Locke’s Vagueness About "Common Good" Has Consequences

By Gary L. Morella

The Enlightenment view of the person and of the state differed radically from what had gone before in the Christian tradition and the common law. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau postulated a mythical state of nature in which autonomous, isolated individuals were milling around and, for various reasons, agreed to form the state. Hobbes thought people were hostile and needed the state, or Leviathan, to keep them from killing each other. The individual surrendered total power to the state, reserving only his right to life and his right not to incriminate himself. Locke’s state of nature was more pleasant, but men needed a common judge to settle disputes. And so they formed the state to protect their rights, but in that state the majority would rule. Rousseau, on the other hand, thought men formed the state to carry out the general will which is the unlimited will, not of the majority, but of the man in charge, the sovereign. [See Rice, The Winning Side, Questions On Living The Culture Of Life.] We will focus on Locke’s moderation of Hobbes’s view of man and society.

In the traditional Christian view, the state derives its authority from God (although the people may from time to time decide who exercises that authority) and the state is subject to the law of God including the natural law. In the Enlightenment view, the state derives its authority horizontally, from the people. It is the people, rather than the law of God, which defines in what way, if any, the power of the state will be limited. And, if the people give rights, the people can take them away. Per Rice, 19^th century utilitarianism added to this mix the idea, as seen in Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and others, that the purpose of the law and society is to achieve the greatest good of the greatest number. This good is the Hobbesian maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain. There is not knowable objective morality and no common good beyond the sum of individual goods. The family is an aggregation of individuals rather than a society in itself. The person comes to be regarded as merely "economic man." The Enlightenment philosophy has dominated the 20^th century in different forms. It devalues the role of mediating institutions, such as the family and social groups, between the individual and the state. It tends to deteriorate into either and individualist capitalism or a totalitarian collectivism, which, of late, has become synonymous with radical liberalism. Enlightenment law is wholly an exercise of will, while Aquinas affirmed that the essence of law is reason. Enlightenment jurisprudence will be utilitarian and positivist, with no inherent limits on what the state can do. The Enlightenment project, which dominates American culture, has three decisive characteristics, secularism, relativism, and individualism.

Whereas Aristotle, Aquinas, and others affirmed that man is social by nature, Enlightenment thinkers postulated a mythical "state of nature" populated by autonomous individuals who were not social but "sociable." Those individuals formed the state according to the social contract. The purpose, according to Hobbes, was to achieve security; according to Locke, it was for the protection of rights; for Rousseau, it was to implement the "general will." The origin of the state was therefore not in nature and the divine plan but in the social contract, with rights coming not from God but from man and ultimately the state. "The Declaration of the Rights of Man at the end of the 18^th century," wrote Hannah Arendt, "was a turning point in history. It meant nothing more nor less than that from then on Man, and not God’s command or the customs of history, should be the source of Law." [See Rice, 50 Questions On The Natural Law, What It Is And Why We Need It.]

Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, responds. "The theories of the social contract . . . were elaborated at the end of the 17^th century (cf. Hobbes); that which would bring harmony among men was a law recognized by reason and commanding respect by an enlightened prince who incarnates the general will. Here, too, when the common reference to values and ultimately to God is lost, society will then appear merely as an ensemble of individuals placed side by side, and the contract which ties them together will necessarily be perceived as an accord among those who have the power to impose their will on others . . . By a dialectic within modernity, one passes from the affirmation of the rights of freedom, detached from any objective reference to a common truth, to the destruction of the very foundations of this freedom. The ‘enlightened despot’ of the social contract theorists became the tyrannical state, in fact totalitarian, which disposes of the life of its weakest members, from an unborn baby to an elderly person, in the name of a public usefulness which is really only the interest of a few." [See Ratzinger, "The Problem of Threats to Human Life," 36 The Pope Speaks, 334-35 (1991).]

According to Hobbes, men are naturally free, and all seek exclusively their own interests. Hence, men lived at first in a state of perpetual war. Then, as a practical expedient, they compacted to form society, to which, as represented by its rulers, unlimited power over the individual members was confided. This sovereign body Hobbes called the Leviathan, the monster of limitless strength and power. As a logical inference from his rejection of divine authority in the constitution and government of states, Hobbes rejected the distinction between the temporal and spiritual power and denied the independent rights of the Church; for "a man cannot obey two masters, and a house divided against itself cannot stand." Thus, whatever worship or religion exists in a State must be completely subject to the civil power and no dogma can be appealed to against a law of the state.

In Locke’s theory the liberty which men had before the supposed original social contract remains with them and is inalienable, "for no one can ever by subjected to authority without his own consent." But as this "universal" consent can scarcely ever be had, the only remedy against anarchy is that the majority must include the rest. The result is that it is a law both of nature and of reason that the act of the majority is the act of the whole.

