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it is like to make a religious argument in politics. 2 Read more at location 323
Note: uomo donna 1 entrambi a immagine di dio 2 entrambi dotati di ragione => la diseguaglianza prospettata è quindi di ruolo 2@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
awkwardness at the prospect at having to make explicit whatever religious or spiritual assumptions lie behind our conviction that humans are special and that some of the more obvious differences between them are irrelevant to the fundamentals of moral concern and respect.Read more at location 324
discomfited at the prospect of having to take seriously, even if only for the sake of clarity and refutation, racist and sexist positions that seem to deny this equality.Read more at location 325
In this chapter, however, I would like to introduce the substance of my discussion of Locke's egalitarianism by focusing on what many regard as the most striking difference within the human species the difference between men and women. Read more at location 331
The biblical subordination of Eve to Adam can be seen as a privileging of Adam in particular and his particular (male) heirs, or it can be seen as a privileging of men generallyRead more at location 339
come to terms with the fact that women as much as men are created in the image of God and endowed with the modicum of reason that is, for Locke, the criterion of human equality.Read more at location 343
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3 Read more at location 602
Note: 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 3@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit
Macintyre's observation that, as he read the Two Treatises of Government, the arguments of John Locke concerning basic equality and individual rights were so imbued with religious content that they were not fit, constitutionally, to be taught in the public schools of the United States of America.Read more at location 604
Why are we not able to bracket off the theological dimension of Locke's commitment to equality?Read more at location 612
The hope that some trick like this can be pulled off, the belief that some such bracketing must be possible if not for Locke's theory, then perhaps for Kant's, or at least for some recognizable commitment to equality this hope is crucial for modern secular liberalism.Read more at location 614
Rawls's system definitely requires a premise of equality, a premise strong enough to structure the original position and substantial enough to provide a basis for mutual respect in a well-ordered society;3 Read more at location 616
according to the Rawlsian scheme, the very same principle of equality must be conceivable and defensible from a variety of philosophical perspectives, some religious and some not.4Read more at location 619
The hypothesis that we might be able to bracket out the religious content and concentrate on equality itself presupposes that the religious content has a purely external relation to the equality principle.Read more at location 621
Consider, for example, the relation of some proposition about a commander to the content of his command.Read more at location 622
For example, the Sixth Commandment has a content "Thou shalt not kill" which seems logically quite independent of any proposition about whose commandment it was or is, a content which may be debated and responded to quite independently of any issue about what one might call the preface to the Decalogue "I am the Lord thy God,Read more at location 624
The latter material is incontestably religious. But the meaning of the commandment itself does not appear to depend on it.Read more at location 626
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.6Read more at location 628
There the religious aspect seems to have an internal relation to the commandment,Read more at location 629
Someone might object that this confuses content with reasons. A given principle, with a specific content, might be supported by any number of different reasons,Read more at location 630
the fact that P is cited as a reason for Q doesn't mean that P is indispensable for understanding the meaning of QRead more at location 632
Now this is sometimes true, especially where the reasons in question establish nothing but an instrumental relationshipRead more at location 633
But I think the Rawlsians overestimate the extent to which it is true generally, particularly in the domain of justice. Abstract principles of justice and rights characteristically need to be filled out and interpreted and it is quite implausible to suppose that this can be done without reference to the reasons that support them.Read more at location 634
I have argued this elsewhere with regard to John Stuart Mill's "Harm Principle."8Read more at location 636
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.Read more at location 639
I believe this is also true of the predicate "human" in the principle of basic human equality.Read more at location 643
in Locke's account, the shape of human, the way in which the extension of the predicate "human" is determined, is not in the end separable from the religious reasons that Locke cites in support of basic equality. 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.Read more at location 643
