Transcript Reading: Locke Part 4

We’re continuing with John Locke and his empiricist theory of knowledge and reality, and today I just want to make some summary comments. I’ll talk about its main points at some length now, and then I want to do a brief recap of some of the faults we’ve found with this.

So let’s take my jot on my whiteboard: all ideas are of sensations or reflection. Locke tells us this over and over—everything in the mind has to be a sensory perception or a reflection on the operations of the mind. It can’t be anything else. But this statement itself, if we know it to be true, is not a perception, and it’s not a reflection. I said to you that Locke would be inconsistent. He wants to rule out self-evident statements, but then he appeals to them. He says there are none, and then he uses them—and this is an example.

Second point: he keeps the idea of substance, even though it turns out to be "something I know not what." He says that all the other properties of things—things that exhibit our experience—look like properties that must be properties of something. There has to be something else; the property itself can’t just exist, floating in midair or something like that. But that means there has to be something that all the properties of the thing inhere in, and so he keeps the idea of substance. My objection is this: this is where Christians should say, "This is only God—or, more precisely, the power of God." God, through Christ, holds all things together, including the properties of things, so as to constitute the nature of that type of thing. So, this is just a spot where I think, as a Christian, Locke missed the boat.

Third, I mentioned early on that there’s a difference between the epistemological question—"How do we know that?"—and the question that’s ordinarily meant on the street when someone asks, "How do you know that?" I call this a historical answer. When somebody says, "How do you know that?" you tell them the history of how you found it out—how that information came to you. You might say, "I read it in the encyclopedia," or "a bunch of us were having a discussion, and we covered all possibilities and came up with this." That’s a historical answer that tells how you came across the information. But that’s not what somebody’s asking for in epistemology. In epistemology, they’re asking, "How do you know that is true?"—not "Where did you get it?" but "What’s its justification?"

And that second question is the epistemological one. We can see in what we’ve heard from Locke, and from what I’ve read, that Locke gives the first type of answer to the second type of question. When epistemology wants to know what justifies you in regarding something as true, Locke gives an account like, "It came through the senses," or "It’s an idea of reflection." That may be where you got it, but I’m not primarily interested in that. I want to know why you think it’s true—and often he doesn’t tell us.

In many places, and I read several to you last time, he says, "It’s evident." Well, it’s just evident that this is right. And that’s a sneaky, backhanded appeal to self-evidence, which he says he ruled out. He disagrees with Descartes, and that’s another place where he gets something really wrong.

Descartes says that when we follow certain procedures—say, we measure two triangles and find that they’re congruent—and we see that this holds true several times, we can then conclude that wherever the angles are equal, angle-side-angle, the triangles will be congruent. We put this down as a law in geometry, a necessary truth. But Descartes doesn’t say that we derive the law from the perception of these two triangles being congruent. Rather, he says that in our perception of the two triangles, we provoke a rational intuition that grasps the law. In other words, it becomes self-evident that all triangles like these will behave in the same way. So, we don’t have to see every triangle that ever existed or ever will exist to know this is universally true.

For Descartes, perception primes the pump. Perceptual knowledge gets our rationality rolling, and once it gets rolling, it sees this self-evident truth, and others, and then formulates the laws of logic—like the law that nothing can be both true and false at the same time in the same sense. So it’s both: we see it perceptually, we see examples of it, and that provokes the intuition that "this is universally true." Locke missed that.

Locke criticizes Descartes for saying that perception can give us universal truths. Descartes does say that, but in the sense I just explained—perception doesn’t derive universal truths, it provokes our rational intuition, which then sees the truth as self-evident.

Finally, Locke tells us that perception leads us to the idea of causation because we experience willing our bodies to do something—my hand picks up this stylus or adjusts my glasses—and we know that the body acts in obedience to the mind’s commands. This gives rise to the idea of power, Locke says. This idea of power means that one thing exerts an effect on another. We don’t see the power itself, perceptually. It’s not a legitimate criticism to ask, "What color is the power?" or "How does it taste—is it salty?" No, power is not a perceptual object, but what we repeatedly see happening gives us the idea that one thing exercises power over another. This non-sensory, non-perceptible power is combined with the observation that one thing affects another to produce the idea of causation. That’s how we get the concept of one thing causing or affecting another.

And now we’re off to the races because we can do physics and other sciences—astronomy, chemistry, and so on—because we have a legitimate concept of causation. That may well be how we come to the idea of causation. I’m not sure, but certainly, the first place we experience it is in ourselves. We will something—"Get this off my face!"—and our hand moves to do it. That kind of thing happens at a very young age, so we grow up assuming that our bodies will respond to our minds.

