §11 with the cutting off of a hand. “Cut off a hand, and thereby separate it from that consciousness he had of its heat, cold, and other affections, and it is then no longer a part of that which is himself, any more than the remotest part of matter. Thus, we see the substance whereof personal self consisted at one time may be varied at another, without the change of personal identity.”

Why This Matters for Morality

• If there is no identity in a person, the intention is not connected to the action – then the person doing the action is not responsible for the intention behind it

• Similarly, if no identity, then rewards and punishments are nonsense– earthly– heavenly

Reply to Stillingfleet

• Bishop Stillingfleet criticized Locke’s views as incompatible with Christinity

• Part of it was their incompatibility of the account of selves with morality

• Locke’s reply:– The New Testament does not specify the form we take in

the afterlife– Morality is compatible with a soul form and with a bodily

form

• Locke also rejected the claim that his views did not allow a “spiritual substance” in us

The Threat from Determinism

• Locke was a determinist.

• Thus he was vulnerable to the same sort of attack as Hobbes was: that there was no room for morality, if no room for free will.


to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True







Secularism moralism

Intellectualism






??

Locke’s Response to the Threat from Determinism

• Locke’s response was compatibilism, as was Hobbes’s

• Locke’s version of compatibilism is slightly different from Hobbes’s

• Locke doesn’t think that liberty applies to the will, but to the willing agent

• Hobbes seems to think this as well, but does not ordinarily emphasize it, and not like Locke does

Liberty of the Person, Not of the Will

• Locke says that we should talk about the liberty of the person, and not the liberty of the person’s will.

• Liberty is having the power to perform or to forbear from performing whatever it is that one has the preference to do.

• Locke thought that it didn’t make any sense to talk about freedom of the will, because the will is determined by a person’s preferences.

Freedom Is Acting on Preferences

• Locke: A person is free because he or she can act or avoid acting given her preferences, but the will is never free.

• Determinism is thus, in a sense, beside the point.

• But in any case, people can be free because they can act on their preference or avoid acting given their preference even if determinism is true.

How Can We Be Punished, if Our Actions Are Determined?

• We make wrong judgments of good & evil• We can go wrong because are minds are constructed to

– prefer the pleasure that we can feel at present to the pleasure we can only imagine in the future and

– discount the pains we imagine given the pains we feel

• Thus we ignore future rewards and punishments and focus on current pleasures and pains

Preferring Present Pleasure to Future Pleasure

• “The cause of our judging amiss, when we compare our present pleasure or pain with future, seems to me to be the weak and narrow constitution of our minds. We cannot well enjoy two pleasures at once; much less any pleasure almost, whilst pain possesses us.… Hence it comes that, at any rate, we desire to be rid of the present evil, which we are apt to think nothing absent can equal; because, under the present pain, we find not ourselves capable of any the least degree of happiness.” (II xxi 66)

Just Punishment Despite Willing What Is Judged Good

• “… here we may see how … a man may justly incur punishment, though it be certain that, in all the particular actions that he wills, he does, and necessarily does, will that which he then judges to be good. For, though his will be always determined by that which is judged good by his understanding, yet it excuses him not; because, by a too hasty choice of his own making, he has imposed on himself wrong measures of good and evil; which, however false and fallacious, have the same influence on all his future conduct, as if they were true and right.” (II xxi 57)

Rewards and Punishments in the Afterlife Depend on Understanding

• “ … whatever false notions, or shameful neglect of what is in their power, may put men out of their way to happiness, and distract them, as we see, into so different courses of life, this yet is certain, that morality, established upon its true foundations, cannot but determine the choice in any one that will but consider: and he that will not be so far a rational creature as to reflect seriously upon infinite happiness and misery, must needs condemn himself as not making that use of his understanding he should.” (II xxi 72)

Locke Differs from Hobbes on Bramhall’s Problem

• Bramhall asked how God’s punishments would be just in a deterministic world:– “if there be no liberty, there shall be no day of doom, no

last judgment, no rewards nor punishments after death. A man can never make himself a criminal if he be not at liberty to commit a crime. No man can be justly punished for doing that which was not in his power to shun. To take away liberty hazards heaven, but undoubtedly it leaves no hell.” (§12 of Bramhall’s discourse)

• Hobbes’s response was voluntaristic• Locke’s response would not have been

Hobbes’s Response Drawn from the Passage at Romans 9:11-21

• Hobbes separates the voluntaristic basis of divine justice from the positivistic basis of human justice:• “[T]he power of God alone without other help is

sufficient justification of any action he does. That which men make amongst themselves here by pacts and covenants and call by the name of justice, and according whereunto men are counted and termed rightly just or unjust, is not that by which God Almighty’s actions are to be measured or called just, no more than his counsels are to be measured by human wisdom.” (§12 of Of Liberty and Necessity, p. 22.)