Many non-cognitivists assume that moral positions are subjective responses to factual features of the world that can be specified quite independently of the response.Read more at location 648
The idea is that "thick" concepts like honesty and courage can be analyzed into descriptive components referring to some fact about the world and evaluative components indicating some attitudinal or prescriptive response to that fact.9Read more at location 651
What, asks McDowell, makes us so confident that we can always disentangle the descriptive properties from the evaluative response?Read more at location 654
The descriptive features underlying a given normative attitude might well seem weird or "shapeless""Read more at location 657
I think a version of McDowell's point may apply to the concept human embedded in our commitment to equality.Read more at location 658
But our concept human may be partly shaped by our commitment to equality, and may not be intelligible in a free-standing way,Read more at location 660
Locke's religious premises help to make sense of or give shape to a certain cluster of human characteristicsRead more at location 662
On its own, however, the shapelessness point deprives the Rawlsians and others who favor the bracketing approach of a quick and easy victory.Read more at location 664
extraordinary difficulties thatJohn Locke gets into as he tries to answer these questions, difficulties that I think threaten the viability of his whole position in the Two Treatises. Read more at location 670
John Locke asserts as a matter of principle the fundamental equality of all members of the human species.'2 Members of this species have a special status, or occupy a special moral position quite unlike that of any other animal.Read more at location 671
in a way that also does not have any parallel for the co-members of any other species.Read more at location 672
Locke comes very close to saying that there are no such things as species.Read more at location 675
The danger that this poses to the moral and political argument is enormous.Read more at location 677
Locke is not a pragmatist, like (say) Richard Rorty, proposing to keep a whole moral system afloat by using some conventional commitments to evaluate others.13 His approach in the Two Treatises and in his other political writings is explicitly foundationalist,Read more at location 679
Locke's politics can and should be studied in more or less complete isolation from the rest of his philosophy.Read more at location 687
The actual evidence cited for Locke's having contradicted himself was always quite slightRead more at location 695
So I guess it is understandable that readers who come up against this difficulty are tempted to take advantage of the myth of a disjunction between Locke the philosopher and Locke the political pamphleteer, and to try and immunize the premises of the political account against the contagion of Locke's philosophical skepticism about species.Read more at location 707
Locke talks about God's decision to "make a Species of Creatures, that should have Dominion over the other Species of this Terrestrial Globe"Read more at location 728
In the present chapter, however, we are considering the importance that Locke attaches to the dividing line between human and non-human species:Read more at location 729
It is an ordered hierarchy, a `great chain of being', in which every species has its station, its rank."15Read more at location 735
Locke's human egalitarianism depends crucially on the clarity and intelligibility of the species-boundaries.Read more at location 738
we turn to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. What Locke says there about species is almost entirely at odds with the conception of species-hierarchyRead more at location 744
Locke envisages a series of created beings, ascending from the lowest entity to the highest,Read more at location 745
this chain of being forms a continuous series of entities, rather than a clearly divided seriesRead more at location 747
We language-users have no choice but to confront this continuum with words.28Read more at location 757
difference between this particular cat and that particular dog. Nothing in nature shows that these resemblances and differences categorize themselves into essences of species.Read more at location 762
there is no reason to think that our tendency to organize resemblances into clusters under the auspices of general species-terms reflects anything other than our propensity as language-users to make use of general words.Read more at location 763
I think this offers little in the way of assistance for our use of the concept species in moral and political theory.Read more at location 768
Sometimes Locke presents the unavailability to us of objective real essences as a reflection of the limitations on our knowledge.Read more at location 794
This seems to hold the real essence hostage to the arbitrariness of the nominal essenceRead more at location 812
the putative boundaries between humans and other animals are blurred in a number of ways. Fetuses are sometimes oddly shaped, familiarly shaped humans often vary enormously in their rational abilities, some allegedly non-human animals have been rumored to have the power of speech, humans have been known to interbreed with apes (Locke alleges), and so on: Read more at location 819
The fact is, says Locke, that you are likely to get disagreement among people as to how to draw the boundaries of the species:Read more at location 824