In fact, it seems to me further that if we were brought up in a room—I'm talking about from very young childhood—where everything in the room responds to every desire I have, that is, when I will the curtain to go up, the curtain goes up. I will the chair to come out from the desk, and it comes out from the desk without any part of my body touching any of these things. They all just obey my will. It seems to me, in that case, I would grow up regarding that entire room as parts of my body. Surely, as it stands, we distinguish our bodies from everything else because the body is that multi-spectral entity with all different kinds of properties that respond to our will, obey our will. So maybe that's initially where we get the idea.

Then we distinguish different kinds of causality corresponding to the different kinds of properties. So we have kinetic, physical, biological, logical causality, technical causality, social, economic, and so on. Well, I think that's at least part of the story. I'm not willing to go to the wall to say that's all there is to it. Locke didn’t get the whole picture, but it seems to me he got part of it, and that much is right.

So, what practical use does Locke make of this? If he’s got an epistemology about how we know, and it entails a certain ontology—that there’s a real world with things in it that are represented faithfully and accurately by our perceptions—what practical use can he bring to it?

It starts with his ethics, and that’s what we’re going to dig into today. His ethics begin with a commitment to the very heart and soul of heaven, and that for him is pleasure over against pain. He’s not willing to acknowledge that, among all the different kinds of properties that things and our experiences have, there isn’t a kind called ethical. It’s not that we experience things to be ethically wrong or ethically right and obligatory—things we should or should not do. Instead, he wants ethics explained in a way that we would now call reductionist.

Locke reduces ethics, which in our experience seems to be a distinct kind of property. We think that some actions truly have the property of being evil, and others truly have the property of being good. We think we should do the good and avoid the evil. But Locke says, no, it’s all reduced to pleasure and pain. And those are sensory properties, things we experience as sensations. That’s why he did it, because he’s been saying all along that the only things in the mind are perceptions and reflections on how the mind works. So, ethics has to be one or the other—it has to be perceptions. And which perceptions? Pleasure and pain.

Locke argues that we experience some things that, for the most part, cause more pain than pleasure for most people. Those things are evil. Other actions, on the whole, produce more pleasure for more people, so they’re good. That’s how he wants to treat ethical properties. We may think we experience an act as having the property of being wrong or praiseworthy or right, but in fact, what we really perceive are types of actions that produce more pleasure than pain or more pain than pleasure—and he would add, for more people. That theory would later develop in the next century into utilitarianism, a theory for which John Stuart Mill is famous.

Mill’s utilitarian theory of ethics says that the right thing is whatever causes the most good for the most people, where good means pleasure, and an evil action is one that produces the most pain for the most people, where pain means sensory pain. Ethics, in Locke’s view, is then reduced to fit into his ontology and epistemology. But since Locke already got the order of what’s given to our experience and what we abstract from it backward, he takes the abstraction to be what’s given and the given to be an abstraction.

Do you understand what I mean here? What’s given to us are entire concrete objects with a multiplicity of kinds of properties and laws that are true of them. But Locke says, no, that’s a construct of our minds. From that real picture of what we perceive, he abstracts certain kinds—colors, tastes, touches, sounds, smells—and says that’s what we experience. But those are all abstracted from the bigger picture. So he flips things around. He’s reversed them. He says the abstractions are what’s given to experience, and the concrete objects are the constructions of our minds, instead of getting it straight.

Because of this reversal, Locke can’t take a full-fledged view of ethics. He can’t say that, among other properties, some actions have the property of being right and some have the property of being wrong in the moral sense. Some are evil, and some are good. No, he has to reduce everything to something we can perceive—so it’s about power, pleasure, and pain. And he adds, “where there is no property, there is no injustice,” because he’s thinking here of ethics largely in the sense of social ethics that holds across a given population. We’re going to have rules about what people can do and not do. We’ll say that some acts are evil and some acts are good. Certain goods may even be obligatory for everyone—not only are they good, but everyone must try to do them. And all evils must be avoided because they produce more pain for more people.

How do you get from that to “there’s evil and good only if there’s private property?” Well, in the first place, Locke takes a very broad view of what he means by property. Property is anything you possess, and that includes your body and your life. Most of us wouldn’t have thought of our lives as property—we would think property is other things we possess, like land, houses, or money. But Locke takes a much broader view of it. If anything is yours—your body and your life are yours—then it’s your property.

So now it makes a little more sense to say there’s no wrongdoing where there’s no property. If you didn’t own anything at all—if your life weren’t your own, if your body weren’t your own—then how could anyone do anything wrong against you? And Locke coins a phrase for this: what is yours, and what everyone does when they seek pleasure rather than pain, is to protect “life, liberty, and property.” That’s Locke. Jefferson later changed the last one to "the pursuit of happiness." But for Locke, it was your life, your liberty, and your property—which includes your life and liberty, by the way, and anything else you happen to own.

