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0:00 Speaker: This is a Partially Examined Life episode preview. You'll find the full episode available for purchase in the music section of the Itunes store or at partiallyexaminedlife.com store for unlimited access to our back catalog. You can become a pel citizen@priallyexaminedlife.com membership. Membership also includes access to discussion groups with other listeners, as well as ad free versions of current episodes and a host of other bonus content, all available from a single convenient feed that you can use with a variety of podcast apps.
0:42 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some people who at one point set on doing philosophy for living or something like that, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 337 is what justifies political power? And we are reading John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and its full name is what? What's the full name?
1:09 Seth: There's the Two Treatises on Government, and this is Second Treatise of Government.
1:14 Mark: It has a name here it is Second Treatise on Government, An Essay concerning the True Original Extent and End of Civil Government. There you go. Which was from Damn
1:28 Seth: glad to see you were prepared from 1690.
1:31 Mark: Thank you. My name is Mark Linsenmeier, well prepared for Madison, Wisconsin.
1:36 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, reserving my right to punish offenders and be the executioner of the law of nature in Austin, Texas.
1:44 Wes: And this is Sabrina Weiss in Troy, New York, defending my property against zombie aggressors.
1:52 Mark: Very nice. Yes, Sabrina, our guest, our fake Wes for today.
1:58 Wes: Ooh, I'm a fake Wes. Should I drop my voice lower?
2:01 Seth: I think that's unfair.
2:04 Mark: Can you do the Dr. Hibbert laugh?
2:08 Wes: Don't think I can quite pull that off.
2:11 Mark: All right, Sabrina, who are you? Why are you here?
2:13 Wes: I am Currently a PhD student in Science and technology studies. I started listening to this podcast, what Is It Now? About a year ago and butted into a discussion on Kant and said a little bit too much. And then I caught Mark's attention. My background is ethical philosophy. I did high school debate, which focused on values and philosophy. It was called Lincoln Douglas Debating. And then years later, I came back and coached it. I went into bioethics and recently completed a master's degree in that. And. And that wasn't enough schooling for me, so I decided to go for this PhD program.
2:52 Seth: And what august institution of learning are you studying at?
2:56 Wes: I am at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
3:00 Seth: A good friend of mine here in Austin is a graduate of that fine institution.
3:04 Wes: It is an interesting place. I'm surrounded by a bunch of engineers and Science people. And our department basically makes a lot of enemies by talking about how science is socially constructed and challenging what they think is absolute truth.
3:19 Seth: Right on. I'm in favor of that.
3:21 Mark: All right, Mr. Locke. So this is our third podcast on social contract stuff. If you go back in time, go to partiallyexaminedlife.com and hit the Podcast Episodes tab. You will see, if you scroll back a bit, one on Rousseau, who is about 100 years after Locke, and one on Hobbes, who is 25, 30 years before this was written. And Locke, of course, is the guy that's credited with being the most influential on the Constitution, on the Declaration of Independence, on the founding documents of our country. So thus, it is worth your time. Although I was struck, in looking back at it, how weird a number of the points are. They're not exactly what you would expect. It's not exactly the Declaration of Independence, and people on the left and right continue to be inspired by it today in its ambiguous advocacy of unlimited ownership, for instance.
4:12 Wes: Should we be glad that at least they're still reading philosophy?
4:16 Seth: I don't believe anybody who cites this is actually reading it.
4:19 Wes: That's the point.
4:20 Mark: They're reading blogs that mention it.
4:23 Seth: People are constantly talking about the Founding Fathers. Locke was not a Founding Father.
4:28 Mark: Not quite.
4:29 Seth: He was like a founding grandfather, perhaps. So where do we start with this thing?
4:34 Mark: We could say a little bit about, just briefly, his biography. So this was 1689. Again, 1651 was Hobbes, Leviathan. And that was really influential. Hobbes. And a lot of people responded to it. But this, which apparently might have even been written like 10 years earlier or something like that, I read speculation about that. So it's not exactly clear what political crisis of his moment he was responding to. But in any case, he was a doctor. He was the private physician of the Earl of Shaftesbury, right.
5:02 Seth: At this time.
5:03 Mark: And at one point, he got exiled, not for his writing, but just because he was associated with political factions that were out of fashion for a little while, but then he got to go back, so it wasn't so bad.
5:12 Wes: Well, if you're not exiled for what you write, you probably weren't writing something interesting.
5:18 Mark: Right. This reading did not catch fire really quickly. It was quite a few decades after that. And then, of course, when we get to the American and French revolutions, so almost a hundred years later, then people are quoting this all over the place. And most of the people that he was arguing against are not, seemingly not legitimate live positions right now. Right. In fact, the first Treatise on Government is all just a response to Filmer. Is that the guy's name? It's a response to some dude who argued for absolute monarchy based on the line of succession coming from Adam.
