Lockean toleration and the victim's perspective

Introduction

Since its publication a quarter-century ago, Jeremy Waldron's ‘Locke: toleration and the rationality of persecution’ has occasioned a great deal of controversy. On the one hand, Waldron's article has done much to shape recent discussion of the Letter Concerning Toleration, ¹ and prominent scholars of Locke such as Susan Mendus, Paul Bou-Habib, and Mark Goldie have accepted key elements of Waldron's interpretation. ² On the other hand, several authors have dissented from the Waldron-inspired orthodoxy on Locke's theory of toleration. ³

This essay takes its place among the latter group. Like these scholars, I believe that Waldron's reconstruction of the argument of the Letter, which centers on Locke's claim that it is irrational to employ persecution in order to convert the persecuted, is misleading. However, this article differs from these other negative assessments in the grounds for its criticism of Waldron. The dissenters from Waldron's reading have all, in their own ways, sought to attain a more accurate understanding of the Letter by ‘rang[ing] wider than the “rationality argument”’ which Waldron analyzes. ⁴ In other words, they have sought to show that Waldron's dismantling of what he takes to be the Letter's ‘main line of argument’, ⁵ —namely, that persecution is instrumentally irrational because coercion cannot make us adopt the desired beliefs—need not lead us to dismiss Locke's theory of toleration, since Waldron's critique leaves untouched the other arguments and considerations that make up Locke's theory.

By contrast, this essay demonstrates that Waldron's account of the instrumental irrationality argument itself is erroneous. In short, I argue that Waldron gives an incomplete, and consequently distorted, picture of Locke's understanding of the mismatch between the persecutor's means (violence) and his end (uniformity of religious belief). In addition, I argue that this incomplete picture has the unfortunate consequence of making Locke's claim about the irrationality of persecution look much less plausible than he or his contemporaries thought it was, or than many of us today would, given a proper appreciation of it, believe it to be. ⁶

I begin by summarizing Waldron's article, before proceeding to my own reading of Locke's view of the instrumental irrationality of intolerance.

Waldron on instrumental irrationality

In his influential article, Waldron probes the Letter in order to ascertain ‘whether Locke's case is worth anything as an argument that might dissuade someone here and now from actions of intolerance and persecution’. ⁷ His answer is that it is not. Locke's argument rests, according to Waldron, on establishing ‘two important propositions’:

(1) that coercion works by operating on a person's will, that is by pressurising his decision-making with the threat of penalties; and (2) that belief and understanding are not subject to the human will, and that one cannot acquire a belief simply by intending or deciding to believe. ⁸

Waldron's attack does not stop there. There is yet ‘another point of leverage for the theocrat’, which is that the Letter ‘ignore[s] the possibility that practice may stand in some sort of generative and supportive relation to belief’. ¹⁰ If a Pascal-like level of determination is not necessary for a process of going through the motions to bear the fruits of belief, then regulations that punish non-attendance at certain churches or non-subscription to certain formularies could end up advancing the cause of doctrinal uniformity. The Letter, it turns out, is a ship with many leaks.

Waldron does not boast that his critique of Locke is novel or stunning. Rather, he admits, ‘[a]ll this is familiar and evidently true’. ¹¹ But this modest admission prompts its own line of questioning: namely, if these problems are so obvious, how did Locke not notice them? Why would he put forward a line of thought that was such a transparent failure?

There are two possible answers to this question. The first is that, despite his concentration on the issue of instrumental irrationality, what Waldron identifies as the ‘main line of argument’ is in truth just one of many lines. The Letter was composed with a live political struggle in mind, ¹² and as a result he took an all-arguments-on-deck approach to the problem of persecution. He does not settle at offering, in the uncharitable words of his High Church antagonist Jonas Proast (about whom more will be said below), ‘a single Argument … to establish his Position’, ¹³ but puts forth a series of related but separable arguments intended to maximize his persuasive potential in light of the ‘variety of principles, held, and contended for, by all sorts and degrees of men’. ¹⁴ Locke himself upbraided Proast for overlooking the argumentative diversity of his text. The Letter, Locke wrote, was not like a house with ‘only one beam [that] has any strength in it’; rather, it had ‘several [beams] that would support the building’. ¹⁵

This reminder of the Letter's many-sidedness leads us to the possibility that Locke simply chose to overlook Waldron's obvious objections to one of his several arguments. If the claim about instrumental irrationality falls flat when scrutinized, Locke might have taken this to be no great loss, for he had set out a range of other reasons to reject intolerance. Moreover, since most people are not particularly critical readers, the argument, despite its weakness, might have done its part to change minds and gain the Letter the ‘general and speedy … Approbation’ its English translator hailed. ¹⁶ The disproof of the efficacy of intolerance may have served Locke's purposes even though he knew it not to be well founded.