So, if you rightfully own it, you own it because you earned it and didn’t steal it—then it’s rightfully yours, and it’s wrong for anyone to try to take it away. Locke is off the ground now with his ethics. Reducing right and wrong to pleasure and pain means that something we all directly experience and know about constitutes the foundation of ethics.

It’s not an abstract property that’s more obscure because it’s not equivalent to pleasure or pain. Some things we just see to be wrong, and we make them so—we outlaw them because it’s self-evident to us that they’re wrong. But Locke can’t accept that. He wants his reduction to account for everything in ethics, and that, ladies and gentlemen, is going to be a tall order.

Think about this for a while. Consider different people's ideas of what gives them pleasure. Suppose, in Nazi Germany, we have 80 million Nazis who derive great pleasure from torturing and killing 80,000 Jews. By this definition, wouldn't that be considered a "right" act? It seems to me that it would. In fact, the more pleasure they derive, the more "ethically upright" the act becomes. So, if they didn’t get much pleasure, it’s marginally okay—it’s just over the line of what you can do. But if it gives them a great deal of pleasure, then it becomes an exceptionally good thing. Look at how much pleasure it brings to the vast majority! All we need is an example like this to realize that this reasoning doesn't work at all.

Similarly, when it comes to pain, this act may give me no pain. Perhaps I even enjoy it. But that doesn't mean it's right. Think about the laws we have over what happens to a human body after death. We, meaning most Western European and North American countries, have laws on the books that you can’t desecrate a human body. These laws likely stem from the belief that God created us in His image and that, even after death, the human body deserves respect. But in other cultures, people honor the dead by eating their body. How do we decide which practice is right? By pleasure and pain alone, I don’t think we can. Right and wrong are not matters of food.

If 80 million Nazis take great pleasure in inflicting terrible pain on a minority, whether it’s Jews, Gypsies, or political opponents, the fact that many people want it doesn't make it right. Ethical laws, as we intuitively grasp them, are about what is fair, just, and, more importantly, loving. That's the Christian view of ethics, summarized in the law of love: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." Now, notice two important things here. It doesn’t say to love your neighbor morethan yourself. You don’t have to sacrifice your well-being at every turn for anyone else. It says to love your neighbor asyourself, implying a balance between your interests and those of your neighbor. Their humanity is as real as yours, and you should treat them as you would want to be treated. These are the Christian principles.

Saint Augustine summarized Christian ethics by saying, "Love, and then do what you want," because if it’s guided by love, it will be the right thing. That’s the major concern—the axiom in ethics that never goes away. All rules have exceptions, even the rule not to kill. If someone comes through the door with a gun and threatens my family, it’s my duty to stop him. If a country tries to invade and enslave its citizens, it's my duty to defend them. So, killing is not always wrong, nor is lying.

I had a professor who lived through Nazi Germany and later came to the United States. During the war, he used his basement to hide Jewish families and help them escape. One night, a Gestapo officer knocked on his door and asked if he had seen any runaway Jews. Without hesitation, he said no, and they left. He lied, and that was exactly what he should have done. Love trumps other rules. That’s Christian ethics. We shouldn’t reduce it to pleasure and pain. There are things that are right and wrong that have little to do with sensory pleasure or pain.

If I steal an idea and publish it as my own, that’s plagiarism. It’s wrong, both ethically and legally. The pain it causes isn’t physical; it’s the violation of intellectual property, and that’s unjust as well as unloving. It’s why plagiarism is illegal and unethical. Christians should distinguish between what’s fair—having to do with justice—and what’s loving—having to do with ethics.

Locke missed the point here. Pleasure and pain don’t cut it. How do you justify the pleasure of 80 million Nazis torturing 80,000 victims? Even if it gives them pleasure, that doesn’t make it right. There’s been an attempt to counter this by saying it’s not the individual act but the rule that matters. According to this utilitarian view, good is pleasure and evil is pain, and laws that produce the most pleasure for the most people are just. But this still falls short. Even laws can be unjust—laws that allow or compel people to torture minorities for the pleasure of the majority are clearly wrong.

Utilitarian ethics can sometimes avoid specific difficulties, but not all. Ethical rules that are based on the opinions of the majority are subject to change, which makes them unreliable. Christian commands, particularly the command to love your neighbor as yourself, provide a firm foundation. The rules—don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t envy, be faithful—work out the majority of the time as expressions of love.

Locke, although a Christian, didn’t grasp what’s unique about Christian ethics compared to other theories. These days, many are trying to revive Aristotle’s virtue ethics, where cultivating certain virtues leads to good behavior. But what are the virtues, and how do we know them? We also have utilitarianism, which we’ve discussed, and Kantian ethics.