So in other words, God gave Adam the earth, therefore by right it should go to Adam's eldest son and Adam's next eldest son, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I guess this was enough in vogue that Locke felt the need to write his whole first treatise responding specifically to that, to the point that, well, nobody really knows who the descendants of Adam are directly and no king has actually claimed this as their reason for being in power. And so really, if you should resist any leader that is not a direct descendant of Adam that you could prove it, then all citizens should resist all governments.
So it's a reductio ad absurdum against that ridiculous view. So the second treatise here is his constructive one where he's looking at the different sources of power, parental power, political power, power of master over slave, and just talking about sort of how each of them comes to be in its legitimate sphere of influence.
6:41 Wes: One thing I really liked was how he starts out with that where he's contesting the idea of the divine right of kings. And all the reasoning that he has in here is his attempt to come up with secular reasons with human rights based reasons for why we have these laws, why we appoint people to govern us and such. And he'll keep throwing bones where he says, oh, but we know that God is the creator of everyone and we that we all have to recognize God. But it's still interesting in how he is trying to develop these more secular reasons.
7:13 Mark: And interestingly, even though this is read in the tradition with Hobbes, it's not even clear that he read Hobbes. He doesn't mention Hobbes anywhere in this.
7:21 Wes: But he does bash on the idea of the monarch quite a bit.
7:23 Seth: Yes, and he does actually use the word Leviathan.
7:26 Wes: Yeah.
7:27 Mark: Ah, yes, he was certainly aware of it.
7:29 Seth: We just read the Phenomenology of Spirit where there was no explicit reference to the entire history of philosophy and Western culture, which, but apparently was cited in every sentence implicitly. He helped establish the Royal British Society with Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.
7:46 Mark: Ah.
7:46 Seth: I mean he had some pretty exceptional company. So he clearly was extremely well regarded by what can only be counted as the supreme intellects of not just his day, but of our history.
7:57 Mark: So maybe we should start with this foundation for equality.
8:00 Seth: He starts with defining political power.
8:02 Mark: Right, that was the quote. So it's chapter 1.3. Political power, then I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties for the regulating and preserving of property and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws and in the defense of the commonwealth from foreign injury. And all this for the public good.
8:21 Seth: Only for the public good.
8:22 Mark: Yes, he talks about property a lot here, but the way that term was used, it was including your own body. So even though he sounds fixated on keeping track of material objects, when he says property, he also means that nobody should have a right over your person.
8:37 Seth: There's a lot to be said about that. But the first thing is he wants to distinguish. He says political power is the power of a magistrate over a subject. And he says this is to be distinguished from a father over children, husband over wife, master over servant, or lord over slave. Later on, he talks about what the differences are, at least between familial power, patriarchal power really is what we should call it, and tyranny and so forth. But he's taking great pains to distinguish so that you can't draw an analogy between patriarchal power and political power, which is. I don't know if this is the direction Hobbes went, but there were many political theorists. Right. Who liken a monarch to the father and the subjects of the state as children and all that. And he's saying what political power is is not the same as what happens in the family.
9:28 Wes: Right.
9:28 Mark: Well, and part of that extended to. It's not just a matter of the state can't be as strict as a father could be or something, because there's also in there limits on parental power. Right.
9:38 Seth: Yeah.
9:38 Mark: Children are not your property. You have an obligation to take care of them, but you don't rule their lives, especially you don't rule their lives once they're grown up.
9:45 Seth: Well, and they're also. And we're kind of jumping ahead, but in order for there to be a basis for political power, it has to be a commonwealth of adults guided by reason. And children are not developed enough to have reason, so they aren't really in the same place as like a citizen and a state.
10:01 Wes: And there's also the key issue of consent, too, that the citizens all get together and they consent to governance, while children don't have any sort of consent.
10:09 Seth: That is correct.
10:10 Mark: Right.
10:10 Seth: And if I have my way, they never will.
10:12 Wes: So are we jumping ahead or going back?
10:14 Mark: No, no, that's okay. I think this is a good place. As a way of summarizing in contrast to Hobbes. So Hobbes had this idea, the state of nature is very nasty, and we will do anything to escape the state of nature, where everybody is just constantly coming and kicking us ahead and taking our stuff and killing us. And so we all implicitly, at least consent to have somebody in charge. So there's somebody we can appeal to who will get rid of all this nastiness. And that's why we have a state. And given how bad the state of nature is really, however bad the leader is, it's better than the state of nature.
