GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - seconsa parte cap. 3 Species and the Shape of Equality

GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY Christian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di  JEREMY WALDRON -     seconda parte cap. 3 Species and the Shape of Equality

• the importance that Locke attaches to the dividing line between human and non-human species
• "The entire cosmos is the work of God....It is an ordered hierarchy, a `great chain of being', in which every species has its station, its rank."...
• Locke's human egalitarianism depends crucially on the clarity and intelligibility of the species-boundaries.
• we turn to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. standing. What Locke says there about species is almost entirely at odds with the conception of species-hierarchy
• Locke envisages ages a series of created beings, ascending from the lowest entity to the highest... But it ascends up from us "by gentle degrees"... this chain of being forms a continuous series of entities..."no Chasms, or gaps" between beings
• We language-users have no choice but to confront this continuum with words............difference between this particular cat and that particular dog. Nothing in nature shows that these resemblances and differences categorize themselves into essences.... 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.
• I think this offers little in the way of assistance for our use of the concept species in moral and political theory....Locke's account of real essences is far from straightforward...I believe it is basically a pragmatic one:
• Sometimes Locke presents the unavailability to us of objective real essences as a reflection of the limitations on our knowledge.
• In general, we seem to have here a pretty thorough-going anti-realism, so far as species are concerned.
• the putative boundaries between humans mans and other animals are blurred in a number of ways. Fetuses are sometimes oddly shaped, familiarly shaped humans often vary enormously mously 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:
• The fact is, says Locke, that you are likely to get disagreement among people as to how to draw the boundaries of the species:
• which internal features caught our attention would be a matter ter of which were inherently interesting to us....it is our interests that would dictate what revisions we made in (what we called) the essence of man.
• when he talks about fetal monstrosities, Locke says that there is a question about whether the entity is entitled to baptism.....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).
• 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 Creator... "the same individual will be a true Man to the one [party], which is not so to the other"... 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°
• 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 portant difference between men and women.4'
• the point about Locke's anti-essentialism is that it leaves the field wide open for anyone to draw the boundaries...It leaves him with no naturalistic basis whatsoever for distinguishing those creatures
• Maybe this should boost the morale of anti-speciesist defenders of animal rights; but it is hardly calculated to cheer those who think there is something special about humans and human equality.
• 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...Locke seems to have deprived himself of the resource he needs to limit
• My strategy in this chapter is to show the indispensability for Locke's theory of equality of the religious aspect of his argument
• In biblical revelation, the only direct intimation of a basis for the distinction of the human species is descent from Adam.... Anyway, a purely genealogical basis for equality and inequality would be practically inadequate.
• Locke says in his political philosophy that any basis for inequality must be evident, clear, and mmnifest.
• Senso comune. 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 on   real resemblances between particulars:... We must ask which resemblances are actually doing the crucial work... That will give us his definition of humanity...
• .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 ity i.e. the possession of faculties that can be regarded as the same or (relevantly) similar.
• Our heuristic now is emphatically...we have to start from the idea of a similarity among faculties that would be robust enough to sustain
• focusing moral attention not on species, but on the complex property of corporeal rationality.... the detail of the issue about species can be left as a purely speculative problem for the naturalists and philosophers.
• Locke. The key, he says, is corporeal rationality...It is intriguing, though, that corporeality is also invoked... This little point, I believe, is quite unintelligible apart from the moral theology. ogy. Locke speculates that there are all sorts of rational beings in the cosmos
• .I don't think he is attempting to commit the naturalistic fallacy by inferring our normative equality from some factual similarity. He says in the Second Treatise that the connection is "evident" (2nd T: 4), but that this is not the same as saying that it is logically implied... like angels, for instance,
• Let us turn now to the rationality criterion....Unfortunately,...non-human animals have minds,... Since they are "not bare Machins (as some would have them), we cannot deny them to have some Reason"
• There are degrees of rationality, both among those we are pre-theoretically inclined to call humans and in a broader class of animals...On this gradual scale, who gets the benefit of equality?
• There is, for example, the human fetus, which, Locke says, "dfers not much from the State of a Vegetable...lunacy, idiocy.......Infants are a slightly different case,.... Locke's argument is that they are to be treated as beings destined for equality, though not our equals at present.... And finally there are the familiar distinctions between the wise and the silly,
• If there is, as Locke says, "a difference of degrees in Men's Understandings...there is a greater distance between some Men and others in this respect than between tween some Men and some Beasts" (E: 4.20.5), then how can we work with or justify any notion of basic equality?
• 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.
• 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.... So, maybe this is Locke's equality-threshold.
• But he quickly indicates that many who bear the nominal essence of man lack the ability to abstract. Many of those we call idiots
• 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 beings
• 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....A range property may be understood in terms of a region on a scale.... we may use the binary property of being within the range,l... In John Rawls's own use of the idea, the relevant range property is the capacity for moral personality.
• Relative to the interest driving the specification of the range property, the precise location tion of an entity on the scale is uninteresting. That it is Within the range is all we need to know...Is there anything which can do this work for Locke?
• No matter how inadequate the average human intellect is for a "universal, sal, 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 Duties... The existence of God, Locke believes, is something that can be established by the unaided human intellect, whatever that intellect's other limitations.
• God .... He has conferred on those whom He intends to serve Him the rational power that is required for easy recognition of His existence.... Anyone with the capacity for abstraction can reason to the existence of God... he has the minimal capacity to think of himself as a person.
• 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.
• 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,
• 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.
• 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.
• There is no reason for an atheist to recognize such a threshold... 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.
• Locke's equality claims are not separable from the theological content that shapes and organizes them. The theological content cannot simply ply be bracketed off as a curiosity
• 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.

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