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22 Locke, Essay II.xxi.1-5,7-11,13-15,22-25,29-33,40-48,51-53,56 Power Locke’s chapter on “power” is actually on the
topic of freedom of the will. The
chapter opens with a brief (and problematic) discussion of the origin of the
idea of power but quickly moves, via the claim that our only clear idea of
power arises in connection with our idea of the power of will to initiate
motion, to an examination of the notions of will (also called volition),
freedom (also called liberty), necessity (or determination), desire, choice,
and moral responsibility and blameworthiness for action. The story Lock had to tell is a complex one
that moves over successive stages. On
the way, the argument makes a U-turn.
Over its initial stages it introduces the notions of will, volition,
freedom, and necessity and builds to the conclusion that the will is not free
but determined by whatever causes the greatest sense of uneasiness (something
that is carefully distinguished from the greatest good). But then, in its later stages, the argument
changes direction. (Interestingly, the
change in direction only occurred in later editions of the Essay and was not present in the
first.) Locke went on to claim that we
have a power to refrain from acting in order to spend time thinking about
which of our actions are conducive to the greatest good. This contemplation can alter our state of
uneasiness, making us more uneasy about the absence of a more remote good
than we are about some immediate cause of distress. Locke proceeded to introduce a secondary
sense of liberty of will arising from the exercise of this power. And he tried to argue that the ability to
use the power to suspend action pending further deliberation makes us morally
responsible for some of our actions and justly punishable for some of our
misdeeds. The outcome was an argument
for a more robust version of “soft determinism” than is found earlier in
Hobbes or later in Hume. Locke did not
just appeal to his definitions of freedom and will and say that even though
all actions are determined, some are voluntary because determined by the will
even though the will is itself determined.
He tried to show that the person has powers that can ensure correct
determination of their will. Failure
to exercise those powers when the occasion arises makes people culpable and
justly punishable for their misdeeds.
The precise details of this highly nuanced position, the extent to
which it successfully provides for a sense of freedom of the will while
recognizing determinism, and even the extent to which it is at all deterministic,
remain controversial. QUESTIONS
ON THE
1. Is the idea of power a
simple or a complex idea?
2. What gives us our
clearest idea of a power to begin motion?
3. What is will?
4. What makes an action
voluntary or involuntary?
5. Why can
beings that have no will not be said to be free? Why can beings who
have will and who are doing what they will nonetheless be said to be
necessitated?
6. Explain the difference
between the power of will and the power of liberty.
7. What determines the
mind to will what it does?
8. What is required for a
great good to determine the will?
9. What is the source of
what is improperly called free will and of such liberty as we have? 10.
What causes us to be able to suspend desire pending due
examination of what is most conducive to our real happiness? 11.
Why is it that we do not all always act in such a way as
to obtain real happiness? NOTES
ON THE Power. Locke considered the idea of power to be a
simple idea that can be acquired from either sensation or reflection
(II.vii.8, II.xxi.3). But it is far
from being so. As explained in
II.xxi.1 the idea of power is the idea of the possibility of either
undergoing or bringing about change.
The former is “passive” power, the latter “active” power. These are hardly simple ideas. They involve, first, the idea of change,
which in turn involves not just the idea of a relation of succession between
different ideas, but the idea of a single thing to which the successive ideas
somehow belong. This means that the
ideas of identity of a thing over time and unity of different features in one
thing must be involved in the idea of power.
But there is more to the ideas of active and passive power than just
that of change. As Locke was careful
to specify, these ideas also involve the notion of possibility. Passive power is not change but a capacity to undergo change — something
that may exist as a mere possibility.
For example, wax has a passive power to change from being yellow to
being white even if it is not actually changing right at this moment. This power exists in it as a kind of
enduring possibility, which we describe as a capacity or disposition. In thinking this, we are going beyond
sensory experience. We experience that
things have undergone certain changes in certain circumstances in the
past. We then infer, for reasons Locke
failed to give, that the course of nature will not change and that it will
continue to be the case that when placed in those same circumstances they
will undergo the same changes. This
produces the idea of a permanent possibility to undergo change. Thus, the idea of passive power depends on
the notion that things will continue to occur in more or less the same way
they have done in the past. Importantly
(and fortunately), for Locke’s purposes all that is needed is that we get
this idea, rightly or wrongly, in order to engage in the chain of thought
that produces the idea of passive power.
