The Meaning of Charity in Locke's Political Thought

AuthorBenjamin Thompson,Robert Lamb
Published date01 April 2009
Date01 April 2009
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/1474885108100854
Subject MatterArticles
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The Meaning of Charity in Locke’s
EJPT
Political Thought
European Journal
of Political Theory

Robert Lamb
© SAGE Publications Ltd,
University of Exeter
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi,
Singapore and Washington DC
issn 1474-8851, 8(2) 229–252
Benjamin Thompson University of Oxford
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885108100854]
A B S T R A C T : The recent ‘religious turn’ within Locke scholarship has stressed the
need to understand his theological commitments when approaching his political
thought. One area of interpretation that has been completely transformed by this
heightened sensitivity to the religious roots of Locke’s thought is his account of
property ownership which, it is claimed, contains a ‘right to charity’ – a subsistence
entitlement that trumps established ownership rights. However, this increasingly
accepted interpretive claim has been made without significant attention to the way in
which charity is deployed throughout Locke’s writing. The aim of this article is to try
and get to grips with Locke’s various usages of the term and determine whether the
concept he deploys is a consistent one. After discussion of the uncertain role charity
plays in his account of property, we examine how it is defined in the Essay Concerning
Human Understanding
, and then turn to the crucial position it occupies in his
theological corpus. Though Locke’s understanding of charity seems fraught with
ambiguities, the reason for these ambiguities relate to his configuration of charity as a
disposition rather than a mere act, a configuration linked inextricably to his account of
toleration.
K E Y W O R D S : charity, Christian-Platonism, disposition, Locke, obligation, property,
toleration

I
There has been a widely acknowledged ‘religious turn’ in recent interpretive
accounts of Locke’s political thought.2 An appreciation of the deep theological
underpinnings of his moral and political works – initially emphasised in the
seminal work of John Dunn3 – has become increasingly regarded as necessary to
their understanding. The importance of this appreciation has been underlined
Contact address: Robert Lamb, Dept of Politics, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter
EX4 4RJ, UK.
Email: R.Lamb@exeter.ac.uk
Benjamin Thompson, St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, Queens Lane, Oxford
229
OX1 4AR, UK.

European Journal of Political Theory 8(2)
more recently in Jeremy Waldron’s innovative and provocative analysis of the way
in which Locke’s religious commitments substantively inform his egalitarian
philosophical premises and normative prescriptions.4 The work of Dunn,
Waldron and others has revealed numerous problems with previously dominant
Straussian and Marxist readings of Locke’s political thought; readings that either
ignored or explained away the significance of his theological commitments. What
the ‘religious turn’ has revealed, above all, are the problems with regarding Locke
as the philosophical father of liberal politics, a view that sits uncomfortably with
much of his thought.
One area of interpretation that has been completely transformed by this height-
ened sensitivity to the religious roots of Locke’s thought is his well-known and
still influential account of property ownership put forward in the Two Treatises.
Long-established interpretations – often Marxist in origin – that viewed Locke’s
theory as an ideological justification for ‘unlimited capitalist appropriation’, the
personification of ‘possessive individualism’, have been thoroughly discredited,
replaced by alternative readings that stress the conditions he attaches to property
ownership; conditions with a markedly religious character.5 In fact, it has become
increasingly accepted that one of the most crucial conditions that Locke places on
ownership is a universal and unconditional entitlement to subsistence provisions,
a right that actually trumps established rights of justly owned private property and
that derives from his Christian theology.
The nature of this entitlement is, however, rather ambiguous, not only because
it does not actually appear in the account of property in chapter 5 of the Second
Treatise
, but also because when it is invoked, it is described as a ‘right to charity’.
Within contemporary liberal accounts of political morality, charity is customari-
ly regarded as a voluntary transfer from one agent in a position of relative comfort
to another in a position of relative indigence.6 Charity is certainly a moral obliga-
tion, but, crucially, it is an imperfect obligation, a supererogatory action that
individuals can legitimately opt out of without suffering any significant oppro-
brium. Acts of charity are, by their very nature, legitimately avoidable. When such
acts do take place, they are in recognition of imperfect duties, distinguishable
from perfect duties: in liberal accounts of political morality, matters of charity are
defined by what they are not, matters of justice.
A. John Simmons rightly points out that Locke’s works are ‘liberally peppered’
with references to charity and that any denial of this can be dismissed as ‘odd’.7
Yet Simmons and other recent Locke scholars deny that it is liberally peppered;
that is to say, they reject the claim that the understanding of charity that Locke
deploys is the liberal one of supererogatory moral action but rather a quite differ-
ent Thomistic understanding. However, this now widely accepted interpretive
claim about the Thomistic nature of Lockean charity has been made without suf-
ficient attention to the way in which charity is deployed throughout his writing.
Thus, the aim of this article is to try and get to grips with Locke’s various usages
230
of charity and determine whether the concept that he deploys is a consistent one