So the monarch, in fact, is not even a party. He's not one of the people who signs the contract, the social contract that ends this. He's just somebody who gets put in place by the individual citizens who sign with each other to say, oh, let's just give power to somebody, because this is just intolerable.
11:01 Wes: And Locke makes a clear distinction that in that sort of nasty, brutish, and short world, there's a combination of a state of nature and a state of war. In a regular state of nature, there isn't that sort of desire to stop being kicked in the head.
11:15 Seth: I'm not sure that ultimately that distinction makes a whole lot of difference. I'm not convinced of that yet. But we'll get to that. What is the state of nature for Locke? He says the state of nature is a state of perfect freedom of action within the bounds of the law of nature. It's a state of equality. And he says it's a state of liberty, but not of license. So, for example, you do not have the liberty to destroy yourself, nor do you have the liberty to destroy, for example, a creature that's in your possession if its death is not needed, like if you're not going to eat it. You can't just go around killing your cats and things like that just for the hell of it. And that's because there is a law in the state of nature, and that law is reason.
11:59 Mark: Well, but he also talks about it as God's law, and I guess that's the big question, that sometimes he sounds like a divine command theorist, that this is the law because God says so. But at the same time, he very often refers to reason, that this is something that anybody should be able to find out, that he distinguishes that from divine commands received from revelation, which, of course, only the chosen people late in history, who the Bible was revealed to, are going to know those things. So while certainly there are going to be God's commands over and above those given by reason that anybody could figure out. None of what reason is going to tell us is going to contradict those more detailed divine commands.
12:35 Seth: So just out of curiosity, is the prohibition against self destruction divine or does that come from reason?
12:42 Wes: It's divine. We are the creations of God. And so to destroy ourselves is basically to disrespect God.
12:50 Seth: Okay.
12:50 Wes: And we're God's property at God's whim.
12:53 Seth: Okay.
12:53 Mark: Right. And God gave everything to us to make use of. So even though I'd like to say you don't need to refer explicitly to God, it's just basic fairness and something like Kant's principles getting from reason, I don't see the details in that. However, of course, Kant argued against suicide.
13:10 Wes: Well, and that's the big question. Are you allowed to commit suicide or not? And I see him using the God based arguments here more to kind of bring in a sense of humility that yes, we have a lot of power, yes, we can do all of these things, but there's a limit to that and we need to stop and recognize there's something bigger than us.
13:29 Seth: May I read a quote, please? Being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions for men, being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into this world by his order and about his business, they are his property. Sabrina, there's your point. Whose workmanship they are made to last during his, not another's pleasure. And being furnished with like faculty, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorize us to destroy one another as if we were made for another's uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.
Everyone, as he is bound to preserve himself and not to quit his station willfully. So by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of life, liberty, health, limb, or the goods of another. So there you go. That's the state of nature.
14:32 Mark: I think Hobbes was ambiguous about whether some of the things he was saying about nature were normative or descriptive claims. Right. He says we have the right to kind of do whatever we want. But what he really means by that is as a practical matter, we can, we have the liberty actually is the way Hobbes put it, we have the liberty to do whatever we need to to secure our survival. And I think he puts it in that sort of ambiguous way between normative and descriptive, because it's something he wants to say we can give away with the social contract. We can give that away. But with Locke here, it's just normative right from the start.
15:03 Wes: It's more like the state of nature lays out some basic ground rules that still have to be obey later on, even when you set up a community or a society.
15:12 Seth: Right.
15:12 Mark: With the exception of the retribution. Right. We have the right in the state of nature to extract justice.
15:18 Wes: Well, that's the thing, is that, yes, every man has a right to enforce the law of nature and punish offenders.
15:23 Mark: Yes. And that's what we give up.
15:25 Wes: Yes. But that's not a. The idea that offenders can be punished and that the law of nature needs to be enforced. That I see as kind of the ground rule. And then the derivative from that is that if you're wandering around in the state of nature, then you have that right to be the executor of that law. But then later on, you pass that job onto somebody else. You're saying, oh, I've got too much to worry about. I want to grow my crops and raise my family, so I don't want to have to go out and keep enforcing this law. I want to have a policeman do it, or I want to have a magistrate do it.
15:55 Mark: So that's one of the advantages of entering into the social contract. The other of which is the fact that this state of nature easily dissolves into the state of war that you were mentioning. In other words, as soon as somebody violates and takes something that somebody else's, then it's a state of war, which Hobbes would say, well, that pretty much happens immediately. There's no point in worrying about the state of nature.
16:16 Wes: Prior to that, Locke is talking about how the state of war in a state of nature will basically keep continuing until peace is offered or I think somebody is killed. But in a society that each side goes to a magistrate and they submit to judgment. So basically, a state of war can end more quickly and more cleanly if there's a society.
