by Scott Soames
In sum, the philosophy of the early modern period was inextricably intertwined with the mathematics and natural science of the day. Scientists like Kepler, Galileo, Newton, and Boyle were themselves natural philosophers who studied other natural philosophers and incorporated what they recognized to be philosophical elements in their scientific theories. Natural philosophers like Copernicus, Descartes, Leibniz, and Berkeley attacked scientific and mathematical problems associated with their overall philosophical perspectives. Some made important advances in physics and mathematics, for example by inventing the infinitesimal calculus, by providing the conceptual basis for analytic geometry, by discovering the sine law of refraction, and by contributing to the science of optics. The philosophers Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, and Kant also struggled to expand objective, scientific knowledge to encompass the mind. Although their theories of perception and cognition are primitive by today’s standards, they succeeded in identifying problems and framing questions that were later dealt with more satisfactorily using descendants of the concepts they helped to articulate.
This quintessentially philosophical activity was also illustrated by Hume’s anticipation of Darwin in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. There Hume confronts the argument that just as we would conclude that a fine watch found on a beach was made by a skilled watchmaker, so we should conclude that the well-ordered natural world we observe is the work of a divine creator. Hume combats this argument by urging the possibility that, given enough time to operate, the laws of nature might explain this order on their own, without an intelligent creator.
Strong and almost incontestable proofs may be traced … that every part of this globe has continued for many ages entirely covered with water. And though order were supposed inseparable from matter … yet may matter be susceptible of many and great revolutions, through the endless periods of eternal duration. The incessant changes, to which every part of it is subject, seem to intimate some such general transformations.28
For example, he suggests, the ingenious adaptation of plants and animals to their surroundings may result from their need to adapt to ever-changing environments.
It is in vain, therefore, to insist upon the uses of the parts in animals or vegetables, and their curious adjustment to each other. I would fain to know how an animal could subsist, unless its parts were so adjusted. Do we not find that it immediately perishes whenever this adjustment ceases, and that its matter corrupting tries some new form? … No form … can subsist, unless it possess those powers and organs requisite for its subsistence: some new order or economy must be tried … without intermission.29
He further obliquely suggests that the survival of the fittest may explain the adjustments undergone by all living things.
And why should man … pretend to an exemption from the lot of all other animals? … A perpetual war is kindled amongst all living creatures.… The stronger prey upon the weaker … the weaker too often prey upon the stronger.… Consider that innumerable race of insects, which either are bred on the body of each animal, or … infix their stings in him.… These insects have others … which torment them. And on each hand, before and behind, above and below, every animal is surrounded with enemies, which incessantly seek his misery and destruction.30
You ascribe … a purpose and intention to nature. But what … is the object of that curious artifice and machinery which she has displayed in all animals? The preservation alone of individuals, and propagation of the species.31
Darwin—whose records show him to have been an avid reader of Hume on the advice of his grandfather—was aware of these ideas. This is not to say that Hume’s plausible speculation was responsible for Darwin’s well-supported theory nearly 100 years later. It is to say that Hume did what philosophers congenitally do—suggest important ideas, some of which turn out to be scientifically productive. This was a recurring theme in the early modern period summarized here.
What, in sum, did philosophy contribute to the remarkable advances in natural science and mathematics during the period? No such advances were the work of philosophy alone. But philosophy did contribute to these advances in many ways: to the Copernican reconceptualization of the solar system needed to explain the apparent retrograde motion of the planets; to the reconceptualization of causation needed to accommodate the notion of a force, gravity, acting at a distance; to the beginnings of analytic geometry; to the invention of the calculus; to early advances in our understanding of light, optics, and vision; to the articulation of foundational questions about the conceptions of space and time needed in our theories; to the idea that the biological world, including the genesis and survival of species, might be explainable by natural causes; and to the project of developing a systematic empirical science of psychology. More important, however, than any of the individual achievements noted here was the fact that during this period science and philosophy were inseparable, overlapping contributors to one of the richest, most rapidly advancing intellectual cultures the world has ever seen.
CHAPTER 4
FREE SOCIETIES, FREE MARKETS, AND FREE PEOPLE
Philosophical conceptions of human nature and human societies; Hobbes on social organization and the justification of the state; Locke on natural rights and limited government; Hume’s naturalistic conception of morality, social convention, and evolving social institutions; the influence of Locke, Hume and John Witherspoon on the American founding; Adam Smith’s philosophy and economics; the contributions of Hume and Kant to morality.