Lamb & Thompson: Charity in Locke’s Political Thought
and then, on this basis, address its moral and political meaning.8 We begin by
identifying the ambiguous role occupied by charity in Locke’s account of property
ownership and subsistence rights in the Two Treatises and in other relevant writ-
ings on politics and economics. After discussion of this, we move on to examine
how Locke defines charity in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, before
turning to the crucial position it occupies in his theological corpus. We argue that
whilst Locke’s understanding of charity and its relationship with justice in his
political work seems ultimately fraught with ambiguities, proper attention to the
breadth of his corpus reveals these ambiguities to be related to his acceptance and
configuration of charity as a disposition rather than a mere act: a configuration that
is inextricably linked to his account of toleration.
II
Locke’s account of property ownership begins with an original community of
goods: he claims that, initially, God bequeathed the world ‘to Mankind in com-
mon’ and granted no individual an exclusive right of ownership.9 The way that
private property rights emerge from this community of goods is through indi-
vidual applications of labour on natural resources.10 The reason that labour is
capable of generating such exclusive rights relates to a fundamental moral princi-
ple underpinning Locke’s thought, the duty to ensure their own preservation that
individuals owe to God: ‘every one . . . is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit
his Station wilfully’.11 It is this crucial moral obligation of self-preservation that
gives the activity of labour real moral force.12 ‘It cannot be supposed’, Locke
explains, that God intended the world to ‘remain common and uncultivated’,
since it was given for human ‘benefit’.13 Therefore, he suggests that when God
‘gave the World in common to all Mankind, [he] commanded Man . . . to labour,
and the penury of his Condition required it of him’.14 Importantly, Locke does
not expect every individual to obey God’s ‘command’ to labour, despite the fact
that he thinks that they, morally speaking, should obey it. Indeed, he draws an
explicit distinction between the ‘Industrial and Rational’ who do obey the labour
command and the ‘Quarrelsome and Contentious’ who do not and whose subse-
quently fraudulent claims to the property of others represent mere ‘Fancy and
Covetousness’.15 This differential tendency to labour is further reflected in
Locke’s view of how distributive shares ought to unfold: ‘different degrees of
Industry’, he suggests, are ‘apt to give Men Possessions in different Propor-
tions’.16
Locke is clear that when individuals acquire private property rights through
labour, these rights ‘exclude . . . the common rights of others’.17 But what happens
to those who simply fail to labour and, as a result, fall into a state of hopeless
indigence whilst the world’s property is appropriated? In libertarian accounts of
private property rights, such as that advanced by Robert Nozick, the story would
seem to end here.18 According to such theories, individuals are not thought to
231

European Journal of Political Theory 8(2)
have an inviolable ‘right to life’ that would require a transfer of resources from a
property-owner to a person under threat of starvation. This, however, is where
Locke and libertarianism would seem obviously to part company, since he clearly
is committed to human preservation; that is, after all, what provides labour (and
therefore property rights) with moral justification in the first place.
It is then unsurprising that Locke does actually suggest that when an indi-
vidual’s survival is not itself in question, that agent ought to do ‘as much as he can’
to ‘preserve the rest of Mankind’.19 This clearly...

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