The principles of Hobbes and Locke were more fully elaborated by the 18^th century founders of the French liberal school and those of the German Aufklarung. Of the latter, Emmanuel Kant has had the widest influence. In Kant’s view, man, as a moral being, is "a law to himself and an end to himself, a cause but not an effect." Hence, the civil union whose object is to secure liberty for all must presuppose an implied contract as a necessary foundation of its authority. [See Cahil, The Framework Of A Christian State.]

Let’s look at a more detailed comparison of the philosophies of Hobbes and Locke as described by John Hittinger in "Three Philosophies of Human Rights,"

In Search Of A National Morality, edited by William Bentley Ball. Per Hittinger, human freedom became the fundamental moral fact, not virtue or divine command. The development of this notion wound its way through late medieval nominalism and became a major theme in the work of Hobbes, especially his Leviathan, which is usually marked as the turning point from the ancient natural right or natural law to the modern account of natural rights.

Hobbes challenged the fundamental presuppositions of the Thomistic synthesis of biblical theology and Aristotelian philosophy – such as the sociability of man and the possibility of a common good, the existence of a highest good (summum bonum) in virtue and contemplation, and the natural law derived from such human teleology. (Telos, as such, didn’t exist for the modern philosophers.) Beginning with a state of nature as a state of war, Hobbes saw the futility of seeing a good higher than self-preservation. His philosophy is based upon a view of human nature as selfish and contentious; he denied that there exists any higher good other than survival. Consequently, he derived the natural law from a more fundamental right of self-preservation.

Hobbes defined the "right of nature" as "the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature" [Leviathan]. He clearly distinguished right from law. "Right consisteth in liberty to do, or forbeare; whereas Law, determineth, and bindeth to one of them; so the Law, and Right, differ as much, as Obligation, and Liberty." For Hobbes, right, i.e., liberty, clearly takes precedent over law, i.e., obligation. The fundamental right or liberty of the self is unbounded or unlimited by anything; by the fundamental right of preservation, each man has a right to everything, and anything done in the pursuit of preservation is without blame. The intolerable conflicts between individuals, however, amount to a state of war. It is reasonable, therefore, to limit one’s claim to things for the sake of self-protection. Morality exists by way of the social contract, and is a rational deduction of moral rules from the right of self-preservation [Leviathan].

Hobbes’s defense of individual rights required the existence of an absolute power in society to keep all potential wrongdoers in such a state of awe that they would obey the law. Hobbes’s account was shocking in many ways, not the least of which was its implicit anti-theistic philosophy, that it was frequently decried and banned. The direct contrast between Hobbes and the biblical and philosophical accounts of moral and political order would be the easiest approach to take to the philosophical questions about rights.

Locke transformed the Hobbesian philosophy into a more acceptable and balanced philosophy of natural rights. It is in this form that many Americans came to know about rights. But Locke’s philosophy contains a fundamental ambiguity, i.e., the tension over the autonomy of the person and the workmanship of God. Homeschoolers see this constantly in the state telling them what "rights" they have in the education of their children to the total ignorance of the fact that these "rights" don’t come from the state, but rather from God as was pointed out in Pontifical Council for the Family’s document entitled "The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality."

Locke wanted to find a solution to the problem of politics that would restore peace to a country divided by religious wars. The tolerance of religious belief required, in his mind, the lowering of the goal and mission of the temporal order, away from the inculcation of virtue, and the defense of the faith to the protection of the temporal welfare of its citizens – rights to life, liberty, and property. [See Locke, Letter Concerning Toleration.] By removing the matter of religious contention from civil concerns Locke hoped to quell the disturbances inflicted upon Europe because of intolerance. Hobbes, by contrast, removed contentious matters by making the sovereign absolute over the determination of the beliefs of citizens. It was Locke who overcame the inconsistencies in this account and sought to place structural and formal limits upon the sovereign political power and to bind the sovereign to the respect of rights to life, liberty, and property. The division of powers, taxation with representation, and limited prerogatives of the state power balanced by a "right to revolution" are all part of Locke’s system. For Hobbes, rights are fundamental moral claims against others; Locke adds to this the claim of the individual against the state, at least when a "long train of abuses" is perceived by a majority and rouses it to act. Per Hittinger, Locke’s more moderate and reasonable account of human rights has appealed to generations of political statesmen and thinkers. However, the seed of radical autonomy as the basis for human rights blooms fully in subsequent philosophers in the natural rights tradition. In the late 20^th century the fruits of this radical autonomy is seen in the insanity of Planned Parenthood vs. Casey where the autonomous unencumbered rights of the individual are elevated to a supernatural plane governed by the "god in the mirror" as each man can define his own universe with its own unique laws and rights to the total exclusion of his fellow men. This begs the obvious question, just what do you do when these myriad universes collide as they invariably will? The obvious answer of "anarchy prevailing" evidently didn’t occur to the majority of our illustrious Supreme Court justices.