16:37 Mark: What was your objection, Seth, that you think that this is not a useful distinction?
16:40 Seth: There's a motivation of some sort to exit the state of nature and get into civil society. Whether it's because the state of nature devolves into a state of war or whether the state of nature is a state of war doesn't seem to me ultimately to make that much of a difference if the end result is the same. There's a section later on where it sounds like he says almost exactly what Hobbes says about the state of nature. Here he says, I easily grant that civil government is the proper remedy for the inconveniences of the state of nature, which must certainly be great where men may be judges in their own case, since it's easy to be imagined that he who was so unjust as to do his brother an injury will scarce be so just as to condemn himself for it.
You know, where Hobbes and we had a big argument about this that I think I never relented on when we did the Hobbes episode. And Sabrina, maybe you can adjudicate, but I was certainly arguing with Wes that my perception of what Hobbes said was that in the state of nature, individuals enter into a contract with one another, like an agreement, like, you watch my back, I'll watch yours. But since ultimately you can never guarantee that those agreements will be enforced without an external power that you mutually agree to assign the power to enforce the contract to somebody else.
It sounds like Locke's saying something here that's not quite as strong, which is basically not so much that we need somebody to enforce the contracts that we enter into with each other, but rather the sort of implicit law that already exists needs to be enforced, and we can't guarantee that its enforcement will be consistent and balanced and fair in the state of nature.
18:16 Mark: I'll buy that. And, you know, he doesn't need the. We could enter into any kind of contract we want with each other, because really, the dictates of fair contracts and fair contracts are the only ones that we would knowledgeably enter into. So even if I say, oh, I'll work for you for nothing, I'll be your intern for. Oh, wait, if that's not ultimately in my interest, then maybe I was just incompetent to make that contract or something. In any case, you could imagine if the idea was to enforce some basic rules of fairness, then if the government detects some unfairness, it could just jump in and adjudicate it. Otherwise, whatever contracts you've agreed to.
18:51 Seth: The reason why I think this distinction is important, and I'm reading it this way, is that he has that section right in that same area where he says, if we can't guarantee in the state of nature that any one individual will execute or enforce the law fairly, then we also can't expect that an absolute monarch, that is to say, the state embodied in A single individual will not exercise the same poor judgment. And that's why absolute monarchies are absolutely the wrong way to go about doing civil society. And that's what I thought was his counterpoint to Hobbes.
19:26 Mark: Right.
19:26 Wes: I think, though, Seth, going back a little bit, the condition in the state of nature, I would say that it is significant because that determines whether you're running away from something or you're running to something that is, are you so desperate to get out of this horrible, nasty situation where people are kicking you in the head you'll be willing to submit to a brutal monarch, perhaps, or you'll go, just anything, I don't care. Just get me out of this. Versus a situation where you say, well, we've got this situation. It's pretty good, but there's some things that could be done better.
Hey, I've noticed there's some unfairness when these things are getting adjudicated. We should probably get something set up. I would say that there is a significance to which type of state of nature you're coming from, and that can determine how much of your rights, for example, you can be expected or understood to give up.
20:16 Seth: That's fair.
20:16 Mark: Yeah. One thing I thought was pretty cool about his notion of the state of nature is that it's not just necessarily talking about some ancient time before governments were formed. Just anytime there's not an adjudicating power, then you're in the state of nature. So different nations are in a state of nature with each other, he says.
20:35 Wes: And he talks about the Swiss and the Indian in the woods of America. Right. And two men on a desert island.
20:41 Seth: Yeah. There's a weird passage where he says the American Indian, like, in England, France or Holland, those countries have no right to exercise any kind of influence over the Indian. And they have no obligation to recognize their authority, which is basically puts them in the state of nature. So until we have the one world government ruled by spirit, the end of history, we're kind of stuck.
21:05 Mark: But that at least makes it sound like the state of nature is not so bad, that, you know, it can create problems if a foreigner comes to your country and disses your laws and like, well, how do you adjudicate that? Is it by your laws or by their laws or. There are issues to work out. And certainly the state of nature then can turn into a state of war. And I think when you're thinking about it between nations, like, well, that's an obvious difference. Are the two countries at war or not? The big revolutionary thing about this Is, of course, just the idea of government for and by the people.
Well, maybe not by government for the people. Government has to be representative of the people, and that's the big advantage out of this. But on almost every other social point, he comes down with the status quo for his society. So even though it sounds like slavery should not be allowed, apparently if you're in a war with another country and that other country surrenders, then at least the people who are actually fighting you, not their families, not their kids, but the actual soldiers, you can just take them and keep them as slaves. I mean, what you're in fact doing with that is perpetuating the state of war.