We do not need to worry whether we are justified in having the idea or
whether it is correct. Similarly, active power is not change but a
capacity or ability to bring about
change. It, too, is something that
exists as a kind of enduring possibility.
We think, for example, that the sun has a power or ability to bleach
wax, even if it is not at the moment shining on a piece of wax. Moreover, it seems to have been part of
Locke’s view that active power can exist and be exercised but fail to produce
any result. I have a power to
straighten my arm, but not every exercise of that power is efficacious (if I
have just done 50 push ups, and go to do a 51st, I may try, but
not succeed). So active power involves
possibility in the sense of only being able to bring about change in those
cases where it is not resisted, either by an incapacity to undergo change in
the thing acted on (e.g., an incapacity in my arm to do a 51st
push up), or by some other active power working differently on the thing. There is yet more. Locke’s did not just think that passive
power is the capacity to change in a certain way on certain occasions. He thought that there can be no change or
passive power in the absence of some active power. So, in his estimation, all change requires
the presence of some cause or active power.
We might well ask what gives us such an idea. Perhaps it is induction from experience
because in principle there in no necessary connection of ideas here. Indeed, there is not a great deal of
experience either. A lot of the
changes we experience are things that just seem to happen, and while we might
think they must have some cause, that cause is not apparent and is left to
scientific investigation to determine. Moreover, change does not just require the presence of a cause, in Locke’s
estimation. The cause is something
that makes the change occur, by acting in some way on the thing that changes. The
thing that changes does not just change at the point at which the cause
enters into the vicinity. The change
is somehow made to occur by the cause, and it is this ability to make
something occur that Locke has principally in mind
when he speaks of active power. Locke treated this bundle of highly
sophisticated notions as a “simple” idea, suggesting that it can be obtained directly
and immediately simply by attending to what is given in sensation or
reflection, as we get our ideas of red, perception, and number simply by
attending to what is given in sensation or reflection. Others have not agreed, particularly as
concerns the crucial notion of an active ability to make change happen. Hume was later to mount a powerful
challenge to this presumption. All that
immediate experience ever tells us, Hume charged, is that one simple idea occurs
after another. A broader survey of
many experiences might tell us that simple ideas of a certain sort are always
followed by simple ideas of another sort.
But experience never reveals anything in the earlier sort of idea that
accounts for why the later sort of idea follows. It never reveals any real power in the
earlier sort of idea that makes the later sort of idea occur or any real
power outside of the two that makes them occur in succession. Locke went at least part way toward
recognizing Hume’s position when he mulled over the possibility that we might
not in fact be able to obtain the idea of active power from sensation
(II.xxi.2, 4, 72). There he admitted
that we can conceive of only two types of activities, thought and
motion. Of the two, motion reduces to
ideas of adjacent positions of a body at adjacent times, rest to same
position at successive times, and change in motion to change of speed or
direction over time. What brings about
a change in motion is collision with something else that is moving. So the cause of motion in one body is
motion of another body, which raises the question of what caused the motion
of that other body. Locke here
persisted in his rejection of Newtonian gravitation, by failing to recognize
that bodies might contain forces like gravitation or elasticity that initiate
new motion. Instead, he maintained
that a body can only transfer what motion it has to another body and not
actively produce new motion. But Hume
made a more radical observation. He
observed that even in collision, we do not observe anything that acts to make
the motion be transferred from impacting to impacted body. Judging in advance of experience, when we
see one body approach another, all possibilities are open. The moving body could pass through the
obstacle as it if were mist. Or pop
out of existence. Or change
colour. Or divide and flow around it. Or explode.