Like Hobbes, Locke derived the principles of limited government from a hypothetical state of nature [Locke, Two Treatises Of Government]. This original state of nature is said to be a state of "perfect freedom." By freedom Locke meant no more than an absence of restraint. Locke mentioned the bounds of a natural law in the same passage with perfect freedom. This is to distinguish "liberty" from "license." The natural law initially guides men in the state of nature to refrain from harm: "The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions." The restraint demanded by natural law derives from an additional characteristic of the state of nature: in the state of nature men are equal, in addition to being free [Ibid]. Locke made clear that equality means equal jurisdiction, or the absence of subordination and subjection. The basis for this mutual respect and recognition is the fundamental problem, since it is the basis for natural law.

Per Hittinger, the key difficulty in interpreting the philosophy of Locke pertains to the foundation of natural rights and the rationale for mutual restraint. Locke gives a twofold rationale and foundation. On the one hand, he spoke of man as God’s workmanship and from this axiom derived the right to life, liberty, and property as essential to the divine moral order; on other occasions he simply appeals to the primacy of self-preservation and unfolds from radical autonomy the list of rights and the self-interested basis for mutual respect ala Hobbes.

In the first model, the basis for equal respect is divine workmanship and the order of creation. Locke argued that all creatures are equal under God and occupy the same rank or status as "creature" [Ibid]. Thus, no one can assume to take the position of God and rule over others. This argument from the order of creation reflects a pre-modern understanding of equality. Men are neither beasts nor gods but occupy equally a ground midway between. [See Jaffa, "Equality as a Conservative Principle," How to Think about the American Revolution.] It is neither appropriate to act as a god nor to treat others as beasts or inferior creatures. Locke explicitly used this pre-modern image. In light of this order of creation, man can make no claim to absolute dominion over his fellow creatures. Mutual respect depends upon the recognition of one’s status as a creature, along with others, before the Creator, i.e., a human being cannot claim the type of superiority that would authorize the destruction or arbitrary use of another human being, and rights protect this status.

The problem is that Locke said that the grasp of "natural law’ didn’t depend on divine revelation, nor did it depend on knowledge of God’s promulgated law and sanctions. This content can be appreciated independently of the workmanship model, per Hittinger. For to deny the mutuality of equal right is to propel oneself into a state of war with others. And by such a declaration one has "exposed his Life to the others Power to be taken away by him." To put oneself in such an insecure state is most unreasonable and dangerous. One is open to being treated like a noxious beast [Locke, Two Treatises]. It is more safe, more reasonable, to acknowledge the equality of rights. Thus, mere self-interest would counsel mutuality and restraint. Locke referred to the law of nature as simply the law of reason and common equity: the law of nature is the reasonable restraint of common equity that will establish mutual security. It is discovered through the person’s own desire for safety and security. The basis for restraint is fear of harm and self-interest. According to this model of rights, selfish interest, or comfortable preservation, is the basis for one’s claims. Enlightened self-interest leads one to recognize the equal right of others to their life, liberty, and property [Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding].

Hittinger describes the legacy of Locke as "ambivalent." The advocate of limited government and an apparent friend of the theistic tradition, Locke nevertheless underwrote a model of radical human autonomy in which freedom dominates the moral order. Today, this radical freedom is confused with license on a daily basis with the most dreadful of consequences where hedonism rules all aspects of society having only the Church as the last bastion of truth in a world gone mad. Locke’s philosophy of human rights was derived from a subjectivist account of the good; it lowers the goal of the state to a supposedly neutral position; it imposes a minimal obligation of nonharm; and ultimately it does encourage self-interest in the best tradition of Hobbes. This lowest common denominator minimalist obligations approach embodied in civil law becomes the extent of morality; the wide sphere of private life must come to occupy the bulk of human energies. With Locke, such freedom was aimed at unlimited acquisition of property and the self found its affirmation in labor and the "work ethic." But such terms as equal freedom and mutual respect came to be transformed under the inspiration of Rousseau and Kant to mean much more than civic liberty and protection of private property. In contemporary American jurisprudence they have come to promote the existence of what has been referred to as the "erotic self" [Bradley, "The Constitution and the Erotic Self," First Things, 16 (Oct. 1991): 28-32].