We do not, however, need to be satisfied with an answer which is thus dismissive of the instrumental irrationality argument. While it is true that Locke did not allow his defense of a cause as important as toleration to rest on a single position, it does not follow that we must write off his clear concern to diminish, in the eyes of a potential persecutor, the effectiveness of persecution as a strategy for conversion. Instead, as I will show, Locke was invested heavily enough in this particular line of argument not to let it rest exclusively on one set of reasons. The instrumental irrationality approach to toleration itself consists of discrete strands. Waldron's reconstruction of the Lockean case for instrumental irrationality misleads precisely because it ignores one of these strands.

The strand which Waldron analyzes is what I will name the ‘categorical’ argument for the irrationality of intolerance. It identifies the pitfall for persecution with the separation of the ‘will’ and the ‘understanding’. The point of this strand is that these faculties are parts of the human soul that do not interact in the way they would need to for persecution to be successful. Waldron calls this separation the ‘causal gap’, and this causal gap is essentially the expression of a kind of category error. The persecutor ascribes to the understanding properties which the will alone possesses; though the will is susceptible to compulsion, the understanding is not: ‘such is the nature of the Understanding, that it cannot be compell’d to the belief of any thing by outward Force’. ¹⁷ This line of thought is summed up well in a famous passage: ‘it is absurd that things should be enjoyned by Laws, which are not in mens power to perform. And to believe this or that to be true, does not depend upon our Will’ (LT 44).

That Locke uttered such ‘categorical’ phrases is well known, and they are indubitably an important element of the Letter. My contention is not that this particular ‘beam’ was not part of the Lockean edifice, or even that Waldron sketches this beam poorly. It is that, in ignoring the other beam that supports the instrumental irrationality portion of the house, he is led to give a false impression of Lockean toleration and to criticize Locke for failing to achieve objectives that Locke never set himself to achieve.

In particular, Waldron's sole concentration on the ‘categorical’ strand of the argument for instrumental irrationality leads him to two conclusions which Locke would have considered mischaracterizations of his text. First, Waldron finds the Letter wanting in empathy for those who suffer at the hands of an intolerant state or church. He laments that ‘what one misses above all in Locke's argument is … a sense of any deep concern for the victims of persecution or the moral insult that is involved in the attempt to manipulate their faith’. ¹⁸ Because the addressees of an argument about the inefficacy of persecution are ‘the persecutors in their interests’, he concludes that the victims themselves figure only ‘incidentally’ in Locke's thinking about toleration. ¹⁹ Second, Waldron judges the ‘familiar and evidently true’ facts about Pascalian modifications of belief and the malleability of belief's ‘epistemic apparatus’ to be not simply inconvenient truths, but rather a ‘fatal crack in the framework of Locke's argument’. ²⁰ Both of these conclusions are inaccurate, certainly if they are taken to be interpretations of what Locke thought he was arguing, but also, I think, if they are taken to be the correct way of assessing the Letter as a ‘practical intellectual resource’. ²¹ The reasons for this inaccuracy are the subject of the remainder of this essay.

The psychological sources of the instrumental irrationality of persecution

Far from resting content with declarations of the immunity of belief to force and of the special prerogative of ‘Light and Evidence’ to ‘work a change in Mens Opinions’ (LT 14), Locke puts forth another, distinct argument for the irrationality of persecution. This argument, ignored by Waldron, I will call the ‘empirical’ argument for instrumental irrationality. The ‘empirical’ argument is distinguished from the ‘categorical’ one analyzed above by the less metaphysical and abstruse character of the claims it makes. The empirical strand resembles much more the inquiries of modern psychology and social science than the abstractions inherited from a scholastic heritage. To steal a phrase from Ingrid Creppel's work on Locke, it is marked by a ‘less naïve psychology’ than the categorical strand's hard-and-fast separation of the will from the understanding. ²²

The empirical argument for instrumental irrationality is elaborated early and at length in the Letter. After an opening paragraph that announces a contradiction between force and the tenets of Christianity, Locke turns his attention to the feelings of peaceful people toward persecutors and the motivations that the former impute to the latter. These observations amount to a challenge to the conversionary potential of persecution that is independent of any ‘categorical’ assumptions about the division of the soul's faculties.

