Locke and Hume the Enlightenment

Locke and Hume

The Enlightenment was a time when man, stepping out of his shackles, began to use his rational facilities and pulled himself out of the medieval pits of mysticism and in the process shoved aside the state and church authorities of the day. It was a spontaneous and defused movement which fed upon itself and led to the great scientific discoveries from which we all benefit today. Beliefs in natural law and universal order sprung up, which not only promoted scientific findings and advancements of a material nature, but which also gave a scientific approach to political and social issues. One, foremost among their ranks, was John Locke (1632-1704) and David Hume (1711-76). In this paper, we will examine their view on ethics and morality, focusing on their treatments of the following concepts: state of nature, social compact, and role of the government

Moral philosophy

The moral dimension of our everyday experience is a pervasive fact. Moral philosopy seeks to make sense of this moral dimension in our lives. Moral philosophy seeks to make sense of this dimension in our lives, the philosophical study of morality, by its reasoned approach to the concepts that figure centrally in our moral judgments, can help us be more objective. In particular, it can help us by alerting us to some of the characteristic deceptions that prevent us from seeing our own moral virtues and defects.

The philosopher's approach to such topics as good and evil or vice or virtue differs in important ways from that of the social scientist or theologian. A sociologist or an anthropologist, for example, describes and interprets a society's mores and is careful to keep the account morally neutral. A theologi an will call on us to act in a particular way and to avoid certain sinful practices. The moral philosopher instead will explain what makes an act right or a person virtuous. In discussing criteria of right action and virtuous character, the philosopher will try to show certain traits, such as honesty, generosity, and courage are worthy, and others, such as hypocrispy, selfishness, and cowardices are not. More generally, the moral philosopher seeks a clear and well-reasoned answer to the question: "What does it mean to be moral?"

Both Locke and Hume attempt to answer this question in terms of what we, as responsible agents confronting wrong and right, ought to do. The emphasis is not becoming a virtuous individual, but, rather, on how people should act in relation to society and government. Both Locke and Hume's philosophy on morality in the public sphere are critiques of Thomas Hobbes' justification of the absolutist monarch in Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Hobbes held that all humans are basically selfish. Without society, they would dwell in a "state of nature" living in fear and engaged in a war of all against all. This was a time of continual strife and ignorance. Hobbes characterized the life in the State of Natura as " solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Persons in the state of nature would have had the right of nature to perserve themselves by whatever means necessary. But no individual in this natural state would be strong enough to feel secure, so it was to everybody's benefit to obtain a measure of security by forming a society in which one gives up one's freedom to do as one wishes. In society one places oneself under a sovreign. In return for this, one receives the security afforded by sovreign protection.

The compact that a people makes with its sovreign is known as the social contract. The beginnings of the social contract idea was first expounded by Plato in the Republic. In Book II of the Republic, Glaucon offers a candidate for an answer to the question "what is justice?" By discussing the myth of Gyges, a shepherd who possessed a magical ring that rendered him invisible, enabling him to do as he pleased without fear of reprisal. In the myth, he used it to murder the King of Lydia. What men would most want is to be able to commit injustices against others without the fear of reprisal, and what they most want to avoid is being treated unjustly by others without being able to do injustice in return. Justice then, he says, is the conventional result of the laws and covenants that men make in order to avoid these extremes. Being unable to commit injustice with impunity (as those who wear the ring of Gyges would), and fearing becoming victims themselves, men decide that it is in their interests to submit themselves to the convention of justice.

For Hobbes, the social contract is constituted by two distinguishable contracts. First, they must agree to establish society by collectively and reciprocally renouncing the rights they had against one another in the State of Nature. Second, they must imbue some one person or assembly of persons with the authority and power to enforce the initial contract. In other words, to ensure their escape from the State of Nature, they must both agree to live together under common laws, and create an enforcement mechanism for the social contract and the laws that constitute it. Since the sovereign is invested with the authority and power to mete out punishments for breaches of the contract which are worse than not being able to act as one pleases, men have good, albeit self-interested, reason to adjust themselves to the artifice of morality in general, and justice in particular. Society becomes possible because, whereas in the State of Nature there was no power able to "overawe them all," now there is an artificially and conventionally superior and more powerful person who can force men to cooperate