We have the ethics of the last thinker we’re going to cover in this course, Immanuel Kant. Kant wanted to say that ethical rules are just like the rules of logic and mathematics—rigid, with no exceptions. He proposed a formula to determine what’s good from what’s evil. I think it was a bold attempt, but it doesn’t quite succeed. However, most people today who seek a fixed ethical standard with rational justification claim to follow Kantian ethics. It's not exactly Kant’s ethics, but it adopts the idea that there are fixed rules that can be known, and in most cases, we can figure out what’s ethically right and what’s ethically wrong.

I believe that the love ethic proposed in the New Testament includes aspects of other ethical theories. Ethics is about virtue, about pleasure and pain, and certainly about following ethical rules, even when they don’t benefit you. But it’s more than that—it’s about the rule of love. The rule of love brings together all these elements in a coherent and meaningful way. To be honest, I think that’s why the rule of love works better than any single approach. It includes them all.

However, it won’t answer every ethical conundrum. It won’t tell you the right thing to do in every conceivable situation, because in some cases, there is no right answer. Every option, including doing nothing, could be wrong. In such cases, we opt for the lesser evil.

Consider an example where you're at a railroad switch station. You have the ability to throw a switch that will direct a runaway train either to the left or the right track. The train is speeding, and whichever track it takes, it will derail and hit people who are too far away for you to warn. On one side, there are 25 people; on the other side, there are 6. Is it simply a matter of numbers? What if you knew the six people included a bishop, a scientist, and a philosopher? Do you save the ones who are more "important" to society? These dilemmas are very difficult and often unsolvable.

Martin Luther once said, “If there’s no way to avoid doing wrong, then sin boldly.” He meant that in some situations, you have to choose the lesser evil and trust in Christ’s grace. We live in a fallen world, and sometimes there’s no purely good choice. The love ethic doesn’t solve these kinds of dilemmas any more than any other system, but it does provide a framework that includes justice and compassion.

Love your neighbor as yourself, that’s the Christian principle. But notice it’s contrasted with the love of God. We are to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves. There are no restrictions on what we owe to God—total devotion. But for our neighbor, also created in God’s image, we owe loving care and justice. We distinguish between these two: one relates to the law and societal order, the other to love and ethics.

In the 19th century, thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill developed the idea of utilitarianism, particularly the “hedonic calculus,” which involves calculating pleasure and pain to determine ethical decisions. Bentham seriously proposed that before taking action, we should weigh its pleasures and pains on a scale to determine its value. For example, you might give a pleasure an "8" for how much joy it brings, but only a "5" for how soon it occurs. Or you might reduce the score for how much pain the pleasure might cause, such as a foul smell. This hedonic calculus attempts to add up all factors and determine the right thing to do by the total score.

Mill, on the other hand, argued for the "greatest good for the greatest number," where good is defined as pleasure and evil as pain. Some U.S. presidents have even adopted this principle in their policies. However, while utilitarianism may sometimes lead to practical solutions, it doesn't always guide you to do what's right. The law of love, however, does—it encompasses all people and helps us navigate exceptions more effectively than utilitarian calculus can.

Locke didn’t go into great detail about ethics, but his position influenced the rise of utilitarianism. The word "utilitarian" means "useful," and in this context, it refers to what brings the most pleasure to the most people. Locke gave us the groundwork for ethics, but his real focus was on political theory, and that’s where we’ll go next. He attempted to derive political theory from his theory of reality. We’ll begin with the question: Is human society fundamentally about the individual or the group?

The word typically used in political theory is “collective.” Does the individual create society, or does society create individuals? The answer to this question leads to vastly different political theories. If we begin with the individual, as Thomas Hobbes did, society is composed of solitary individuals who come together to form social contracts. Life in this “state of nature,” according to Hobbes, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, so people create a sovereign power to rule them.

On the other hand, if we begin with the collective, society produces individuals. In this view, a group of humans large enough to sustain itself naturally forms laws, settles disputes, and appoints leaders. Aristotle believed that a self-sustaining group would naturally develop laws and governance.

The Christian position, however, is neither strictly individualistic nor collectivist. God created both individuals and groups. Psalm 68 says, "God sets the solitary in families." In those times, a family was much more extensive than our modern conception—often consisting of 10 to 20 people. So, both individuals and groups are created by God.

In Christian ethics, good and evil are not determined by a vote or by what gives people the most pleasure. We have fundamental axioms, such as the law of love, that apply to individuals and groups alike—families, churches, businesses, labor unions, governments, and other institutions. The state has the responsibility to maintain public order, create laws, and defend the country if necessary.

When we return to Locke’s political theory, we’ll see how his ideas influenced later thinkers and the development of political systems.