According to this line of thought, what makes ‘the rigour of Laws and the force of Penalties’ unsound instruments for effecting conversion is that it is implausible from the point-of-view of the sufferers that this rigor and force could have been employed for their benefit (LT 14). It is foolish, Locke believes, to imagine that through the infliction of physical pain or material disadvantage one could convince someone who is already averse to a given creed that the creed in question is a true one. Rather than inclining the heterodox to focus on the strengths of the arguments for orthodoxy or on the virtues it instills in the faithful, the predictable outcome of persecution is the creation of hostility and mistrust in the targeted parties. It hardens, not softens, opposition to the religion that persecutes. This is the psychological reality of victimization, and it presents a formidable barrier to successfully carrying-out of an agenda of intolerance:

That any Man should think fit to cause another man whose Salvation he heartily desires, to expire in Torment and that even in an unconverted estate, would, I confess, seem very strange to me, and I think, to any other also. But nobody, surely, will ever believe that such a Carriage can proceed from Charity, Love, or Good-will. (LT 10)

This was not a new insight of the Letter; on the contrary, in this regard the Letter was developing a psychology of victimization that had already been employed in his 1667 Essay on Toleration. There Locke had turned to similar observations about the victim's perspective to decry the coercive pursuit of religious uniformity in England. If only the reader would investigate ‘his own bosom for an experiment whether ever violence gained anything upon his opinion, whether even arguments managed with heat do not lose something of their efficacy, and have not made him the more obstinate in his opinion’, ²³ the pro-persecution position would be fatally weakened. The futility of the employment of violence for evangelical purposes derives from human beings’ simple, instinctive inability to think well of the causes of their sufferings: ‘He that differs in an opinion is only so far at a distance from you, but if you use him ill for that which he believes to be the right he is then at perfect enmity, the one is barely a separation, the other a quarrel’ (ET 128). ²⁴ When it comes to making converts, persuasion is vastly better policy than persecution. And the best way to illustrate this superiority is by entering into the head of the victim.

The Letter accentuates the force of the Essay's thought about the psychological sources of coercion's ineffectiveness by pairing it with another circumstance that tends to discredit the motives behind persecutory measures. And this is that, while partisans of intolerance are busy punishing ideological non-conformity, bad behavior within their ranks often meets with impunity. Every time a victim sees one of the persecuting flock commit some sort of immorality and get off scot-free, his suspicions of the vicious character of his persecutors seem confirmed. If ‘this burning Zeal for God, for the Church, and for the Salvation of Souls’ ‘bend[s] all its Nerves either to the introducing of Ceremonies, or to the establishment of Opinions’ and ‘pass[es] by those moral Vices and Wickednesses, without any Chastisement’ (LT 9), there will naturally be widespread doubt about the sincerity of the altruistic, paternalistic platform of persecutors. Such conduct destroys the good standing without which the possibility of persuading others is impossible:

Now I appeal to the Consciences of those that persecute, torment, destroy, and kill other Men upon pretence of Religion, whether they do it out of Friendship and Kindness towards them, or no: And I shall then indeed, and not till then, believe they do so, when I shall see those fiery Zealots correcting, in the same manner, their Friends and familiar Acquaintance, for the manifest Sins they commit against the Precepts of the Gospel; when I shall see them prosecute with Fire and Sword the Members of their own Communion that are tainted with enormous Vices, and without Amendment are in danger of eternal Perdition; and when I shall see them thus express their Love and Desire of the Salvation of their Souls, by the infliction of Torments, and exercise of all manner of Cruelties. (LT 8–9)

Mark Goldie has rightly noted how ‘happily’ Locke went about the ‘the prosaic business of puncturing the divines’ fond notion that the enforcement of the Restoration penal laws was a pastoral and catechitic activity’ as opposed to a cover for their worldly ambitions. ²⁶ This ‘puncturing’ activity, however, is not, as Goldie seems to think, a sidebar to or distraction from a more serious, substantive argument about the irrationality of compelling uniformity. Instead, such a deflation and criticism of the motivations of persecutors, we can now see, is part and parcel of an important strand of this argument: what I’ve been calling the ‘empirical’ strand. The constant expressions of incredulity regarding the supposedly selfless, religious motives of persecutors represent the victim's perspective on his victimizers. A strategy for changing preferences or beliefs that instead engenders distrust of the partisans in one's camp and skepticism about one's views is hardly the rational one to adopt.

Locke's adversary and the instrumental irrationality argument

Interestingly, Jonas Proast's relationship with the Letter's psychology was a complicated one. Proast was an Oxford chaplain, who, over the decade-and-a-half following the Letter's appearance, published three attacks on Locke's defense of toleration, eliciting in response three further letters (one unfinished) from Locke. In a remarkable passage Proast not only acknowledged the ‘empirical’ version of the instrumental irrationality argument, but agreed with it:

These cruelties [he is speaking here of “severe penalties”: loss of property, starvation, torture] have the misfortune to be commonly look't upon as so just a Prejudice against any Religion that uses them, as makes it needless to look any further into it; and to tempt Men to reject it, as both false and detestable, without ever vouchsafing to consider the Rational Grounds and Motives of it. This effect they seldom fail to work upon the Sufferers of them. ²⁷