It's not like you have a contract with your slaves because they're just there as your possessions. I don't know. He didn't get into details then, Actually,
22:14 Wes: No, I thought he clarified that you get to take those people who fought against you in that war. You get to take them as slaves, but you basically make them work and you get to take back from the labor that they create enough to compensate you for the cost of the war that you spent. And then I guess after that, you're supposed to let them go. So it's a very gentlemanly sort of slavery.
22:37 Seth: Yeah. If we're going to talk about that, we should probably make that clear distinction between state of war and state of nature and how that all relates to slavery, since this is the big contending point for the listeners. Mark had mentioned that Locke had worked for Lord Ashley, who was also, what, the Earl of.
22:53 Mark: The Earl of Shaftesbury.
22:55 Seth: The Earl of Shaftesbury, The Duke of Sandwich. This lord was responsible for setting up something called the Board of Trade and Plantations, and was part of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas, as in the American Carolinas. And Locke was the secretary of both of those organizations. And so he was very much aware of what was going on with the slave trade and plantation system. And there were apparently a number of British citizens in Barbados who wanted to emigrate to the Americas and bring their slaves. And there's a whole bunch of stuff surrounding that.
But Locke says, and I actually thought this was fairly unambiguous, but I guess people are looking at his involvement in that organization and not so much what he wrote, philosophically, that the state of war is a declaration or a design to either take somebody else's life possessions or to make somebody else a slave, as opposed to just living alongside each other without that intention, which would be the state of nature. I guess you can put it in terms of the state of war involves intent to kill, steal or enslave, Whereas the state of nature doesn't involve that.
24:05 Mark: Well, right. The person who starts the war.
24:07 Seth: Right, the person who starts the war. Right. And so if you enter into a state of war with somebody, then what changes from the state of nature?
24:15 Mark: You're forfeiting your life. Whereas in a normal society, if somebody accosts you on the road and is trying to steal your stuff, you can shoot them. Right? Because there was no way. It was an immediate danger. It's self defense. But if they go in your house and lock you out and say, it's mine now, ha ha, you can't just go shoot them. You have to appeal to the magistrate. So that's in a state. So justice should ideally only be to the extent it should be eye for an eye maximally. Whereas if there is no one to appeal to, then you're authorized to do whatever you need to.
And this sounds very much like Hobbes to prevent. You know, once a person enters into a state of war, say by stealing your goat, you can just go and kill them, because how do you know that they're not going to steal more? How do you. Once they've shown themselves to be untrustworthy, there is no magistrate to appeal to. There's no way to end this war unless they apologize and give you back your goat or equivalent restitution, or they die. And that's essentially what's happening. You know, if I take the French army and attack England, then me and all the other Frenchmen that are fighting there, our lives are forfeit because we're the aggressors and it's the same thing.
There's no UN or whatever that can decide this dispute and can say smack down on you France, not only, you know, you have to give up this and this and this. And so unless France then surrenders and sort of throws themselves on the mercy. But in any case, even if they do that, it seems that England would have the right to take all the fighters as slaves to just prevent them from doing anything like that in the future. And on top of that, you could go to France and seemingly take enough of their possessions to make up for the damage that they did, but no more.
And you can't take even as much as the damage they did if that would make all the French children starve. Right. You have to give them an installment plan. You have to offer terms that they could live with.
26:00 Wes: Think of the children. There seems to be a temporal distinction too, that if there's a robbery attempt in progress, then you can do all of these things to protect yourself. And similarly, later on when he talks about the state of slavery, that if someone is trying to enslave you, then you can kick and fight and scream and try to kill the person. And yet if you are already a slave, he doesn't really seem to say much about it, which I almost read as an implication of, well, you had your chance and you lost, so now you got to suck up and put up with it.
26:34 Seth: I don't know about that. I mean, there is this section where he says you can never.
26:39 Mark: You don't make a deal with slaves.
26:41 Wes: You can't sign your life over to somebody.
26:43 Seth: Well, not only can you not sign your life over, but you're constantly in the state of war, even at master and slave relationship. So it's not like you become a slave and then suddenly you're obligated to follow direction. You have every right to go the master by any means necessary, whenever you want to.
26:59 Mark: I think it's not even that it's right for you to do that, it's just that, right. The criterion does not apply. And this sounds very Hobbesian, right? Because for Hobbes there is no normativity outside of a government telling you what to do. So if you're in the state of nature with somebody, then there is no right or wrong. That's the way I interpret it in this case. Now it still seems like the law of nature, God's law, applies to everyone. That would apply to slaves too, right? If you put your life in forfeit and are taken in a war again, so it was a just war by the person who took you as a slave, then there's something fitting. If you're going to really strictly go with the law of nature, then you kind of take what you can get.