Some people, he concedes, may add a criterion of rationality: they understand by "man" not just a featherless biped, but a rational animal. But then what we have are two rival classifications so that, as Locke says in the Essay, the same individual will be a true man to the one classifier which is not so to the otherRead more at location 832
But again, which internal features caught our attention would be a matter of which were inherently interesting to us, or else which external appearances we wanted to understand the causality of. Either way, it is our interests that would dictate what revisions we made in (what we called) the essence of man.38Read more at location 840
when he talks about fetal monstrosities, Locke says that there is a question about whether the entity is entitled to baptismRead more at location 846
I think this shows the absurdity of the Laslett suggestion that we have, on the one hand, Locke the philosopher (uninterested in normative implications) and, on the other hand, Locke the political theorist (uninterested in philosophy).Read more at location 849
implications for the moral and political philosophy. On the face of it, the implications of Locke's skepticism about species are pretty serious. If the boundaries of species are made by men and not given by our CreatorRead more at location 851
"the same individual will be a true Man to the one [party], which is not so to the other"Read more at location 853
Locke's comment in Book IV of the Essay, on how an English child might "prove" that a negro is not a man, is really quite disconcerting in this regard.4°Read more at location 857
by rejecting essentialism, Locke is undercutting those theories of human inequality that depend on "essentializing" superficial characteristics like skin color or sex organs. Kathy Squadrito says, for example, that Locke's rejection of external form as real essence means that he doesn't really think there is an important difference between men and women.4'Read more at location 863
the point about Locke's anti-essentialism is that it leaves the field wide open for anyone to draw the boundariesRead more at location 865
It leaves him with no naturalistic basis whatsoever for distinguishing those creatures one is allowed to hunt, exploit, enslave,Read more at location 868
Locke is also supposed to have committed himself to a fundamental principle of equality: members of the same species are naturally equal in authority, whatever the other differences between them. But now that species-based notion has collapsed,Read more at location 872
Locke seems to have deprived himself of the resource he needs to limitRead more at location 875
My strategy in this chapter is to show the indispensability for Locke's theory of equality of the religious aspect of his argumentRead more at location 876
It is important to see that, at the stage of the argument we have reached, neither God nor scripture can supply the deficiency of science,Read more at location 878
The species-difficulty arises because even if God has announced that all humans are created equal and commanded us to treat them as such, we still face the problem of defining the classRead more at location 880
In biblical revelation, the only direct intimation of a basis for the distinction of the human species is descent from Adam.Read more at location 881
Anyway, a purely genealogical basis for equality and inequality would be practically inadequate.Read more at location 889
Locke says in his political philosophy that any basis for inequality must be evident, clear, and mmnifest.45Read more at location 892
So what is to be done? I think that in order to make Locke's account of equality in the Two Treatises consistent with his discussion in Book III ofthe Essay, we have to forget about real essences, and abandon the emphasis on species altogether. I think we should focus instead onRead more at location 900
We have to make do with that. We must ask which resemblances are actually doing the crucial workRead more at location 902
The emphasis now is on characteristics not on species or ranks of species. The domain of equality will simply be the domain of relevant similarity i.e. the possession of faculties that can be regarded as the same or (relevantly) similar.Read more at location 908
we have to start from the idea of a similarity among faculties that would be robust enough to sustainRead more at location 912
focusing moral attention not on species, but on the complex property of corporeal rationality.Read more at location 922
the detail of the issue about species can be left as a purely speculative problem for the naturalists and philosophers.50 Read more at location 924
By showing a philosophical difference between species and real resemblance, he puts himself in a position to explore in a philosophically rigorous way the possibility that morality requires only the latter, not the former. Read more at location 927
him associating basic equality, not with species-membership, but with a certainRead more at location 930
Locke. The key, he says, is corporeal rationality.Read more at location 968
It is intriguing, though, that corporeality is also invoked "a corporeal rational Being"Read more at location 971
This little point, I believe, is quite unintelligible apart from the moral theology. Locke speculates that there are all sorts of rational beings in the cosmosRead more at location 972