It is only experience that teaches us what does happen. And all that experience teaches us is what does happen, not what makes it happen. All we actually observe is that, as a
matter of fact, bodies change their state of motion after collision. We see nothing that accounts for why they
do so. Locke’s chief reason for supposing that we do
in fact have an idea of active power is that we get it when we reflect on our
abilities to direct our thoughts and move our bodies. When I try to play a game of chess in my
head or go to move my arm, I have a certain kind of thought, which we might
refer to as (i) an attentive consciousness of the act I want to perform,
combined with (ii) a belief that it lies within my power so that I can
perform it simply as a consequence of deciding to do so, followed by (iii) a
decision and exertion of an effort to perform to do so. (iii) needs to be
distinguished from (iv) the experience of a sense of strain accompanying the
exertion of effort and increasing as the exertion of effort continues. (iv) is a simple
idea of sensation (we might as well attribute it to the sense of touch) that
arises in us on those occasions where a body motion is resisted to some
degree. However, many of our body motions
are so slightly impeded as to feel, as we put it, “effortless,” and the same
is true of almost all of our mental acts.
Where these activities are in question, there is still an exertion of
an effort to perform the act, but the exertion is so “effortless,” as we
misleadingly like to put it, that it causes no sense of strain. What we should really say is that the
effort is not accompanied by any sensation of strain, not that there is no
effort. Effort is always present, and
the question is only how much strain is felt in concert with it. It is those cases where decision and effort
are followed by the emergence of the intended idea or motion (either with no
sense of strain or with some) that, Locke claimed, give us our clearest idea
of active power. Hume would have
charged that we actually get two or maybe three ideas: the idea of a decision
or determination, the idea of an effort perhaps accompanied by a feeling of
strain, and the impression of a change in our ideas or of a motion of our
limbs. We might discover that ideas of
the last sort regularly follow upon the occurrence of ideas of the former two
sorts, but we never have anything that gives us an idea of what makes the
latter sort of idea follow from the former sorts. Thus we never experience power, considered
as what it is that makes the change occur.
We only ever experience a constant or regular conjunction between
otherwise unrelated earlier and later events, without discerning anything
that would account for why they are so regularly conjoined. Locke, in contrast, seems to have simply
taken it for granted that we cannot experience a change without thinking that
some power is responsible for that change.
“… whatever Change is observed, the Mind must
collect a Power somewhere, able to make that Change …” (II.xxi.4). Hume might have responded that this is
tantamount to invoking an innate idea, since the notion of a “power able to
make a change” is not anything we discover, even in our reflections on our own
acts of decision and effort. Locke’s
best defence might have been to try to claim that we actually feel power in
ourselves when we exert the effort to move our bodies or produce a certain
idea, but as will be seen in a subsequent chapter, Hume had excellent reasons
for denying that the endeavour we feel ourselves exerting is any such thing. Will and
volition. Be this as it may, Lock seems to have
thought that reflection gives us a simple idea of a power in ourselves to
bring about changes in our thoughts and motions in our bodies simply as a
consequence of, as he put it, “preferring” to do so. He referred to this power as “will” or
“volition” (he used the terms interchangeably), and to those actions arising
from it as voluntary. Not all our
thoughts or body motions are voluntary.
Sensations, particularly sensations of pain, are most often involuntary. We can simply will to think about what we
want, but we cannot simply will to see or feel what we want. Motions of the heart and digestive system
are likewise involuntary, as are the motions of the limbs when we are thrown
or fall. Only those thoughts and
motions brought about by the power of will are voluntary, not those brought
about by other powers. But which thoughts and motions are those? Locke’s position seems to have been that we
are aware, through reflection, of exercising the power of will. What you do through exercising that power
is voluntary. What you do through
exercising (or being acted upon by) other powers is involuntary. The awareness of the power of will takes the
form of the awareness of a thought of a certain kind. Earlier I characterized it as an attentive
consciousness or thinking about an intended action, combined with a decision
to perform that action, further combined with an effort to bring about what
was decided. Locke spoke of directives
and commands and preferences, but he at one point warned his reader that, Ordering, Directing, Chusing, Preferring, etc. which I have made use of, will not distinctly enough
express volition, unless [you] will
reflect on what [you yourself] do, when [you will]. For Example, Preferring which seems perhaps best to
express the Act of Volition, does
it not precisely. For though a Man
would prefer flying to walking, yet who can say he ever wills it? [II.xxi.15 abridged out of Winkler’s edition] To
