WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL POWER / TUTORIALOUTLET WHAT ARE THE FUNCTIONS AND LIMITS OF POLITICAL POW | Page 5

negates the possibility of innate ideas
(Essay Book 1) and claims that morality is capable of demonstration
in the same way that Mathematics is
(Essay 3.11.16, 4.3.18–20). Yet nowhere in any of his works does
Locke make a full deduction of natural
law from first premises. More than that, Locke at times seems to
appeal to innate ideas in the Second
Treatise (2.11), and in The Reasonableness of Christianity (Works
7:139) he admits that no one has ever
worked out all of natural law from reason alone. Strauss infers from
this that the contradictions exist to
show the attentive reader that Locke does not really believe in natural
law at all. Laslett, more
conservatively, simply says that Locke the philosopher and Locke the
political writer should be kept very
separate.
More recent scholarship has tended to reject this position. Yolton,
Colman, Ashcraft, Grant, Simmons,
Tuckness and others all argue that there is nothing strictly inconsistent
in Locke's admission in The
Reasonableness of Christianity. That no one has deduced all of natural
law from first principles does not mean that none of it has been
deduced. The supposedly contradictory passages in the Two Treatises
are far
from decisive. While it is true that Locke does not provide a
deduction in the Essay, it is not clear that he
was trying to. Section 4.10.1–19 of that work seems more concerned
to show how reasoning with moral
terms is possible, not to actually provide a full account of natural law.
Nonetheless, it must be admitted that
Locke did not treat the topic of natural law as systematically as one
might like. Attempts to work out his
theory in more detail with respect to its ground and its content must
try to reconstruct it from scattered
passages in many different texts.
To understand Locke's position on the ground of natural law it must
be situated within a larger debate in