But Proast, of course, could not assent to Locke's psychological insights on this matter wholeheartedly—this would be to deal a harsh blow to his own position. Instead, he allowed the victim's and spectator's perspectives to stand, but sought to limit their impact. He managed to qualify their impact, however, only in an imprecise way. While he granted the counterproductive consequences of extreme torments, he denied that these consequences attached to all uses of the ‘externally coactive power, in general’. ³¹ Beneath a certain threshold of pain or insult, Proast alleged, exercises of coercive authority against dissenters lost their hate- and mistrust-engendering properties and became merely ‘tolerable Inconveniences’. ³² Disadvantages that fell within this range were irksome enough to prompt the heterodox to reconsider their rashness in departing from the true faith, but not so harsh as to blacken the reputation of orthodoxy and its adherents. Yet Proast staunchly refused to spell out concretely what sorts of measures fell within this efficacious range, and he even went so far as to condemn Locke's request that he ‘express what Penalties, particularly, are such as … may fitly and reasonably be used’ as a ‘very unreasonable Demand’. ³³ Locke found his adversary's ‘many shifts’ exasperating, and lambasted him for maintaining with such confidence that force could be of true religious benefit ‘without showing the just measure of punishment to be used’. ³⁴ To Locke, Proast's evasiveness on this subject was merely a dogmatical believer's assurance that whatever penalties the ‘true’ Anglican Church enforced would not be liable to the psychological problems of the victim's perspective.

While Proast's lack of clarity regarding the scope of non-noxious punishment was polemically fruitful for his antagonist, Locke's objection was, of course, more fundamental than mere frustration with his opponent's vagueness. Locke's view was that there was no penalty for heterodoxy, no matter how negligible it may seem, that could be safely presumed not to provoke a backlash; there was no threshold below which the adverse psychological effects of intolerance would not be triggered. Far from the psychology of victimization applying only when particularly bloody torments were employed, it was enough to damage the good standing of the dominant creed that dissenters ‘should not enjoy the same Privileges as other Citizens; that they should not be permitted either to buy or sell, or live by their Callings; that Parents should not have the Government and Education of their own Children; that they should either be excluded from the Benefit of the Laws, or meet with partial Judges’ (LT 55–56). Ineffectiveness, Locke thought, was the normal result of singling people out for even minor disadvantages on the grounds of their beliefs.

Proast had another rejoinder to offer, one that is particularly apt to surprise readers today and to reveal how counterintuitive and unusual Locke's psychological claims must have seemed to many Englishmen in a century whose sensibilities were more violent than our own. This was his accusation that Locke was bucking the conventional wisdom of the age. As Proast noted, the High Church position was not an anomaly, a defense of coercion peculiar to the religious domain. It was in keeping with contemporary educational practice: ‘That Force does some service toward the making of Scholars and Artists, I suppose you will easily grant’. ³⁵ How could Locke be so up in arms, Proast wondered, about a policy of molding opinion in religion through the use of force, when the English school system molded young men's character and intellect with corporal punishments: ‘why [are] Penalties not as directly useful for the bringing men to the true Religion, as the rod of correction is to drive foolishness from a Child, or to work wisdom in him’? ³⁶ Proast, who appears not to have known about his foe's educational writings, must have imagined that with these lines he had exposed a tension in Locke's views, for surely, Proast imagined, Locke would not cast force out of the classroom, whatever he might think about the church.

But Locke, who was a former pupil of a ‘very severe school’ and who carried bitterness at his schooling with him throughout his life, ³⁷ was just as consistent in expelling coercion from religion and education as his adversary was in advocating coercion in both of these arenas. The child, on Locke's description, responds to a beating from a parent with a suspicion and hostility that parallels the dissenter's reaction to his persecutor: beating ‘will look more like the fury of an enraged enemy than the good will of a compassionate friend; and such a chastisement carries with it only provocation without any prospect of amendment’. ³⁸ Corporal punishment arouses a revulsion in the child both for the parent or teacher who gives the blows and for the activity or doctrine on behalf of which the disciplinarian acts: ‘command and force can often create but can never cure an aversion; and whatever anyone is brought to by compulsion, he will leave as soon as he can and be little profited and less recreated by it, whilst he is at it’. ³⁹ The only chance an adult has to change the dispositions of a child is by ‘a gentle persuasion in reasoning’ (those ‘Exhortations, Admonitions, and Advices’ of the Letter (LT 19)) or by a careful, Emile-esque manipulation of the child's schedule such that what he before thought of as play becomes in his eyes drudgery and what before was work becomes recreation to him. ⁴⁰ In children as well as adults we observe what for Locke was an important truth: that force does no more than turn a belief or even an educational assignment which we are disinclined to accept, which does not convince us or appeal to us, into one which is positively hateful and painful to us. Against Proast's expectations, Locke was consistent in applying his psychology of victimization to both the religious and the educational domains.

