Recently, I've been listening to a lecture course on Justice by Harvard professor Michael Sandel. For a Harvard professor, he's not all that bad. At least he doesn't come across as a know-it-all, and there is none of the smug eliteness that we often find in people in his position. No, he appears level-headed and patient, and he gives you the sincere impression that he's more interested in what you are thinking and why than in what it is you think you know. That's why he gets points in my book.
He's also an interesting enough lecturer and I admire how he makes it possible at all for a discussion of any kind to arise in a lecture that is being attended by over a 1,000 students (face-to-face). He takes you through a recent history of ethical and moral thinking, and invites you to explore just why some thinkers have thought the way they have and what that could or might mean for us today. Let's face it: we're faced with many of the same problems that faced Socrates, Aristotle, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Rawls, and many others. The more things change, the more some things remain the same.
In one of the lectures, he spends a bit of time with Locke. Now, I'm not the world's biggest Enlightenment fan, though I see a lot of positive things that can be derived from this break with tradition. What caught my attention, however, was his attitude toward property. What does property have to do with ethics? Well, actually, a lot, and not the least since the line between what's just and what's legal has become increasing blurred (cf. my last post). You see, it was about the time of Locke that we moderns picked up again on a really fairly ancient idea, namely that property rights are important. In ancient Rome, by about 50 BC, the master of a household, the dominus (related obviously to our word "dominate") had complete power over his property, which included not just his lands and money, but his wife, children, and, of course, slaves. In fact, his power was absolute in the sense that he could do what he wanted with the things and he could even execute the people, if he so desired, without fear of legal repercussions. This was a form of "having" that probably makes some people drool, even today. It is difficult, however, in our modern minds to justify this, especially where the people are involved, but the artificial relationship it creates towards the things has hung around for quite a while.
In the second century AD, then, the Romans actually redefined what the word "freedom" (Lat. libertas) meant, making it in essence indistinguishable from the rights of dominium (that is, the rights of the master over his property) (cf. Graeber, 2011, pp 198ff). And I mention this because it was fellows like Locke who dug deep into our past to find ways to break the authority of the Church which had been dominating the ethics business for centuries. It became a matter of reason, not faith, that things should be one way and not another. Even that other great Enlightenment thinker, Kant, based his entire philosophy of morals on the notion of "freedom" (though he defined it as the ability, no the duty, to obey only those maxims which one gave to oneself; he assumed every human being was in the end, by virtue of his being in existence, free). It doesn't take a genius to recognize that there is a very thin line in our modern minds between the notion of "rights" and what is in fact "right" (or ethical).
But what does all this mean for Locke and for us today? More next time.
References
Graeber, D. (2011) Debt: the first 5,000 years, Melville House Publishing.
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