order or direct that an action occur is one thing, and to perform that action
is something else. For Locke, the will
is not merely a power to express a preference or give a command (as it is for
Descartes). It further involves the effort to execute that preference or
demand. But this is not to say that
the will is always successful. In the
best cases, what is willed follows “barely by a thought or preference of the
mind ordering” (II.xxi.5) that it occur. In these cases, where the effort is not
accompanied by any sense of strain, the will can be compared to something
divine. God is supposed to have said,
“Let there be light,” and light is supposed to have come to be as an
inexorable and necessary effect of his mere command that it be so. The will is like this when it works without
strain. Barely by a command, it makes
a thought arise or a limb move. But
this does not mean that it is reducible to a simple command. In other cases (e.g., those Locke instanced
at II.xxi.9-10, 13, and 48) the command that the will has over our thoughts
and body motions may be less efficacious or even totally ineffective. This is only to be expected, since unlike
Descartes, who was invested in saying that the power of the will is infinite
(and therefore took it to consist merely in the power to choose, not to act on
what was chosen), Locke considered powers to be things that can only possibly bring about their effects and
that are therefore limited. Though
will is a power to bring about changes in thought and move the body, it is a
power that can fail to bring about its intended effect. Freedom
and liberty. The fact that will is a power that can fail
to bring about its effect led Locke to introduce the notion of what he liked
to call a further power, the power of freedom or liberty (the terms are again
used interchangeably). I say “liked to
call” because, as it is described, freedom looks more like a state in which
the power of will can be exercised than a separate power in its own
right. These appearances
notwithstanding, Locke was invested in considering freedom to be a separate
power from the power of will for reasons that will be mentioned below. For Locke, you are free when (i) your willing
to perform an act (including an act of refraining from doing something) is by
itself sufficient to make that act occur, but also (ii) had you willed not to
perform that act, your will would also have been by itself sufficient to make
that act not occur. If either of these
conditions is not satisfied, you are not free but necessitated. This means that free actions have to be
willed. The motions of a tennis ball
are not free because, even though a tennis ball can be considered to have the
power to either move or be at rest, and to move either one way or the other,
the tennis ball does not will those motions.
The motions of someone who trips and falls are not free either,
because even though the person has will, their will
is to do the opposite, and not fall.
But the definition of freedom also entails that actions that are
willed are not necessarily free. Just
because you will to do something, and your willing
it alone is able to make that thing happen, that doesn’t make you free. It also has to be the case that had you
willed not to perform the action, your bare act of willing it would have been
able (with or without some strain) to prevent the action. To cite Locke’s example, a person who stays
in a locked room because they want to be there is not free because even
though they stay in the room voluntarily (as a consequence of willing to do
so), they could not leave the room were they to have that contrary volition. It follows from this that the distinction
between the voluntary and involuntary action does not fall in line with the
distinction between free and necessitated agents. You perform an act voluntarily if you will
to perform it. But you are only free
if you would have been able not to perform it had you willed not to perform
it. Some acts can be voluntary even
though the agent is necessitated to perform them. From this it follows that will is compatible
with necessitation. An act can be
voluntary, though necessitated. However, it equally follows, as a matter of
easily verifiable empirical fact, that not all our acts are
necessitated. To discover this, we
need merely consider what it lies within the physical power of a human body
to do. If you are an adult, not
paralyzed, not tied down or confined, and of normal strength, you are free to
move your limbs in any direction, free to lift any weight less than half your
own, and so on. We can all tell this
in advance. That is, you are able to do these things if you will to do so. But what about your acts of will? Are you free to will? Or free to choose what to will? Free
will. The way Locke defined it, freedom has to do
with what happens consequent upon
an exercise of will, not prior to
an exercise of will. So it looks like
the notion of free will is, on his terms, incoherent. Since freedom is defined in terms of will,
you cannot turn around and take some acts of will to have the property of
being free. To will is to perform the act of preferring in
the belief that barely by this preference you will be able to realize what
you prefer. To be free to perform an
act is to be able to perform it if you will to do so and able to refrain from
doing it if you will to do so. So
apply this definition of freedom to the act of willing. It would follow that to be free to perform
the act of willing is to be able to will if you will to do so, and able to
refrain from willing if you will to do so.