Some other appearances of the ‘empirical’ strand

However, unconventional Proast may have found Locke's assessment of the ineffectuality of the use of force, Locke's message proved an appealing one to advocates of toleration. Prominent readers of Locke picked up on this thought and incorporated it into their own defenses of toleration. Gerard Noodt, professor at the University of Leiden and ‘a noteworthy scholar of law’, ⁴¹ published a set of orations in the early 1700s that amounted to ‘essentially paraphrases of Locke's Letter on Toleration’. ⁴² Consequently, his tract ‘A Discourse upon Liberty of Conscience’ contains heavy dollops of the ‘categorical’ account of the instrumental irrationality of religiously motivated coercion: ‘Examine the Nature and Properties of Human Understanding, you will find nothing there that depends on the arbitrary Determination of the Will, ‘tis governed only by Instructions and Remonstrances, it yields immediately to the Truth of a Proposition, if ‘tis convinc’d it is true, but till then all the Terrors of Cruelty cannot compel him to such a Submission’. ⁴³ But Noodt also enlists the soberer, empirical version of the assertion of the ineffectuality of torments and penalties for purposes of conversion. It is hard to believe, he contends, that a persecutor could be ‘a Man of Honour and Probity, a pious, wise, modest Man’; it is impossible to think that he could be an adherent to the ‘constant Rules of Reason’ when his choice of evangelizing instruments reveals him to be regulated by ‘his Passions and Power’, by ‘meer Malice and Envy’. ⁴⁴ Since ‘no body can produce any reasonable Motive that could induce him to usurp an Empire over another's conscience’, the persecutor is vastly more likely to be moved ‘by the blind Zeal of a superstitious Bigot’ than by devotion to the true religion. ⁴⁵ If there are really such people as ‘loving persecutors’, ⁴⁶ then they have made a fatal strategic error, for their decision to persecute has besmirched their character and their cause.

A similar adoption of the ‘empirical’ explanation for the backfiring of the use of force to achieve creedal uniformity made its way into the writings of one of the most celebrated academics of the 18th century, Jean Barbeyrac. The expatriate Huguenot professor had enormous admiration for both Locke and Noodt; he took up Lockean themes throughout his oeuvre, and the view that has been the subject of this essay was among them. ⁴⁷ In his 1715 address on ‘What Is Permitted by the Laws’, Barbeyrac provided a statement of the victim's response to the coercion employed against him that could have been lifted verbatim from the Letters:

Now, note this well, whatever partakes of force is of itself incapable of winning over the mind and, it follows, of softening the heart. Force does not enlighten, it shocks … And this is why those who seek to persuade have to take care to do nothing that might encourage the suspicion that their aim is to coerce. Men like to act freely for themselves; and they enjoy a sense of doing so when they heed only those reasons they find convincing … . In a word, to the extent one has recourse or appears to have recourse to coercion, so to that same extent impressions that reach the heart will be rejected. ⁴⁸

Barbeyrac took this Lockean psychology of victimization so seriously that he drew from it much more radical conclusions than Locke himself had. While Locke was adamant that legislation targeted at beliefs was nothing but oppression, he adopted precisely the opposite stance with regard to legislation targeted at moral faults, even what would later come to be called ‘self-regarding’ ones. ⁵¹ He apparently did not believe that punishing ‘Whoredom, Fraud, Malice, and such like enormities’ would turn the fornicator against the anti-Whoredom ideology, or the con artist against the anti-fraud agenda, in the same counterproductive way in which religious intolerance turned its targets against the faith which persecuted them (LT 9). Barbeyrac, on the other hand, extended Locke's thought to include a proscription tout court against morals legislation, on the ground that the same adverse psychological process that foiled the use of force, on behalf of subscription to theological creeds would provoke similar distrust of and disgust at a state-sponsored war on vice. ‘No matter how virtuous a legislator is or should be’, Barbeyrac concluded, ‘the proper and natural end of his laws is not to raise men to virtue’, because laws against vice are ‘very rarely’ of any avail when it comes to ‘forming good people’. ⁵² Just as Locke had condemned the regulation of religion for religious ends but not for genuine ‘Political matter[s]’ (LT 38), Barbeyrac denied that it was legitimate when the magistrate ‘proscribes and punishes’ instances of vice ‘specifically as immoral’. ⁵³ In support of his proposal to limit legislation to the domain of ‘useful things’, Barbeyrac pointed to the negative psychological effects that transgressing this domain produces, effects which rendered legislation that exceeded its proper scope ineffectual at best, and provocative of a backlash at worst. To Barbeyrac, though not to Locke himself, the upshot of the moral psychology of the Letter was that the magistrate's meddling with vice in the absence of verifiable political-utilitarian justification was equivalent to the persecution engendered by the odium theologicum.