27:36 Speaker: Right?
27:37 Mark: Whereas if you're a slave under other circumstances, there's no way you could be bound by the law of nature like that. Like you were saying, you have the right to defend yourself in any way.
27:44 Wes: Well, true, but he conveniently doesn't think about the slaves that were taken to America. For example, they were pretty much minding their own business in Africa and then they were taken. They didn't go try to invade England or the American colonies. So I just don't see any discussion of that sort of circumstance.
28:02 Mark: Sounded like you read something about this, Seth.
28:04 Seth: What I read about was on the Wikipedia page and on the Stanford Encyclopedia page was about people were looking at the philosophical work and trying to reconcile it with his work as a secretary of these two organizations because he helped draft the Constitution of the Carolinas that allowed slaves. Yep, that allowed slaves. And so people are trying to figure out exactly what he wrote, what he approved, what he amended, what he didn't, et cetera, et cetera. And there are people that say one of two things. Either he was a coward and he didn't put into practice what he wrote about philosophically, or he was a hypocrite and he was a racist and a pro slavery, but he philosophically was against it.
And what I'm saying is, reading this text, it seems to me fairly unambiguous that from a natural rights, political power perspective, slavery is never justified unless you are the conquered on the unjust side of a war. You have to have started a war and be unjust. And then when you get conquered and you get enslaved, it's entirely appropriate. And that's the only circumstance, and apparently some people have tried to read then, that somehow the African slaves who came to the United States had engaged in such an unjust war, et cetera, et cetera.
And this is apparently the big bone of contention with Locke as far as this topic is concerned. I'm just saying that from this text, it's pretty unambiguous to me. You can't make yourself a slave, and if somebody puts you there, you get in a state of war and you have every right to fight it.
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Majority tules:
According to the social theoty of Rene Girard, human animals are selfishly memetic and want what someone else values. With everyone envious of scarce valuables, you get social agitation (see 10 Commandments). This ultimately leads to big problems of collective guilt which is expiated by a majority identifying a scapegoat to be banished or killed (Socrates, Jesus, animal sacrifice, animal farming, etc).
Kierkegaard’s ‘truth is in the minority’ was but one important call for correction to the problem of Locke’s empowered majority.
Remember, in a country of 100 million voters, the majority is 50,000,001. This explains our political climate of stalemate well. And this close race between majority/minority is a weapon used to control individuals, and as long as universities programs in the liberal arts and behavioral sciences, say philosophy and sociology, continue to recruit students with the lure that by studying people’s behavior you can have a lucrative career marketing anything to them…
Nicely done – I look forward to much more political philosophy. Your collective, albeit brief, foray into the US constitution was rather good, and I’d be really interested to hear an episode based on critiques of that (I’m not from the US, so I am interested, rather than emotive, on this issue).
Sabrina made a great addition, and I hope to hear more from her on future episodes, but I did miss Wes… sniff.
I also enjoyed the consideration of the US Constitution viz. Locke’s influence. For a scathing indictment of the bi-partisan reverence for said document, see historian Seth Ackerman’s commentary in the latest issue of The Jacobin: “Burn the Constitution”
http://jacobinmag.com/archive/issue2/ackerman.html
As usual an excellent podcast. One can really see, at least in comparison to your previous podcast on Kant why his metaphysics of justice moved to a more normative theory of political power. I would like to hear more modern political philosophy and critiques of utlilitarianism from you guys. I am thinkingin this case of someone like John Rawls, whose ‘veil of ignorance’ and ‘justice as fairness’, both attempt to remove the problems of utilitarianism and preserve what is good about social contract theory and Kantian normativity. In leading a Rawls reading group at our local philosophy bookstore (Red Emmas in Baltimore, http://www.redemmas.org) over the past few years, I have found that his use of game theory and modern economics to ground his theories of distributive justice, as opposed to tradtional forms of political theory that come out of a more European socialist traditon really resonates with readers as very modern and highly applicable to todays social problems.
Great work we all love these podcasts….
This was the first of your podcasts I’ve listened to. I think you’ve got me, at least for a while.
My question arises from my background as a History major (I’m an accountant; look where that got me). During the discussion of Locke, many of your criticisms seem to come from an attempt to judge the man and his writings on the basis of contemporary values. As long as I studied history and listened to people run down Jefferson and Patrick Henry and George Washington for being slaveholders, I always kept in mind that they were men of their era and thus never had the perspective of a post-slavery society. We can say all we want in 2011 that slavery is objectively wrong, but in 1690 or 1776, that idea would not get a lot of traction. We can, in hindsight, call that society inherently racist, but the men themselves did not have the guilty mind necessary for them to commit the evil act we now consider slavery to be.