Unfortunately, however, imago del does not solve the following problem. On the one hand, non-human animals have minds, at least to the extent of having and acting on ideas and combinations of ideas (E: 2.11.5-7). Since they are "not bare Machins (as some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some Reason"Read more at location 979
There are degrees of rationality, both among those we are pre-theoretically inclined to call humans and in a broader class of animalsRead more at location 991
Once again, it is Locke himself who provides the raw material for this skeptical, anti-egalitarian approach.Read more at location 993
There is, for example, the human fetus, which, Locke says, "dfers not much from the State of a Vegetable...Read more at location 994
Locke's argument is that they are to be treated as beings destined for equality, though not our equals at present. Read more at location 1005
And finally there are the familiar distinctions between the wise and the silly,Read more at location 1011
If there is, as Locke says, "a difference of degrees in Men's UnderstandingsRead more at location 1014
there is a greater distance between some Men and others in this respect than between some Men and some Beasts" (E: 4.20.5), then how can we work with or justify any notion of basic equality?Read more at location 1015
that, considered as tabulae rasae, our minds are all the same, and that the intellectual differences between us are simply a matter of input and exercise.Read more at location 1018
In Book II of the Essay, he argued that what distinguishes humans from other animals is not their capacity to reason per se - for brute animals have some sort of reason - but rather the "power of Abstracting," the capacity to reason on the basis of general ideas.Read more at location 1027
But he quickly indicates that many who bear the nominal essence of man lack the ability to abstract. Many of those we call idiotsRead more at location 1035
Locke is not offering this capacity to abstract as the real essence of the species human. He is offering it as an interesting resemblance among all the beingsRead more at location 1037
for Locke the real resemblance on which basic equality rests the ability to form and work with abstract ideas must work rather like what modern political philosophers call a range property.Read more at location 1045
A range property may be understood in terms of a region on a scale.Read more at location 1048
we may use the binary property of being within the range,Read more at location 1049
In John Rawls's own use of the idea, the relevant range property is the capacity for moral personality.Read more at location 1055
Relative to the interest driving the specification of the range property, the precise location of an entity on the scale is uninteresting. That it is Within the range is all we need to knowRead more at location 1066
No matter how inadequate the average human intellect is for a "universal, or perfect Comprehension," it yet secures their great Concernments, that they have Light enough to lead them to the Knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own DutiesRead more at location 1077
The existence of God, Locke believes, is something that can be established by the unaided human intellect, whatever that intellect's other limitations.Read more at location 1081
Some argue, says Locke, that it is "suitable to the goodness of God" (E: 1.4.12) to imprint an idea of His being directly on our minds. But God has used a different strategy. He has conferred on those whom He intends to serve Him the rational power that is required for easy recognition of His existence.Read more at location 1084
Anyone with the capacity for abstraction can reason to the existence of God,Read more at location 1087
The fact that a being can get this far, intellectually, by whatever route, shows that he is a creature with a special moral relation to God.Read more at location 1096
if I catch a human in full possession of his faculties, I know I should be careful how I deal with him. Because creatures capable of abstraction can be conceived as "all the servants of one Sovereign Master,Read more at location 1101
That, it seems to me, is the interest that is driving and shaping Locke's moral conception of "man," and motivating the interest in the particular range of capacities that forms the basis for Lockean equality. Read more at location 1104
Someone in denial of or indifferent to the existence of God is not going to be able to come up with anything like the sort of basis for equality that Locke came up with.Read more at location 1109
There is no reason for an atheist to recognize such a threshold, and there is no reason to believe that he could defend it if he did. The atheist has no basis in his philosophy for thinking that beings endowed with the capacity that Locke emphasizes are for that reason to be treated as special and sacred in the way Locke thought. Read more at location 1115
Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them. The theological content cannot simply be bracketed off as a curiosityRead more at location 1118
Lockean equality is not fit to be taught as a secular doctrine; it is a conception of equality that makes no sense except in the light of a particular account of the relation between man and God. Read more at location 1120