To be clear, I do not mean to suggest that the thought being traced here was peculiar to Locke and a select clique of contemporaries. It makes its way into a very different brand of toleration in the work of Pierre Bayle, whose relationship with Locke was one of ‘prolonged and striking non-collaboration and lack of warmth’. ⁵⁴ Amongst the ‘thousand Passions’, Bayle wrote, that persecution is likely to stir up in the ‘Souls of those who suffer’, there stands out an inclination to ‘blaspheme [the faith of their persecutors] in their Heart, to detest it’. ⁵⁵ The ‘very thoughts of Persecution will become an Argument, or a very strong Prejudice at least’ that the truth lies on the side of the victims rather than the victimizers. ⁵⁶ The experience of being persecuted is, Bayle believed, inimical to the goal of getting people to think positively or open-mindedly of an opinion from which they dissent, since ‘the tyrannical methods it employs against’ dissenters figure among the principal products of persecution. ⁵⁷ Bayle, in his compendious assemblage of objections to religiously motivated compulsion, granted a prominent place to its adverse psychological reverberations upon sufferers.

Attention to these reverberations persisted through the 18th century and beyond, as in the incredulity of Voltaire that Catholics could ‘believe we can convert [Protestants] to our way of thinking by continually subjecting them to the most malicious slanders, by sending them to the galleys, by sentencing them to die from the gibbet, or on the wheel, or at the stake’. ⁵⁸ Voltaire commended Locke's Letter as ‘excellent’ ⁵⁹ —a commendation which it would hardly have deserved in the eyes of this practically minded firebrand if its main argument hung solely on a tendentious distinction between the will and the understanding. Locke was embraced by Voltaire in part because he had articulated the victim's perspective on his torments.

The empirical strand of instrumental irrationality served as well in the most un-Lockean of English toleration struggles. In the 1770s, at a relatively early stage of the movement for Catholic emancipation that would culminate in the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, the dissenting minister and Enlightenment polymath Joseph Priestley explicitly enlisted Locke in the ranks of the Catholic cause. ‘I make no doubt’, declared Priestley, ‘the great Mr Locke would, without the least reluctance, have given up’ his position on the non-toleration of Catholics if he had seen how ‘very unfavourable’ ‘the consequences’ were. ⁶⁰ The bad consequences that Priestly identified were that, rather than enticing Catholics away from their faith, ‘the rigour of our present laws respecting the papists’ furnished to ‘popish priests and missionaries’ their ‘most effectual arguments’ for the superiority of Catholicism. ⁶¹ The perverse disutility of the legal disabilities that Catholics met with in England was only a particular instance of the more general rule that penalizing dissent redounds to the disadvantage of the cause doing the penalizing: ‘Who would not, with every appearance of justice, suspect any cause’ that ‘forced uniformity’? ⁶² Thus reflection on the victim's perspective loomed large in the mind of one of the 18th century's most uncompromising champions of freedom of religion and of discussion.

Assessing the empirical strand

I conceded at the opening of this paper that this line of thought was merely one among many pursued in the Letter, coexisting in the ‘house’ with such other argumentative ‘beams’ as the contractarian account of the separation of church and state and the Christian argument that persecution is inconsistent with the Gospel message. This observation about the victim's likely response to his sufferings is neither a shocking novelty nor the sole ground on which Locke supports toleration. But it is important that we recognize the presence and impact of this thought in the Letter, and not merely for the incremental enrichment that it affords to our understanding of the text. It is important as well because this recognition renders the most enduring text on toleration in Western political thought less liable to caricature. Waldron's dismay that concern for the ‘potential victims of intolerance’ vanishes in the Letter in favor of mere ‘prudential advice offered to those who are disposed to oppress them’ is misguided in slighting the many claims for toleration that do not hinge on the issue of instrumental rationality. ⁶³ But it misfires even more damagingly in ignoring the fact that the irrationality argument is itself grounded in an empathetic reconstruction of the victim's perceptions of his persecutors and their program. More generally, the empirical strand of the irrationality argument has aged better than many elements of Locke's work. Even if we reject the categorical division of the will and the understanding or judge that the Letter's theological premises belong in the ranks of ‘what is dead in the political theory of John Locke’, ⁶⁴ we can still uphold the significance of the ‘victim's perspective’ that this paper has described.

Most of us, after all, do believe that the appropriate response to a proposal to use force for the benefit of those on the receiving end is mistrust. And I suspect that, as a matter of fact, such proposals are typically met mistrustfully. The ‘sage Locke’ judged this a datum that could be enlisted to undercut paternalistic defenses of intolerance. Today this lesson bears repeating every bit as much as claims for toleration based on the ‘rights of conscience’ or the ‘burdens of judgment’. As Locke knew well, the ideologues and true believers who are tempted to persecute are not keen to allow that conscience has any such rights. But their very devotion to their creed might be turned from arms to argument, from coercion to persuasion, if it could be shown that the former paths reliably lead others to loathe and reject the convictions that the would-be persecutors care so much to spread. It is a central, if underappreciated, part of Locke's defense of toleration that he held that no course of action was less likely to engender good feelings toward a religion than harming one's fellows on its behalf.