Both conjuncts are absurd, in Locke’s estimation. The second conjunct is absurd because no
one can refrain from willing. As soon
as a course of action that lies within your power to either do or not do is
proposed to you, you must of necessity do one or the other of two things: do
it, or refrain from doing it, if only for the moment. You cannot escape doing one or the other,
and whichever you do it is something you will to do. So we cannot choose not to will. The first conjunct is equally absurd, in Locke’s
estimation. Were the act of willing
itself one that I can will to perform, then an infinite regress would
threaten. Suppose I can’t perform the
act of willing unless I will to do so.
Then, since my act of willing to will is itself an act of willing, and
I can’t perform an act of willing unless I will to do so, I would not be able
to will to perform the act of willing unless I first willed to perform the
act of willing to perform the act of willing.
The only way to break out of this infinite regress is to recognize
that, even if it made sense to will to will, every act of willing would
ultimately have to be the product of a will that is not itself willed, but
determined by some other factor. Locke backed this rejection of free will up by
claiming that the will is one power that an agent can have whereas freedom is
a different power that an agent can have and that powers can only be ascribed
to agents, not to other powers. This
is not an easy argument to understand.
One problem with it is that, the way Locke described it, freedom seems
more like a state than a power: it is the state where contrary powers can be
exercised rather than a power in its own right. If freedom is a power, then it is not
obvious what it is a power to do (both things at once? hardly. so just one of
them? then
how does it differ from willing that one?).
Fortunately, Locke’s position can be defended just by considering how
he described freedom, without having to appeal to his further claim that it
is a power. If freedom is being in a
state where contrary powers can be exercised, whereas the will is a power,
then it already makes no sense to describe the will as being in a state where
contrary powers can be exercised. A
power can’t be in a state where a contrary power can be exercised. That is tantamount to denying that the
power is there at all. The will is
always the will to do some specific thing, even if that specific thing is to
refrain from acting a particular way for the moment. As long as there is willing in existence,
there is power being exercised, one way or the other (either to act a certain
way or to refrain from acting that way).
A consideration of what lies within the physical capacity of the body
may lead us to conclude that there may be a possibility that the opposite
could have happened if it had been
willed, accounting for freedom of
action. But as long as there is will there one way, there is no
will the other way so that the will itself never exists in an indeterminate
state. All the same, we might wonder whether free
will might not make sense in some other sense of “freedom” than the sense Locke
laid out. Grant that it we have no
power to refrain from willing,
might we nonetheless not have some power to choose what to will independently of having that choice determined for
us? Grant that it makes no sense to
will to will, might we not simply exercise an absolute power of choice, that
allows is to spontaneously decide on one course of action or the opposite,
regardless of what inclinations or motives may be operating on us? Locke had no sympathy for this view. His most powerful argument against it,
offered over II.xxi.48, is that even were it possible it would constitute a
defect. On his view, our wills ought
to be informed by a full understanding of the ultimate consequences of the
different courses of action open to us.
To the extent that they are not in conformity with what we understand
and feel, they are something foreign to us, that rebels
against our judgment. As he put it,
someone who rests a hand on a table and has the power to either lift it if he
wills to do so or let remain at rest if he wills not to raise it, is
considered to be at liberty and (in Locke’s sense) to be free. This is something we consider to be a good
thing and a proof of a degree of power that the person has. But when you bump the application of the
notion of freedom back from the act of moving to the act of willing the
motion, and consider the person to have complete freedom to either will or
not will to raise the arm regardless of the circumstances (to be perfectly
indifferent to raising the arm even if an object is flying towards their face
and they need to raise the arm to protect themselves) — then you consider the
person to have something wrong with them.
My will does what I judge is the right thing to do, and what I judge
is the right thing to do is a matter of what I understand and what uneasiness
I feel and not something that my will ought to be able to spontaneously
disregard. Uneasiness. Supposing that the will cannot be free, it
becomes a question what determines it.
Locke’s answer was that the will is determined by the desire for
happiness. (This answer is confused by
II.xxi.30, where Locke declared that desire should not be confused with the
will and that will and desire can run counter to one another. He should be understood to have meant that
while the will is not the same as desire, desire does determine the
will. Cases in which desire runs
counter to will are actually cases in which one desire runs counter to the
desire that does determine the will.
