GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - prima parte cap- 3 Species and the Shape of Equality
- xchè nn possiamo omettere la dimensione religiosa in locke?
- rawls ha bisogno di premettere il valore dell uguaglianza ma nn vuole compromissioni religiose
- relazione comando/comandante
- es. nn uccidere l altro... xchè anch esso è a immagine di dio... che relazione c è tra la prima e la seconda parte (quella religiosa)
- le ragioni di un comando ci consentono di capirlo meglio? sì quando il predicato è astratto e indeterminato
- nel precetto dell eguaglianza tra uomini il termine umano riceve il suo contenuto dall affermazione religiosa
- contenuto del comando e ragioni del comando nn sono sempre separabili ma interagiscono specie nei comandi astratti: siate onesti. questo fatto mette in crisi i nn cognitivisti
- "gli uomini sono uguali"... il concetto di uomo è in parte determinato dal comando e nn solo viceversa
- la necessità di definire l umano spiazza rawls e i laici
- @@@
- il principio di eguaglianza fa della specie umana qualcosa di speciale
- una filosofia che nn distingue tra specie crea grave danno alla filosofia ma x distinguere occorre introdurre l elemento religioso
- il dominio dell uomo sul creato
- .....
- Macintyre's observation:... arguments of John Locke concerning basic equality and individual rights were so imbued with religious content that they were not fit, constitutionally, stitutionally, to be taught in the public schools
- Why are we not able to bracket off the theological dimension of Locke's commitment to equality?
- Why can't we put the religious premises in parentheses?...this hope is crucial for modern secular liberalism.... Rawls's system definitely requires a premise of equality... but I am doubtful that this Rawlsian strategy will work.
- Rawlsian strategy... religious content has a purely external relation to the equality principle. By an external relation, I mean a relation that does not go to the meaning
- Consider, for example, the relation of some proposition about a commander to the content of his command.
- For example, the Sixth Commandment has a content "Thou shalt not kill" which seems logically quite independent of any proposition about... what one might call the preface to the Decalogue "I am the Lord thy God,
- The commandment to Noah prohibiting murder cites as a reason the fact that potential victims of murder are made in the image of the person (God) who has issued the commandment.... There the religious aspect seems to have an internal relation to the commandment,
- Someone might object that this confuses content with reasons....the fact that P is cited as a reason for Q doesn't mean that P is indispensable for understanding the meaning of Q
- Now this is sometimes true, especially where the reasons in question establish nothing but an instrumental relationship.....I think the Rawlsians overestimate the extent to which it is true generally,
- Abstract principles of justice and rights characteristically need to be filled
- I have argued this elsewhere with regard to John Stuart Mill's "Harm Principle."8
- I think this is particularly the case where a moral principle involves predicates whose extension is not given determinately apart from the principle in question.
- I believe this is also true of the predicate "human" in the principle of basic human equality.
- in Locke's account, the shape of human.....is not in the end separable from the religious reasons... If someone arrives at what purports to be a principle of human equality on other grounds (e.g., non-religious grounds), there is little reason to believe that that principle will have the same shape or texture as the Lockean principle....
- Many non-cognitivists assume that moral positions are subjective responses to factual features
- They think this is true not just of moral positions like "Causing pain is wrong," where it is clear that we can use the descriptive words "causing pain" to identify the actions concerned... but also that it is true of moral positions involving "thick" moral concepts, positions tions like "Honesty is the best policy" and "Courage cannot be taught."... concepts like honesty and courage can be analyzed into descriptive components referring to some fact about the world
- John McDowell and others have expressed doubts about the general applicability of this pattern of analysis. What, asks McDowell, makes us so confident that we can always disentangle the descriptive properties from the evaluative response?
- The descriptive features underlying a given normative attitude might well seem weird or "shapeless""
- I think a version of McDowell's point may apply to the concept human embedded in our commitment to equality.... But our concept human may be partly shaped by our commitment to equality,
- Locke's religious premises help to make sense of or give shape to a certain cluster of human characteristics
- shapelessness point deprives the Rawlsians and others who favor the bracketing approach
- All men are equal...These are familiar egalitarian propositions. To whom do they apply?...I shall devote the rest of this chapter to an exploration of some of the extraordinary difficulties thatJohn Locke gets into as he tries to answer these questions,
- John Locke asserts as a matter of principle the fundamental equality of all members of the human species. Members of this species have a special status, or occupy a special moral position quite unlike that of any other animal....any parallel for the co-members of any other species.
- But in his philosophy of science...Locke comes very close to saying that there are no such things as species....species are at best just human conventions... The danger that this poses to the moral and political argument is enormous.
- Locke is not a pragmatist, like (say) Richard Rorty, proposing to keep a whole moral system tem afloat by using some conventional commitments to evaluate others.13 His approach in the Two Treatises and in his other political writings is explicitly plicitly foundationalist,
- A causa di qs difficoltà... we have been taught by historians of the Cambridge school- in particular ular Peter Laslett and his followers to assume that Locke's politics can and should be studied in more or less complete isolation from the rest of his philosophy...."Locke is, perhaps, the least consistent of all the great philosophers,
- Ma... The actual evidence cited for Locke's having contradicted himself was always quite slight
- Well, I believe they are wrong...it is not just a matter of noticing the difficulty and then winching down God to resolve it.
- Locke talks about God's decision to "make a Species of Creatures, that should have Dominion over the other Species
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