State of Nature

Locke's most important and influential political writings are contained in his Two Treatises on Government. The first treatise is concerned almost exclusively with refuting the argument of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, that political authority was derived from religious authority, also known by the description of the Divine Right of Kings, which was a very dominant theory in seventeenth-century England. The second treatise contains Locke's own constructive view of the aims and justification for civil government, and is titled "An Essay Concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government. Unlike Hobbes, Locke, viewed man as naturally moral; however, he did not consider man to be a divine creature fixed with ideas on coming into this world. Locke was an empiricist, that is, all knowledge comes to us through experience. As he explained in the Essay on Human Understanding, there is no such thing as innate ideas; there is no such thing as moral precepts; we are born with an empty mind, with a soft tablet (tabula rasa) ready to be written upon by the pen of experience According to Locke, the State of Nature, the natural condition of mankind, is a state of perfect and complete liberty to conduct one's life as one best sees fit, free from the interference of others. This does not mean, however, that it is a state of license: one is not free to do anything at all one pleases, or even anything that one judges to be in one's interest. The State of Nature, although a state wherein there is no civil authority or government to punish people for transgressions against laws, is not a state without morality. The State of Nature is pre-political, but it is not pre-moral. Persons are assumed to be equal to one another in such a state, and therefore equally capable of discovering and being bound by the Law of Nature. The Law of Nature, which is on Locke's view the basis of all morality, and given to us by God, commands that we not harm others with regards to their "life, health, liberty, or possessions" (par. 6). Because we all belong equally to God, and because we cannot take away that which is rightfully His, we are prohibited from harming one another. So, the State of Nature is a state of liberty where persons are free to pursue their own interests and plans, free from interference, and, because of the Law of Nature and the restrictions that it imposes upon persons, it is relatively peaceful.

On the other hand, David Hume did not believe that man had an innate nature. Hence, for Hume, that the state of nature is mythical and thought there is little practical point speculating about the forgotten past of the human race,

Instead he turned his attention to creating a psychological theory that explained why people obey authority. For Hume, man was basically an animal, an animal which must make up for its lack of claws, fur, an agility, and prowess by developing intelligence and coopertaion with other. It is by cooperation that man is able to supply his defects, and raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures, and even acquire a superiority above them. (Hume, 1985)

Social Contract

For Locke, the reason man would willingly contract into civil society is not to shake his brutish state, but rather that he may advance his ends (peace and security) in a more efficient manner. To achieve his ends man gives up, in favour of the state, a certain amount of his personal power and freedom Pre-social man as a moral being, and as an individual, contracted out "into civil society by surrendering personal power to the ruler and magistrates, and did so as "a method of securing natural morality more efficiently." To Locke, natural justice exists and this is so whether the state exists, or not, it is just that the state might better guard natural justice Locke in his works dwelt with and expanded upon the concept of government power: it is not, nor can it possibly be, absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people. For it being but the joint power of every member of the society given up to the legislative assembly, the power vested in the assembly can be no greater than that which the people had in a state of Nature before they entered into society, and gave it up to the community. For nobody can transfer, to another, more power than he possesses himself, and nobody has an absolute arbitrary power over any other, to destroy, or take away, the life or property of another. In Chapter 11 of the Second Treatise in Two Treatises of Government (1680-1690), he notes that the power of legislators]... is limited to the public good of the society. It is a power that hath no other end but preservation, and therefore can never have a right to destroy, enslave, or designedly to impoverish the subjects... To this end it is that men give up all their natural power to the society they enter into, and the community put the legislative power into such hands as they think fit, with this trust, that they shall be governed by declared laws, or else their peace, quiet, and property will still be at the same uncertainty as it was in the state of Nature.

Hume rejects not only Hobbes' particular account of the role of the Sovereign, but also the whole social contract tradition. The concept of the social contract cannot, by itself, explain the binding force of our moral obligations because it relies on the obligation that we have to keep our promises. In a classic essay, "Of the Original Contract," Hume argues that the social contract tradition relies on the thought that one ought to obey the Sovereign because one had promised to do so; h However, Hume writes, theorists in this tradition find [themselves] embarrassed when it is asked, why are we bound to keep our word? (Hume, 1985). Hume puts far less emphasis on the role of the Sovereign. The reason for this can be traced back to Hume's more optimistic view of human nature. Given that we all have experience of the benefits of co-operation and agreement (in interactions with those we care about), Hume conceives of the problem of trust not as the problem of having to convince mutually antagonistic egoists to co-operate. Rather, it is the problem of reassuring persons who know of the benefits of co-operation that, if they co-operate, they will not be vulnerable to those who would take advantage of them. The solution, then, lies in each person seeing the advantages made possible by such 'artifices' as rules of property and justice. These conventions - these restraints on the unrestricted pursuit of self-interest - find approval, as Hume puts it, 'in the judgement and understanding' because of the great advantages that they make possible.

The Role of Government

The question of whether man would voluntarily put himself under government is but the first question: there then follows along the next, "What form of government is best." Hobbes, not surprisingly, given his view of the nature of man, preferred that there should be one supreme authority, a monarchy. While Hobbes could tolerate government by legislative assembly alone, as opposed to a monarch, he thought that power in the assembly should be absolute and not to be shared.. Locke's view, more consistent with the social contract theory, was that there was no need for government to have great powers, which, in the final analysis, would only be needed to keep people down; at any rate, Locke recognized the real danger of leaving absolute power to any one individual, or group of individuals nd thought that government's power was best limited by dividing government up into branches, with each branch having only as much power as is needed for its proper function.:for Locke, the rights given up by individuals in the social contract are limited. There is no way that an invidual, even if they had the power so to do, coul give another individual or governemental entitity an absolute arbitrary power over their persons and estates. To do so would put themselves into a worse condition than the state of Nature, where, at least, they had a liberty to defend their right against the injuries of others, and were able to defend their rights.