Consequently, when Locke is seen to evade or seem hypocritical on the subject of slavery, I don’t think it’s an act of moral cowardice or irrationality, I think it’s because he was a man living in the late 17th century, and that’s just how people thought back then. We can say there are contradictions in his writings, but then we have to finish the thought with “that can be explained by the milieu of the times he lived in.”
And even if we note contradictions in some of his writings, I don’t think that invalidates the rest of his philosophy. The point of philosophy is not to parse a person’s writings for a fatal flaw and toss everything away when you do, is it?
Bottom line: Locke is interesting in suggesting humans own themselves and their property, suggesting limits on government power. There are more echoes of Locke in the Declaration that the most famous phrase.
Thanks for a good podcast. It was a good conversation to listen to. I plan to listen to more.
Mitch–
Thanks for joining us and for taking the time to comment. Perhaps in this episode the general approach we take didn’t come through as clearly, or perhaps since this was the first of our episodes to which you’ve listened, you aren’t as accustomed to our way of discourse.
To begin with, we always take our subject and his/her ideas seriously. Though we have fun during the discussion, we respect the thoughts and the thinker. Our goal is to examine the ideas put forth with some amount of academic rigor, but to judge them against our ‘real world’ experience and common sense. Naturally, we are going to do that with the biases of our culture, time and background.
Unless he edited it out, I distinctly remember Mark saying he didn’t care about Locke’s biography as much as his ideas. I was careful to note not that I was judging Locke about his attitude towards slavery, but only that it was a topic of academic interest what his attitude truly was and how much of the Constitution of the Carolinas could be put on him. In fact, I firmly believe that his philosophical stance comes down against the legitimacy of slavery, except in that odd circumstance where you are an unjust aggressor who loses a war.
We were not trying to trace Locke’s legacy and impact to the founding of the US as much as explore his view on the origin and legitimacy of government. No doubt he was hugely influential and his idea that humans own their own bodies and labor, as well as the separation of powers are immensely important in our intellectual history and echo strongly even to this day.
Cheers,
–seth
Just getting a clarification here, no accusations or anything. At 1:12:28 when, I think it was either, Seth or Mark said “I don’t have to imagine it I know he wrote it during the apartheid.”, were you joking or were you serious? “The apartheid”, most commonly referencing the South African apartheid, didn’t happen until the 20th century.
Otherwise another fabulous discussion. I tend to enjoy the political talk and with the rational aspirations of Locke it really helped my morning of writing code fly by. Thanks.
That was Seth, and yes, it is OK to use the term in a more general sense not referring specifically to South Africa: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_of_apartheid.
Thanks for listening and for the comment, Justin!
On the eternal return of US (congressional!) support for apartheid: 1) http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/05/25/the_smallest_minds_and_cowardliest_hearts_is_congress_clapping_for_apartheid?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4dde4a63afa57efb%2C0
2) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcG_063Ml-Q&feature=related
Excellent Podcast! I’m slowly making my way through the catalog and enjoying every one.
The discussion on mixing labor to obtain property rights gave me a flashback to the classic first-year law school property case of “Pierson v. Post” from New York. The Wikipedia summary is as follows: “Lodowick Post, a fox hunter, was chasing a fox through a vacant lot when Pierson came across the fox and, knowing it was being chased by another, killed the fox and took it away. Post sued Pierson on an action for trespass on the case for damages against his possession of the fox. Post argued that he had ownership of the fox as giving chase to an animal in the course of hunting it was sufficient to establish possession.”
Future vice-president Daniel Tompkins wrote the opinion for the court, citing Justinian’s Institutes, saying pursuit wasn’t enough to get property rights to a wild animal (Ferae naturae).
Future Supreme Court Justice Henry Brockholst Livingston wrote a dissent saying “Whatever Justinian may have thought of the matter, it must be recollected that his code was compiled many hundred years ago, and it would be very hard indeed, at the distance of so many centuries, not to have a right to establish a rule for ourselves.”
He basically wanted to encourage hunters to kill foxes, writing:
“it is admitted that a fox is a ‘wild and noxious beast.’ Both parties have regarded him, as the law of nations does a pirate, “hostem humani generis,” and although “de mortuis nil isi bonum” be a maxim of our profession, the memory of the deceased has not been spared. His depredations on farmers and on barnyards, have not been forgotten; and to put him to death wherever found, is allowed to be meritorious, and of public benefit.”
I have enjoyed many of your podcasts. The audio quality is amazing for people in different locations. I am learning much.
I find it hard to believe that 3 people of your intelligence can be so ignorant of libertarian economic philosophy. Paraphrasing; we all want clean water and air, so we need the government to deliver these goods, libertarians are stupid to think otherwise. A libertarian would remind you that all goods wanted by people would/could be delivered without a state.