Locke’s own example, of someone who is compelled to persuade a second
person to do something the first person doesn’t want them to do, is an
example of one desire, to avoid reprisal, determining the will contrary to
another desire, for someone else to not do what they are being asked to do.) When writing the first edition of the Essay Locke had presumed that the
desire for happiness takes the form of a desire for the greatest good, or at
least what is perceived to be the greatest good at any given moment. But he changed his mind in later editions,
perhaps as a consequence of considering cases of weakness of the will. As a matter of empirically verifiable fact,
we do not always act so as to bring about what we recognize and acknowledge
to be our greatest good — not even what we mistakenly or temporarily consider
to be our greatest good. We will often
acknowledge that achieving our greatest good calls for a certain action that
is within our power, and yet refrain from performing that act as a
consequence of some sort of weakness.
Perhaps we are just too lazy.
Or perhaps, as in the case of people who persist in law suits they
know they cannot win and that are going to ruin them financially, we are
driven by some passion, in this case one leading us to want to cause trouble
for someone else at whatever the cost to ourselves. Confronted with these sorts of cases, Locke
recognized that a person may perceive something to be the greatest good, and
openly acknowledge it to be such, and still not will to act to obtain that
good. He speculated that this is
because the desire for happiness takes a different form, the form of a desire
to remove whatever is currently causing us to feel most uneasy. We are, after all, most concerned to remove
pain. Seeking pleasure or the greatest
good takes second place to that occupation.
Accordingly, we only act to obtain goods insofar as the absence of
those goods becomes a source of uneasiness, indeed, the source of our
greatest current uneasiness. However
great a good may be known to be, if its absence does not bother someone, they
won’t act to obtain it. And if
obtaining it when its absence causes no uneasiness would require doing things
that are difficult or painful, then a person will certainly not act to obtain
it, because the thought of the difficulty and pain produces uneasiness which
they will act to avoid by avoiding the pursuit of the good thing. Locke speculated that this is why we feel
hunger and thirst and lust. Food is
pleasurable to eat. But the thought of
the pleasure to be obtained by eating does not drive us to eat as effectively
as hunger, which is a felt uneasiness at the absence of food. The
doctrine of suspension. Up to this point,
Locke’s discussion of the power of will has proceeded directly to a “soft
determinist” conclusion. The will is
not free. It is instead determined by
whatever is currently causing the greatest uneasiness. The notion of freedom nonetheless makes
sense. Agents act freely when their
actions are caused by their wills, as opposed to some other cause, and it is
further the case that had they willed to do the contrary they would have been
able to do so. Of course, since their
wills are determined, they could not possibly have willed to do any otherwise
than they did in fact will to do. But
we can still consider whether any special obstacles would have prevented them
from performing a contrary action had they, contrary to fact, been determined
to will otherwise. And we can declare
them to be free simply because there is no such impediment and the immediate
determining cause of their action is their will. However, in later editions of the Essay Locke changed direction, and
began to speak of another kind of liberty that precedes the determination of
the will and of factors that allow us to antecedently influence how our wills
are determined. In one paragraph (56)
he even declared that there are cases where we are at liberty with respect to
willing. It remains a controversial
matter whether these innovations entail abandoning soft determinism in favour
of the rival, libertarian position on free will. The ground for making the change was laid when
Locke shifted from taking the will to be determined by the perception of what
we take to be the greatest good to taking it to be determined by the most
pressing source of uneasiness. Making
this shift led him to declare that we do not always or even mostly act to obtain
the greatest good, and that our desires are not proportioned to the value of
the goods we seek. But it also led him
to note that if something really is a great good then, when we contemplate
it, and think of the pleasure it can bring us, we can be led to become uneasy
as a consequence of its absence — perhaps so uneasy that we will be motivated
to act to obtain it. This means that contemplation can alter the
strength of the uneasiness we feel and so alter the determination of the
will, bringing it about that we do in fact most desire what is most good for
us. To the extent that he recognized this
possibility, Locke was not yet moving out of the ambit of a soft determinist
account of the will. Many determinists
have recognized that the will is not just determined by desire, but by an
understanding of what is most conducive to achieving what we most
desire. But they have taken this
understanding itself to be determined by experience or evidence in
combination with reasoning ability, and to be merely one factor, that mixes
with desires roused by passions and others sources, in the determination of
the will. Locke took a different tack. He maintained that while uneasiness
determines the will, we sometimes find ourselves in circumstances where it is
not necessary to act immediately in order to obtain our ends. In these circumstances we know from
experience that it is often possible for us to, as he put it, “suspend the
satisfaction” of a project. It is
important not to confuse the ability to suspend acting on a project with
willing not to will, which Locke earlier dismissed as impossible. Suspending action on a project is
willing. It is willing to refrain from
performing an action. More
specifically, it is willing to refrain from performing an action in order to
take some time for further consideration.
