GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITYChristian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di JEREMY WALDRON - Introduction

GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITYChristian Foundations of 'John Locke's Political Thought di  JEREMY WALDRON - Introduction

• messaggio cristiano: creati eguali...eg. di base...raccolto da locke
• domanda consueta: quale uguaglianza?
• nostra domanda: xchè l uguaglianza
• Dworkin: l eguaglianza data x scontata (il dibattito è su quale). Ma xchè tanta sicumera?
• xchè giustificare l uguaglianza?: nessuno la nega.
• ai tempi di locke era negata: filmer
• x locke l assioma dell eg. è un assioma teologico
• che fatica tradurre locke nel linguaggio di oggi
• il ponte: anche x noi l eguaglianza è un valore difficilmente relativizzabile... col relativista qui casca l asino
• il ponte: l uguaglianza come valore pre politico
• il fondamento cristiano: secondo l a. è necessario x difendere la causa dell e.
• alternative:isaia berlin e la difesa utilitaristica... argomento circolare
• confutazione di filmer: 1 primo trattato: sulla base delle scritture 2 sec. trattato: sulla base della ragione
• 1 trattato: fissa l eguaglianza 2 trattato: spiega l eguaglianza
• filmer e aristotele... inegalitarismo particolare e generale... diritto divino dei re contro schiavi naturali
• l argomento religioso x la libertà è spesso caricaturizzato... cpn locke c è l occasione di prenderlo sul serio
• .......
• equality: the proposition that humans are all one another's equals created equal,
• I propose to explore in the company ofthe seventeenth-century English political philosopher John Locke.
• Testo. The Reasonableness of Christianity is as well-worked-out a theory of basic equality as we have in the canon of political philosophy.
• Philosophers ask whether we should be aiming for equality ofwealth, equality ofincome, equality of happiness, or equality of opportunity... mitigation of poverty;
• La questino del libro. Not "What are its implications?" but "What does this foundational equality amount to?"... "What is the character of our deeper commitment to treating all human beings as equals
• Il silenzio degli egalitaristi. Distinction between basic equality and equality as an aim is fundamental to Dworkin's work. Yet Dworkin has said next to nothing... He has devoted very little energy to the task of considering what that principle amounts to in itself... He maintains that it is an obvious and generally accepted truth
• .If he is right and I think he is then there is a failure of argument on a very broad front indeed.
• No doubt part of the reason for reticence here has to do with the unpleasantness or offensiveness of the views - sexist and racist
• Esperimento mentale. In philosophy generally erally one sometimes has to pretend to be a weirdo... In political philosophy, one has to appear to take seriously positions that in other contexts would be dismissed out of hand as offensive...
• By contrast John Locke and his contemporaries...were confronted with such denials,
• Sir Robert Filmer, the great proponent of patriarchalism... and the divine right of kings...in the same Multitude ... there is one Man amongst them, that in Nature hath a Right to be king
• It was the contrary position the principle of equality that seemed radical, disreputable, beyond reason, valid only as a philosophical hypothesis
• Locke, beyond doubt, was one of these equality-radicals... Political correctness argued the other way,
• Locke accorded basic equality the strongest grounding that a principle could have: it was an axiom of theology, understood as perhaps the most important truth about God's way
• Locke attempting to think through the consequences of this radicalism.... holding fast to what he knew was a counter-intuitive position,
• We are not accustomed to debate public controversies about equality using Old Testament sources;
• "Creatures of the same Species and rank"... "there is no appeal but to Heaven"
• Even if we say it is "just" a metaphor, it is a forbidding enough task to explain to a modern student what makes the metaphor apt,
• potential for anachronism and misunderstanding,
• many of us believe that this business of respecting one another as equals might have to be referred, in turn, to the idea of something important in or about human nature.
• Locke was exploring the possibility that humans were by nature worthy of respect as one another's equals, not just one another's equals in the politics of late seventeenth-century England,
• The title of my Carlyle Lectures and the sub-title of this book refer to the Christian foundations of Locke's political thought......Why "Christian"? Why not just "Religious Foundations of Equality"?...Locke was intensely interested in Christian doctrine...Dunn has argued that the whole frame of discussion in the Two Treatises of Government is "saturated with Christian assumptions..... Jesus Christ (and Saint Paul) may not appear in person in the text of the Two Treatises but their presence can hardly be missed
• I want to ask, not only whether we can discern the influence of Christian teaching... but also whether one can even make sense of a position like Locke's.........apart from the specifically biblical and Christian teaching that he associated with it.
• For Dunn, I suspect, the theological logical and specifically biblical and Christian aspects ofLockean equality are features of Locke's theory that make it largely irrelevant to our concerns. Locke's political theory of its theological foundations is a way of confining Locke to the seventeenth century.
• the deep philosophical commitments ments of a modern theory would likely be oriented to secular values such as autonomy or dignity or human flourishing,
• Tesi. I actually don't think it is clear that we now can shape and defend an adequate conception of basic human equality apart from some religious foundation.
• Isaiah Berlin, for example, imagines that there might be a utilitarian defense of basic equality.... But that is hopelessly confused.
• "Every man to count for one, nobody for more than one"32 is partly constitutive of utilitarianism, and so cannot be defended on utilitarian grounds except in a question-begging way.
• Locke confronted the claim, put forward in his own time, that these fundamental, apparently transcendent positions, could be understood on a purely secular basis. He had grave reservations about these claims,
• To treat Locke's argument as though it were a secular argument.... is one sort of anachronism.
• One has only to read the first of Locke's Two Treatises to become aware that we are in a quite different intellectual world
• Every Locke scholar, and not just those of a secular bent, views the methods and substance of the First Treatise as strange and disconcerting... "reason" part of the argument is mostly presented in the Second Treatise... So it is tempting to say that the First Treatise is just irrelevant to our modern concerns.
• Of course, part of John Locke's interest in the specifically biblical part of his argument is connected with the determination, driving his work in the Two Treatises, to refute the specific claims of Sir Robert Filmer,
• the most familiar philosophic defense of general inegalitarianism, namely Aristotle's theory of natural slavery.
• Filmer's primary interest is in identifying specific individuals who have authority over others, rather than classes or types of individual in some general hierarchy.4° A theory of the divine right of kings is particularistic... So this too seems to deprive Filmer's theory and its refutation of most of its interest for us.
• as Locke points out, Filmer is not consistent in his particularism....but much ofthe time he seems to be arguing for absolute authority in the abstract... Locke's attack at this point is one of the most powerful
• nobody in particular could possibly have the authority that Filmer says Adam and his heirs have had because of the relation that God has established among people in general.
• dispel the impression, which John Dunn's article might leave us with, that Locke is so different from us... Locke like us is interested in the meta-theoretical question
• First Treatise is an indispensable resource in the reconstruction of Locke's theory of equality... The First Treatise is nothing but a defense of the proposition that humans are, basically, one another's equals; it is a defense of the basis on which the Second Treatise proceeds.
• Secular theorists often assume that they know what a religious argument is like........a crude prescription from God,l.......they contrast it with the elegant complexity of a philosophical argument by Rawls (say) or Dworkin.... I suspect that it might be as caricatural.... ma.... Religious arguments ments are more challenging
• One virtue, then, of devoting all this time and all this space to an analysis and elaboration of Locke's religious case for equality is that it promises not only to deepen our understanding

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