The interpenetration of philosophy with science and mathematics in the early modern period was matched by its interpenetration with emerging descriptive and normative investigations of politics, economics, morality, and the relationship between the individual and the state. The first great political philosopher of the time was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose famous work, Leviathan, was published in 1651. An accomplished writer and scholar, he translated Thucydides and all of Homer, met Galileo, and submitted objections to Descartes concerning the Mediations. His pre-Newtonian philosophy of nature included a speculative physics of matter in motion, a philosophical psychology, and a theory of knowledge. But it was his political philosophy, resting on a theory of human nature, that was groundbreaking.
Hobbes believed the good to be what is desired. He also believed that each person seeks to maximize his or her own good. Hence, he thought, human life without the coercive power of the state would be a war of all against all, in which one must depend on oneself alone for everything, including survival.
In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation … no knowledge of the face of the earth … no arts; no letters; no society; and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man solitary, nasty, brutish, and short.1
This picture of life in a “state of nature” is used to tell two stories. The first is a causal explanation of how and why societies are formed. We form them because we realize we can’t survive on our own. The second is a justification of the state. We should willingly submit to its authority because doing so is in our interest. Hobbes imagines a hypothetical social contract in which we mutually agree to give up our natural right to seek our own advantage as we wish, transferring authority to the state to forbid or permit actions as it sees fit. Because we benefit from the arrangement, we have a nearly unlimited obligation to obey the law, as long as it is rightly seen as preventing a war of all against all. Since functioning states do that, nearly all are justified.
This indiscriminate justification of states, no matter how authoritarian, is one reason why Hobbes was controversial. More to his credit, perhaps, he also provoked controversy at the time for challenging the divine right of kings. Despite taking monarchy to be the preferred form of government, he gave a naturalistic account of political institutions, which left plenty of room for empirical and philosophical argument. What he didn’t do was recognize what we
now know to be central aspects of human psychobiology.
Because cooperation promotes survival, human beings are social animals. In addition to needing help from others, we form attachments to them. Parents are genetically disposed to care for their young. Children bond with those on whom they depend, forming ties of affection and trust in which their self-conceptions are intertwined with others. They learn rules in games and collective activities, earning rewards proportional to the value of their efforts. They scrutinize each other for rule violations, and they punish violations of trust with social ostracism and worse. Because participants are socially connected, rule violations risk more than the loss of self-centered benefits. Violations are affronts to one’s comrades, to one’s friendship with them, to one’s image in their eyes, and to the person one wants to be. In this way, rules obeyed to secure benefits of group action become principles honored for their own sake. Natural sentiment, social affiliation, recognition of mutual interest, and prudential rationality blend into a common morality. A number of the philosophers who followed Hobbes implicitly recognized much of this.
The first was the empiricist philosopher John Locke, discussed in the previous chapter. Like Hobbes, Locke’s political philosophy was based on a hypothetical “state of nature” and social contract in which individuals cede authority to the state. But whereas Hobbes recognized no moral obligation independent of the state, Locke believed that moral law, discoverable by human reason, is the source of rights and obligations that don’t derive from any political institution.
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges everyone; 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.2
Locke took these rights to be both natural and discoverable by reason, in the sense that they can be shown to be necessary in order for human beings living in close proximity with one another to secure the manifest benefits resulting from their cooperative involvement with one another. If we are to live with others, Lockean imperatives tell us, each of us must grant others certain rights or prerogatives. Among them are life, liberty, and possessions, including the right to acquire, produce, buy, sell, and exchange property.
Since for Locke, the family is the natural social unit, which fathers are obligated to support, they also have the right to bequeath property to their offspring. Property is initially gained by appropriating unowned natural resources, which one improves or puts to use. One can amass as much as one likes, provided one doesn’t waste resources or let them spoil, and there is “enough and as good” available for others. Unfortunately, however, the moral law that should govern the state of nature will often be disobeyed unless it is backed by force. Thus a minimal state arising from the social contract is needed to preserve natural rights. In such a state, the citizens themselves or their representatives enact laws for the common good, which are published and known by all; they adopt a legal system for impartially adjudicating disputes that arise; and they develop and submit to a system of legal enforcement to ensure that their rights are protected.
How is the minimal state justified? One might argue that it is justified on the pragmatic grounds that it produces greater happiness and fewer violations of natural rights than other alternatives. Locke wouldn’t disagree. However, he gave a different argument, based on consent.