Supposing that we can do this, at least some times (at II.xxi.53 Locke
recognized that in some cases the sense of uneasiness is just too strong to
allow this), it gives us time to contemplate the various consequences of the
course of action we are considering and the various goods we might obtain by alternative
courses of action. This contemplation
could give rise to desires for absent great goods and uneasiness over their
absence strong enough to alter the way our wills would have been determined
had we not engaged in contemplation.
Obviously, we would end up acting more wisely or prudently rather than
on impulse. We would, in other words,
do what, all things considered, we ought (prudentially considered) to do. Locke took this to provide a foundation for
ascriptions of praise and blame. When
we are caught up in the heat of action and make wrong choices our mistakes
are excusable. But when we need not
act immediately, we have the freedom (i.e., the “power”) to suspend action
pending further deliberation rather than to act precipitously. If we will to act without due contemplation
in these circumstances then, in Locke’s opinion, we are justly blamable for
any wrong choices we might make because we were free to suspend action, and
because, had we done so, and engaged in further deliberation, that
deliberation would have changed the balance of the uneasiness we felt, and
led our wills to be determined by the greatest good (what is most prudent)
rather than by the greatest current uneasiness. Our mistakes in these circumstances are our
own fault for failing to deliberate when we had the leisure to do so. The
necessity of pursuing happiness. On
this account the ability to hold a desire in suspense in order to contemplate
other goods is the foundation of a kind of liberty — the liberty to be
determined by the understanding rather than by impulse. Locke often spoke as if this is something
that we can simply choose to do, at least on those occasions where action one
way or another is not pressing, and as if a failure to exercise this choice
when it is available makes us culpable for our misdeeds. These are problematic claims. It is certainly the case that, when action
is not pressing, we are free (in
Locke’s technical sense of freedom) to suspend action. Freedom is a matter of what observation and
past experience tells us lies within the capacity of a body. I am free to stand or stay seated because
past experience tells me that, barring special circumstances such as
paralysis or bonds, this is the sort of thing that human bodies have the
physical power to do — should they only will to. And we similarly discover from experience that
when it is not necessary to act right this moment in order to obtain an end
or forever lose the opportunity, then I can decide to wait a few moments
before acting. But the question here
does not concern freedom, but choice.
When the issue is moral praise or blame, it is not enough to know that
the person had the power to have acted otherwise. We also want to know if they would have
been able to choose otherwise. If will
just is the power to think or refrain from thinking, as Locke earlier defined
it, then a power to hold off from thinking about a desire would itself have
to be an effect of the will. But if
the will is determined, then we should not to be able to simply choose
whether or not to suspend acting on our desires. To get around this difficulty, Locke claimed
that our wills ought to be
necessitated or determined by the desire to seek true happiness. (Earlier, he claimed that they are determined by the most pressing
uneasiness, but let’s set that aside for the moment.) The desire for true happiness makes us
anxious not to make mistakes — in particular, not to make the mistake of
satisfying a particular, immediate desire at cost to our true happiness. This in turn makes us cautious and makes us
form a higher-order uneasiness over acting on a more immediate uneasiness
pending due contemplation of the consequence of our actions. I just mentioned that, earlier, Locke said
that our wills are determined by the most pressing uneasiness. If they are to be determined instead by the
desire for true happiness, that desire needs to be
cultivated to the point where the risk of losing true happiness becomes our
most pressing uneasiness. To do that,
we need to will to turn our thoughts to identifying greatest goods and
contemplating their advantages so that we will desire them. But the will is determined by what is
currently the greatest uneasiness, not by what ought to be the greatest uneasiness, so we can’t just will to do
this. It is hard to read Locke’s chapter on power
without feeling as if you are being spun around on a merry-go-round. First we are told that the will is
determined by the greatest uneasiness.