Waldron regrets that Locke addressed himself to the ‘persecutors in their interests’. Aside from the obvious truth that movements on behalf of the powerless tend to make their greatest advances when they are able to speak convincingly to the interests of the powerful, it is crucial to recall that in this case the professed interests of the persecutors are other-regarding. Their claim is that a confluence of interests exists, theirs being to spread true religion and save souls, while the interest of the unconverted is to secure eternal life. Insofar as persecutors are sincere about their religious motivations, then their own interests cannot be detached from, but necessarily include, the interests of those whom they persecute. What Locke argued was that, even if persecution proceeds from the purest hearts imaginable, the confluence of interest cited in its justification is unbelievable to the victims themselves. If he speaks to ‘persecutors in their interests’, he does so in order to show that the success of the persecutory program hinges on the ability of the persecutor, in turn, to claim to be acting in the interests of those persecuted. This enterprise, though, is irrational in that it completely overlooks the predictably negative feelings and judgments of its ostensible targets of conversion. Far from leaving them out of the picture, Locke's case for the instrumental irrationality of intolerance centers on the victims and their sentiments toward the religion and the people that have harmed them.

In Waldron's eyes, Lockean toleration crumbles due to an overly simplistic account of the complex interaction between force and belief. We can see now that his reading suffers from the same vice: it is an oversimplification of a subtle, empathetic argument for toleration.

Principle, probability, prudence

The bulk of this paper has laid out the ‘empirical strand’ of the argument for the instrumental irrationality of intolerance. In so doing, I have tried to redeem Locke from one of the charges that Waldron, as a result of focusing exclusively on the categorical strand, brought against him: namely, that the argument pays scant regard to the victims of persecution. Before concluding, there remains a second misconception to be dispelled.

This is the conclusion that the ‘familiar and evident facts’ about the capacity of restraint and coercion to impact beliefs disprove the instrumental irrationality argument. According to Waldron, Locke's case relied on the separation between the will and the understanding being complete and unexceptionable. Waldron's interpretation was therefore ‘categorical’ in two senses: it alleged both that Locke was imputing a category error to the defenders of persecution, and that Locke's claims about instrumental irrationality were intended to apply absolutely and without exception. If there is even one counterexample that shows belief to be susceptible to a program of coercion, ‘then the case in principle against the use of force in religious matters has collapsed into a purely pragmatic argument’ and the ‘substance of his position’ is ‘demolishe[d]’. ⁶⁵

Now, Waldron may be right to be dissatisfied with an argument for the instrumental irrationality of persecution that does not meet these absolute standards. But these standards were not Locke's. By attending only to the ‘categorical’ moments with their implication that belief's untouchability by force must obtain absolutely, Waldron is led to impute to Locke a vision for his argument that Locke did not have. As Nathan Tarcov has noted, ‘Locke himself knew that his claim that persecution cannot compel belief is not simply true’, and in his first rejoinder to Proast he was not shy in mentioning instances in which intolerance had helped to sustain a privileged set of beliefs. ⁶⁶ Put simply, he had no notion that his position on the instrumental irrationality of persecution required the status of a metaphysical certainty or a law of nature.

What did Locke believe he needed to show? His objective was a more modest one than Waldron would have it. He spells it out near the start of the Second Letter. After having explicitly denied the view that Waldron assumes he must have held—nowhere ‘does the author ⁶⁷ say that it is impossible that force should any way, at any time, upon any person, by any accident, be useful towards the promoting of true religion, and the salvation of souls’ (SL 69)—Locke articulates the point which his argument about instrumental irrationality was intended to establish:

For in all pleas for any thing because of its usefulness, it is not enough to say as you do, and is the utmost that can be said for it, that it may be serviceable: but it must be considered not only what it may, but what it is likely to produce: and the greater good or harm like to come from it ought to determine the use of it. (SL 70)

While Mark Goldie attended in a nuanced way to the conflict between Proast and Locke over the ‘efficacy of compulsion’, he nevertheless agrees with Waldron, assigning to Locke a ‘Cartesian rigidity’ which ‘left the rational deliberations of the understanding untouchable by any plausible theory about the causal and motivational structure of human beliefs’. ⁶⁸ But as we have seen, the truth which Locke wished to impress upon his readers was a less grandiose and absolute one, namely, that no one who was sincerely motivated by the promotion of his faith and the eternal well-being of dissenters’ souls would turn to a strategy whose odds of success were slimmer than its odds of backfiring:

Whereby I doubt not but it is visible, that [persecution's] usefulness and uselessness laid in the balance against each other, the pretended usefulness is so far from outweighing, that it can neither encourage nor excuse the using of punishments; which are not lawful to be used in our case without strong probability of success. But when to its uselessness mischief is added, and it is evident that more, much more, harm may be expected from it than good; your own argument returns upon you. For if it be reasonable to use it, because it may be serviceable to promote true religion, and the salvation of souls: it is much more reasonable to let it alone, if it may be more serviceable to the promoting falsehood and the perdition of souls. (SL 79-80)