Hittinger points out that David A.J. Richards, Professor of Law at New York State University and Director of N.Y.U.’s Program for the Study of Law, Philosophy, and Social Theory, in one of his publications entitled Sex, Drugs, Death and the Law, follows the logic of the right to privacy to the point of decriminalizing all consensual sex acts, including prostitution, as well as drug use and euthanasia. Richards stressed the radical departure in ethics and politics characteristic of the modern theory of rights elaborated by Locke. He sought to purge American thought and culture of its religious influence; this included what Richards called its Calvinistic public morality and also natural law principles derived from Catholic morality and tradition. The Bible or Thomistic natural law must be considered degrading because they attempt to guide or otherwise restrict the creative freedom of individual persons, presumably even the freedom to not only destroy themselves, but society in general.

The right of conscience, uninformed conscience to be sure, is the primary right and the paradigm for all others. Expanded to include any conscientious belief or actions derived therefrom, no matter how radical, no matter what the consequences, so too other rights are similarly expanded and developed in the light of the principle of autonomy and respect for persons. "I’m OK, you’re OK, even though you’re killing yourself physically and spiritually and, by your example, invite as many as possible to follow you to perdition. Pornography is extolled as the higher option against the repressed Catholic and puritan public morality. Sexuality is the core value for Richards because through it, "we express and realize a wholeness of emotion, intellect and self image guided by the just play of the self-determining powers of a free person. As a good liberal he wished to demonstrate the constitutional legitimacy of the right to privacy, its rightful application in such cases involving contraceptive use in marriage, nonmarital contraceptive use, pornography in the home, and abortion services. In addition he criticized the Supreme Court for its failures to apply privacy rights to consensual homosexual acts. The tired old refrain that homosexuals ought to be afforded the same rights to privacy, family, adoption and so on as heterosexuals in order to forward the "great work of collective democratic decency that is the Constitution of the United States" surfaced. No matter that the Constitution allows for no rights to aberrant self-destructive behavior, much less demands that society accept same.

In the work of the lunatics like David Richards, the seed of radical autonomy planted by Hobbes and Locke for the sake of acquisition of property and comfortable self-preservation matured to become the fruit of a full moral subjectivism and the clear abandonment of and attack upon any shred of classical natural law and virtue.

Hittinger’s conclusion to this challenge of the correct use of rights discourse is rooted in its necessity for the very protection of the claims of religion and religious activity in a secular state. Rights language helps to explain the advocacy for the vulnerable members of society that Christian conscience demands. Thus, to influence public policy in a salutary way, rights discourse is inevitable. But the basis for and purpose of human rights discourse must be clearly understood if we are to avoid the confusion and equivocations of the present day. We must engage in a serious reading of modern philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke; in addition the contemporary developments of Rawls, Dworkin and Richards must be squarely faced; finally, Christian thinkers like Maritain and John Paul II have opened up horizons for a sound philosophy of human rights. [See Schall, The Church, The State And Society In The Thoughts Of John Paul II.]

Hittinger tells us that the use of rights discourse is fraught with difficulties, not the least of which is sheer equivocation when engaged in discourse with the dominant liberal culture. The philosophy of human rights underlying such accounts – the radical autonomy of the human person – must be challenged and redefined. A sound philosophy of rights must make it clear that freedom is not an absolute, that rights are imbedded in an objective moral order that is accessible by reason (the natural law of Aquinas, not that of Hobbes or Locke), and revelation (divine law), and finally that rights are correlated with duties to the community, to others, for the common good, and ultimately to God.

Political power in Locke’s commonwealth clearly resides in the will of the majority. Locke believes that reason will persuade most men to pursue a course of enlightened self-interest. They will be motivated by "the common good," a conception that remains extremely vague in Locke’s Treatises. The possibility that the majority might turn tyrannous is gingerly avoided. But of course no one has an answer for those cases where a whole people seem to have gone collectively insane such as typified by the United States of America since Roe v. Wade and, in particular, under the President and her husband where the principle of "common good" is nonexistent. This comes as no surprise given Locke’s radical move to redefine virtue as nothing more than irrational fashions, not attuned to the customs of the times, the mere opinions of what man has about what is acceptable or not in society. Ethics is not ordered by duty or perfection but by self-advantage and self-interest, a breeding ground for moral relativism. The greatest praise in Locke’s increasingly materialistic world goes to the inventor, not those doing spiritual and corporal works of mercy. Human power is elevated with God put in the background. No need to worry about the supernatural since technology will save man from the grave. Faith is superfluous leaving only a purely secular ethic with faith only retained to appeal to a broader audience.

One might ask a simple question. If avoidance of death is our highest end, the summum bonum of materialism, of secular humanism, why should anyone sacrifice; why be a soldier or policeman? Locke tries to answer this difficult question by wrapping his social contract in faith, but his arguments, as discussed in this paper, are shallow for Locke’s faith, as for so many of the modern philosophers, is a function of a "god made in their image" not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and certainly not the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.