Men being … by nature all free, equal, and independent, no one can be put out of this estate [of nature] and be subjected to the political power of another without his own consent. The only way whereby anyone divests himself of his natural liberty and puts on the bonds of civil society is by agreeing with other men to join and unite into a community for their comfortable, safe and peaceable living one amongst another, in secure enjoyment of their properties and a great security against any that are not of it.3
Since explicit consent to a social contract is rare, Locke needed a notion of presumed consent.
Although he left this notion somewhat undeveloped, it wasn’t entirely without foundation. Recognizing that one must inevitably give up some freedom in order to enter society, he believed that certain rights cannot, without absurdity, be presumed to have been given up. An individual, he reasoned, enters society
only with the intention … the better to preserve himself and his Liberty and Property; (For no rational Creature can be supposed to change his condition with the intention to be worse) the power of the Society, or the Legislature constituted by them, can never be suppos’d to extend further than the common good; but is obliged to secure every one’s Property by providing against [the] … defects … that made nature so unsafe and uneasy.4
In short, no one can rationally be presumed to entirely surrender life, liberty, and property to secure the benefits of organized society, for to do so would be to sacrifice more than would be gained.
Locke reiterates the idea a little later.
The Supreme Power [the state] cannot take from any Man any part of his Property without his own consent. For the preservation of Property being the end of Government, and that for which Men enter into Society … [to suppose it given up is] too gross an absurdity for any Man to own.… Hence it is a mistake to think, that the Supreme or Legislative power of any Commonwealth, can do what it will, and dispose of the Estates of the Subject arbitrarily, or take any part of them at pleasure.5
Though not without considerable force, this statement is less clear and compelling than one might expect. Locke hoped to establish a great deal from the observation that no one can rationally be presumed to surrender one’s rights to life, liberty, and property to secure the benefits of organized society. However, it is unlikely that everything for which he hoped can be established by this route. One gains so much by entering society that merely prohibiting government from making one worse off than one would be in a state of nature, with no system of social cooperation to rely on, is to limit government very little. Consequently Locke’s justification falls short of establishing the robust system of protected natural rights at which he was aiming.
At the very least, his heavy emphasis on hypothetical consent—what one would consent to—requires qualification. Mightn’t a rational agent consent to some diminution of Lockean natural rights—some diminution of autonomy, some diminution of rights to acquire, retain, and dispose of property—well short of obliteration, to secure the benefits of social organization? Surely there is considerable room for a rational agent to do so. Mightn’t one’s willingness to make such trade-offs depend on the specifics of one’s situation, and on the society one is joining? How could it not?
Instead of appealing to hypothetical consent to a social contract in the state of nature, one might do better simply to recognize that if, as virtually everyone desires, one is to live in society with others, one must demand certain rights for oneself while also extending them to others. One must grant all individuals the right to security from violent attack, and the right to a sphere of autonomy in which individuals are free to decide their most basic beliefs, to express themselves, and to follow their chosen way of life without harming or coercing others. Since this will typically involve the right to acquire, produce, buy, sell, and exchange property, some semblance of Lockean rights will be included.
Imagine choosing a form of government for ourselves now. Presumably the laws of human biology, psychology, sociology, and economics constrain successful forms of political and social organization. Suppose we know enough about these constraints to identify some presumptive rights and privileges that individuals are justified in expecting a morally just, and practically workable, government to respect. We don’t have to think of the task as deciding everything at one time, for societies in all conditions, but as deciding for ourselves here and now.
Like Locke, we may want a democratic form of government. But we may also want some assurance that certain fundamental rights and principles will be respected. A reasonable way of increasing the
probability that they will be respected is to put them beyond the reach of ordinary policy making by requiring supermajorities to change them. This doesn’t have to happen all at once. Rather, we might see ourselves as starting modestly and incrementally building a structure that allows for constitutional adjustments, the need for which may become evident over time. At every stage the guiding idea should be to identify principles that, all other things being equal, the government must obey if its citizens are to have a reasonable chance of achieving the goals that voluntary collective action are designed to secure.
Although not all of this is in Locke, the basic picture is an elaboration of his ideas. For him, a democratically elected legislature is the supreme authority in making laws for the common good, applied uniformly to all. His separate executive enforces the law, but cannot enact it, while his separate judicial system settles disputes and tries violations of law. In short, he proposed limited constitutional government, with a clear separation of powers designed to avert tyranny and to secure natural rights, so that citizens can reap the benefits of peaceful, cooperative relationships with one another. Finally, he stipulated that if the government fails to enforce the natural rights of citizens, or exceeds its proper limits, rebellion is justified.
