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Book Review: Locke, Science, and Politics1 9 3the control of appetite by reason.” This sounds much like Aristotle, with thisdifference: although in Locke as in Aristotle “happiness is reason’s goal,” forLocke happiness “is compounded of pleasure and pain”; for Aristotle, pleasureand pain amount to what we might now call “indicators” of happiness,not happiness itself. 2 “Locke sounds quite like Hobbes…when he says that wecall ‘good’ what causes us pleasure, ‘evil’ what causes us pain, and that theseare different for different individuals” (119). But Locke departs from Hobbes,who puts morality to the service of self-preservation, “the one appetite universallyshared” (120). Locke instead looks to the longer term, encouragingus to live with a view to future as well as immediate pleasure and pain. Thedrunkard allows present pleasure—or at least the relief of present unease—toovercome his knowledge that his overindulgence will ruin his health, causinghim pain and even death. Happiness is pleasure, in Locke—his psychologydoes not make it possible to “foresak[e] appetite for reason”—but pleasuremust be understood reasonably, as a sort of lifelong coordination and disciplineof the appetites and of their satisfaction (120–21). To be maximizedover a lifetime, our pleasures must be calibrated. Locke significantly broadensHobbesianism.But does he abandon it? Strauss and his followers deny that he does.Forde regards Locke’s morality as too closely associated with a noncorporealmoral law, and too far beyond the pursuit of self-preservation, to qualify asHobbesian at its core. Although Locke “concur[s] with the Hobbesian dictum,that the human appetites are neither good nor evil in themselves, untilthey know a law to judge them”—in this, both philosophers hew closer tothe book of Genesis than to Aristotle—Locke “differs with Hobbes on thenature, and perhaps the source, of that law” (123). Locke lists three kinds oflaw: divine, civil, and reputational—the second of these being what we thinkof as human legislation, the third being the informal “law” set by public opinion.Although the Questions concerning the Law of Nature and the SecondTreatise make much of a “natural law,” “natural law, in the old sense of a lawingrained or embedded in nature, cannot exist for Locke,” any more than itcan for Ockham or Pufendorf; what we call natural law is really divine lawpromulgated by “the light of nature” (124). But, Forde argues, this does notsignal a shift from moral law to “individual natural right” (126), despite thelanguage of the Second Treatise. “Locke nowhere says that he, or anyone, has a‘right’ to pursue happiness as he sees fit. He, and we, have not so much a rightto pursue happiness as a duty to pursue happiness aright”—a duty we can2Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.5, 7; 2.3; 7.11–13.

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