Thank you,
Mike
Towards the end, one of you mentioned that you guys might do an episode about The Federalist Papers at some point. As an aspiring historian, and ridiculous Alexander Hamilton fangirl, I think that’s a great idea!
In all the talk about the “founding fathers,” people tend to forget how totally different they all were from each other. Maybe you guys could talk about Hamilton & Jefferson as political philosophers, their competing visions, theories of history, pathological hatred for each other &c. I think as the central tension in US history, the Hamilton/Jefferson conflict offers a handy lens through which to view some fundamental political questions. The founders were, I think, a lot more interesting, dangerous, and strange than almost anyone gives them credit for. It wasn’t just Republicans vs. Federalists or agriculture vs. industrialization. You have, in Hamilton and Jefferson, two people with totally opposite personalities and backgrounds, vastly different notions of the Good, who can’t even agree on the nature of reality itself, trying to run a brand new republic under the same president, without basically devolving into civil war.
You mean the *only* Alexander Hamilton fangirl, no? 🙂
This came up again while we were recording on Aristotle’s Politics. I think it’s going to happen sooner rather than later.
I’ve been working my way through the back catalog of PEL, and I was disappointed in the level of discourse in this episode. I felt you were a little dismissive of the topics expressed in this particular reading. Unlike many of the more esoteric topics covered in episodes on metaphysics, there is a great deal of practical argument in texts like Locke. Here’s hoping that you revisit political philosophy again soon. Until then, I plow on excitedly to Russell and Whitehead!
Specifics? Make a compelling argument re. something we were dismissive about.
I am only now beginning to see that this whole site and your excellent podcasts are just an elaborate facade! All so Mark can get thousands of unsuspecting philosophy geeks owning downloads of his songs, in the hope that over time we will all come to see and appreciate his musical genius. It’s really starting to work. I loved the song at the end of this episode.
His quest for fame is insatiable and knows no bounds
Regarding humans not being Rational Actors:
http://stevenpoole.net/articles/within-reason/
The present climate of distrust in our reasoning capacity finds much of its rationale in the field of behavioural economics, particularly the work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described in Kahneman’s bestselling Thinking, Fast and Slow. There, Kahneman divides the mind into two allegorical systems, the intuitive “System 1”, which often gives wrong answers, and the reflective reasoning of “System 2”. “The attentive System 2 is who we think we are,” he writes; but on his view it is the intuitive, biased, “irrational” System 1 that is in charge most of the time — indeed, it “is also the origin of most of what we do right.”
Other versions of the message are expressed in more strongly negative terms. You Are Not So Smart is the title of a bestselling popular book on cognitive bias. According to a widely reported study by researchers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, reason evolved not to find “truth” but merely to win arguments. And in The Righteous Mind, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls the idea that reason is “our most noble attribute” a mere “delusion”. The worship of reason, he adds, “is an example of faith in something that does not exist.”
Your brain, runs the prevailing wisdom, is mainly a tangled, damp and contingently cobbled-together knot of cognitive biases and fear. It’s a scientized version of original sin, whose political implications are troubling. If reasoning isn’t going to work well for you, you might as well abandon the attempt. Have you ever been told to stop “overthinking” something? Perhaps someone else will benefit if you give up.
And so there is less reason than many think to doubt humans’ ability to be reasonable. The dissenting critiques of the cognitive-bias literature argue that people are not, in fact, as individually irrational as the present cultural climate assumes. And proponents of debiasing argue that we can each become more rational with practice. But even if we each acted as irrationally as often as the most pessimistic picture implies, that would be no cause to abandon the idea that humans are a fundamentally rational species. And it would be insufficient motivation to flatten democratic deliberation into the weighted engineering of consumer choices, as nudge politics seeks to do. Public reason is nothing short of our best hope for survival. Even a reasoned argument to the effect that human rationality is fatally compromised is itself an exercise in rationality. Albeit rather a perverse one, and — we may suppose — ultimately self-defeating.
In response to the problem with our culture, I think it is do to our religious use of books and media which if you look at how a church works they make you believe their book has all the answers and so you do not have to experience anything for yourself. Media discourages experience and so we have a perspective lacking society. Ignorance spawns and spreads by people having opinions on things they know nothing about and this is highly encouraged in our society. How come if a kid started to read you history 101 you would praise him, never for a second pondering that a child could have no real understanding of history, mean while if he started spouting about penthouse letters you would understand this kid has no perspective to even speak about sex. We are moving into plato’s cave and the internet isn’t opening up the world it is becoming the world, the only one most will experience. I have yet to find a philosopher who says reading about or watching something on a screen equals having an experience.