Locke’s Darwinian Response

• One might think of Locke’s very different response as Darwinian

• Those whose evil reflects an incorrect understanding of the future are separated from those who are guided by a correct understanding

• A “natural survival” of the fittest: survival into Heaven for those fit to be there

• A natural justice

The Problem of Egoism

• Recall the problem of egoism: Where is there room for morality is psychological egoism is true of us?

• My view is that Hobbes faced this problem squarely, since he was a psychological egoist?

• His reply was to attempt a reconciliation of egoism and morality – to generate moral norms purely on the basis of self-interest


to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True







Secularism moralism

Intellectualism




??



Metaphysical compatibilism

Theory of Motivation

• Locke presents an account of motivation in his section on liberty: – Any mental preference is the result of what he calls

“mental uneasiness” – The will is determined by whatever creates the greatest

uneasiness – Uneasiness comes from pain or the absence of pleasure– Uneasiness is eliminated if the pain that causes it is

eliminated, or if the pleasure that’s absent is supplied

• A consequence of this theory: Locke is a hedonist

Locke Seems Vulnerable to Same Criticisms as Hobbes

• It seems that Locke could be vulnerable to same criticisms as Hobbes

• Shaftesbury’s grandson, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (incidentally also named Anthony Ashley Cooper), thought so

• Locke had tutored him while he lived with his grandfather

• Shaftesbury’s work was devoted to refuting Hobbes’s egoism, associated it with Locke

Inconsistency in Locke’s Moral Philosophy?

• Shaftesbury’s attack is echoed in the belief among many Locke’s scholars that his moral views don’t hold together

• The natural law theory is seen as incompatible with the hedonism

• One sees the first in the Second Treatise and the second in the Essay – and it might seem that they are incompatible

• Explanation? – written for different occasions

Alternative View

• They are compatible• The natural law theory presents what we know

when we know the requirements of morality• The hedonism presents how we are motivated

to conform to what we know to be the requirements of morality

• We are motivated on this view only in connection with rewards and punishments of the afterlife

Shaftesbury Rejected Reward & Punishment as Moral Motivation• Shaftesbury rejected reward and

punishment in the afterlife as moral motivation– likewise public opinion & civil sanction

• On Shaftesbury’s view, if this were the only motivation, then human beings were incapable of morality

• Substituted conscience & love of God

Is This a Fair Criticism of Locke?

• Recall the fundamental law of nature:– “being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm

another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions…”– “Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not

to quit his station wilfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another”

Another Motivation?

• This is the content of morality• Can the only motive for conforming to this be

desire for reward & fear of punishment?• In an essay written three years after Essay &

Second Treatise were published, Locke writes:– “Whoever spared a meal to save the life of a starving

man, much more a friend…but had more and much more lasting pleasure in it than he that eat it. The other's pleasure died as he eat and ended with his meal. But to him that gave it him ‘tis a feast as often as he reflects on it.”

A Thin Defense

• The motivation is pleasure, but it is not the motivation of avoiding punishment or receiving a reward

• This suggests that there are other sorts of pleasure

• But admittedly this is a thin basis for defending Locke

• Almost entirely – perhaps entirely – within the Essay, the motivation is reward & punishment

• Little discussion of motivation in Second Treatise


to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True







Secularism moralism

Intellectualism




Separation of natural law from moral motivation


??



Relativism

• Given the role of reason, there is little basis to accuse Locke of relativism

• The fundamental law is a universal law, in that it applies to all

• That is compatible with Locke’s criticism of a theory of innateness – that not all adhere

• Already, we have seen a reason that not all adhere – lack of understanding


to Ethics

The Christian

Response

Hobbes’s True







Secularism moralism

Intellectualism




Separation of natural law from moral motivation


Distinction of norms of natural law from uniformity in actions



Documents

Philosophy E166: Ethical Theory Week Six: Locke on the Other Threats to Morality: Materialism, Relativism, Egoism, Determinism