But then we are told that we can suspend acting to remove the greatest
uneasiness when it is not necessary to act at exactly this moment in order to
eliminate it. Except suspending action
requires an act of will. That requires
a higher-order uneasiness, the uneasiness over
losing true happiness. But because the
most pressing uneasiness determines the will, uneasiness over the prospect of
losing true happiness will not determine the will unless we cultivate it to
the point where we become so uneasy about this possibility that it becomes
the source of our greatest uneasiness.
Doing this requires yet another act of will, this time a will to focus
our thoughts on things that will make us truly happy. At this point, however, Locke may have
thought that the circle is broken.
This is because a higher order uneasiness
over missing an opportunity to cultivate an uneasiness over the prospect of
losing true happiness is such a remote and abstract desire that it shouldn’t
contradict any more specific project.
Yet, it is such an obviously worth while project in its own right that
we should want to carry it out as time permits. We merely need to remember the importance
of the activity, and we can perform it at those times when we are not
distracted by more pressing concerns.
Our frequent moments of leisure ought to allow us the time to
cultivate the desire for true happiness and so make ourselves able to
subsequently suspend attention to other desires pending due
contemplation. The only residual
problem is why we do not all do this.
How is it that so many of us end up making bad choices? Bad
choice and moral blame. One cause of bad
choice is the strength of the uneasiness motivating the will to make it. In these cases, where the person feels
strong pain or intense passion, Locke considered that bad choice might be
excusable. But in other cases bad
choice is a consequence of laziness.
Though we are able to, we simply do not make the effort to cultivate a
desire for what we understand to be a great good (through, say, forming
habits). Or we simply do not make the
time to think about what sorts of things would be really good, even though we
have the leisure to do so. Locke
claimed that in these cases we are justly blamed for our bad choices. We even blame ourselves for them. It remains questionable whether this position
on moral blameworthiness is consistent with Locke’s theory, nuanced though it
is. If we are lazy or distracted, it
is, on his own account, because some pressing
uneasiness determines the will and makes us unwilling to cultivate a desire
for what we understand to be a great good or to investigate which goods are
better than others. It remains unclear
whether anyone really has a power to do anything other than what they did, on
Locke’s account. But perhaps it does not matter. One thing that is clear, even from the
first edition of the Essay, is that
Locke managed to provide for a distinction between voluntary and involuntary
actions: those that are caused by the will, and those that our bodies are
forced to perform or refrain from performing by factors that do not act on
the will. When we morally praise and
blame people, we do so in part because we want to affect what those people
and others around them will will to do on
subsequent occasions. (We do this,
because we think people’s wills are determined, at least to some extent.) We believe praises will induce people to
will to persist in good actions, and induce others to imitate them. We believe blame and punishment will give
people an incentive not to perform bad actions. But it would be pointless for us to praise
or blame or reward or punish people for actions that they do not will to
perform. Actions that are not willed
by the agent will be performed or not performed regardless of anything we do
to influence what people will to do.
So we don’t praise or blame or reward or punish people for those
actions. But we do praise or blame or
reward or punish people for actions that we consider them to have done
willfully, even if we consider their wills to be determined. Indeed, it is precisely because we consider
their wills to be determined that we do this, because we think it will have
an effect on how their wills are determined on future occasions. We don’t need to consider people to have been
able to do otherwise in order to consider them to be proper subjects of moral
praise or blame. We can consider their
actions to have been fully determined.
But we do have to be able to consider them to have done what they did
willfully rather than unwillingly. As
long as we can do that, and Locke did explain how we can do that, we have
everything we really need to provide for moral praise or blame. ESSAY
QUESTIONS AND RESEARCH PROJECTS
1. Was Locke able to
successfully distinguish the power of freedom from that of volition? Is his treatment of these notions
ultimately coherent?
2. Does Locke’s account
of volition differ from Descartes’s?
If so, how? If not, what is the
common position of the two on the nature of the will and what is the textual
basis for attributing this position to each?
3. Assess the adequacy of
Locke’s reasons for denying freedom of the will.
4. Was Locke ultimately
able to reconcile determinism of the will with moral responsibility and
blameworthiness?
5. Compare Locke’s and
Hobbes’s views on the nature of the will and the possibility of freedom of
the will. |