that what Jesus taught as our moral obligation really is that. Locke was firmly persuaded, however, that revelation is not our only mode of access to moral obligation. Most if not all of our moral obligations can also be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, unaided by revelation. To that part of our moral obligations which can in principle be arrived at by the use of our natural capacities, Locke (in traditional fashion) gave the title of natural law. Locke’s own view was that morality could in principle be established as a deductive science, on analogy to mathematics: one would first argue for God’s existence and for our status as creatures of God; one would then argue that God was good, and cared for the happiness of God’s creatures. Then one would argue that such a good God would lay down commands to his creatures, aimed at their overall happiness. From there, one would proceed to reflect on what does in fact conduce to human happiness. And so forth. Locke never worked out the details of such a deductive system of ethics; late in his life he concluded that it was beyond his capacities. But he never gave up on the ideal. The Second Treatise and other writings. Locke’s theory of natural law entered intimately into the theory of civil obedience that he developed in the Second Treatise of Government. Imagine, he said, a group of human beings living in what he called a state of nature – i.e., a condition in which there is no governmental authority and no private property. They would still be under divine obligation; and much (if not all) of that obligation would be accessible to them by the use of their natural capacities. There would be for them a natural law. In this state of nature they would have title to their own persons and labor; natural law tells us that these are inherently our ‘possessions.’ But there would be no possessions beyond that. The physical world would be like a gigantic English commons, given by God to humanity as a whole. Locke then addresses himself to two questions: How can we account for the emergence of political obligation from such a situation, and how can we account for the emergence of private property? As to the former, his answer is that we in effect make a contract with one another to institute a government for the elimination of certain deficiencies in the state of nature, and then to obey that government, provided it does what we have contracted with one another it should do and does not exceed that. Among the deficiencies of the state of nature that a government can be expected to correct is the sinful tendency of human beings to transgress on other persons’ properties, and the equally sinful tendency to punish such transgressions more severely than the law of nature allows. As to the emergence of private property, something from the world at large becomes a given person’s property when that person ‘mixes’ his or her labor with it. For though God gave the world as a whole to all of us together, natural law tells us that each person’s labor belongs to that person himself or herself – unless he or she freely contracts it to someone else. Locke’s Second Treatise is thus an articulate statement of the so-called liberal theory of the state; it remains one of the greatest of such, and proved enormously influential. It should be seen as supplemented by the Letters concerning Toleration (1689, 1690, 1692) that Locke wrote on religious toleration, in which he argued that all theists who have not pledged civil allegiance to some foreign power should be granted equal toleration.
Some letters that Locke wrote to a friend concerning the education of the friend’s son should also be seen as supplementing the grand vision. If we survey the way in which beliefs are actually formed in human beings, we see that passion, the partisanship of distinct traditions, early training, etc., play important obstructive roles. It is impossible to weed out entirely from one’s life the influence of such factors. When it comes to matters of high ‘concernment,’ however, it is our obligation to do so; it is our obligation to implement the three-step practice outlined above, which Locke defends as doing one’s best. But Locke did not think that the cultural reform he had in mind, represented by the appropriate use of this new practice, could be expected to come about as the result just of writing books and delivering exhortations. Training in the new practice was required; in particular, training of small children, before bad habits had been ingrained. Accordingly, Locke proposes in Some Thoughts concerning Education (1693) an educational program aimed at training children in when and how to collect satisfactory evidence, appraise the probabilities of propositions on such evidence, and place levels of confidence in those propositions proportioned to their probability on that evidence. See also BERKELEY , EPISTEMOLOGY , ETHICS , EVIDENTIALISM , HUME , POLITICAL PHILOSOPH. N.P.W.