Locke was not alone in seeing this issue of the ‘balance’ of probable good and harm, and not the more stringent stance attributed to him by Waldron and Goldie, ⁶⁹ as the real battlefield on which the question of the rationality of intolerance was to be decided. Bayle conceived of this point in essentially the way that Locke did. Bayle had no compunction about admitting that there were historical cases in which intolerance appeared to have been successful. ⁷⁰ And yet he perceived this to be no obstacle to the more general truth which he wished to convey, which was that the ‘natural tendency’ of compulsion was to recoil against its users. ⁷¹ Like Locke, Bayle did not believe that he was fighting on all-or-nothing terrain. Both philosophers thought that they performed an important service for the cause of toleration in showing that coercion was a poor means of effecting consensus; they did not imagine that they had to hold adamantly to the false notion that it always miscarried. They wanted to stress, and believed they could prove, that persecution was a poor bet.

The same outlook—a willingness to acknowledge the apparent ‘successes’ of persecution combined with an unrelenting support for toleration and an untroubled invocation of the principle of the instrumental irrationality of intolerance—appeared prominently a century-and-a-quarter after Locke's death, in one of the landmarks of English historiography. Henry Hallam's Constitutional History of England developed the ‘victim's perspective’ into one of the most potent engines of post-Reformation English politics. It caused, for instance, the decisive and permanent turn away from Catholicism under Mary:

But what had the greatest efficacy in disgusting the English with Mary's system of faith, was the cruelty by which it was accompanied … .A sort of instinctive reasoning told the people, what the learned on neither side had been able to discover, that the truth of a religion begins to be very suspicious, when it stands in need of prisons and scaffolds to eke out its evidences. ⁷²

While it may strike some that Locke, Bayle, and Hallam set their sights too low on this front, it is important to note that what they are offering is still, in this more modest form, an argument about instrumental irrationality. For a course of action to be irrational it is not required that there be no possibility that it will eventuate in the desired outcome; it is enough that there be other, more reliable means of achieving the end sought. If ‘Exhortations, Admonitions, and Advices’ are superior instruments for the conversion of dissenters than ‘Confiscation of Estate, Imprisonment, Torments’, then the rational thing for a believer of ‘Charity, Love, or Good-will’ to do will be to abstain from force (LT 19, 13).

It is thus a misunderstanding to assume that Locke, starting from a categorical division between the soul's two faculties, tried and failed to prove that coercion could never meet with success. This is a misunderstanding because Locke was not trying to show any such thing. For Waldron, even if the chances of an effectual persecution were as slim as those of winning the lottery, the logic of the Letter would be fatally flawed because it would offer only a ‘purely pragmatic’ as opposed to an ‘in-principle’ argument. ⁷⁶ Now, as it stands, this is a false dichotomy: one could certainly adopt a principle that, in matters as momentous as the eternal welfare of souls, one has an obligation not to choose means that are more likely to backfire than to succeed. Such a principle would state that it is wrong to erect stumbling-blocks to others’ salvation, and it would fit perfectly into Locke's general theological framework. Indeed, this principle underlies much of Locke's thinking about toleration; take, for instance, the remark in the Essay on Toleration that one of the considerations which makes state projects of ‘establishing uniformity’ wrong is that the doctrinal conflict which such projects generate is liable to ‘make a great many atheists’ (ET 131–132)—that is, is liable to encourage the growth of damnable beliefs. A secular, consequentialist version of this principle is eminently available: if x is likely to cause less harm/more good than y, do x. In sum, there is not any unbridgeable gap between principle and probabilistic or prudential counsel from the Lockean point-of-view.

There is yet another way in which the sharp contrast between principle and prudence distorts Locke's message, one which is intimately related to our theme of the victim's perspective. This is that the fact of the imprudence of intolerance serves as a heuristic to the motives of the religious parties in question. Seen in this light, the willingness to persecute is a touchstone. The fact that coercion is more apt to result in hatred for one's views than in acceptance of them gives grounds for a strong presumption that those who would descend to persecution are not truly driven by paternalistic, other-regarding intentions, but rather by desires in which piety and benevolence play little part. When the official platforms of both the persecuting and the tolerationist parties sound pious and moral notes, how is one to know whose motivations are righteous? The answer that Locke provides is that it is ‘altogether incredible’ that those who choose a path that leads so far from their stated goal could be ‘really contend[ing] for the Advancement of the true Religion’ rather than following the promptings of their own ‘Pride and Ambition’ (LT 11). This is, of course, not logical proof that ‘Friendship and Kindness’ are absent from the hearts of all persecutors. But it is strong that, however much they invoke ‘Religion’, the word is to them a mere ‘pretence’ (LT 8).

Is this an absolutely airtight case against the rationality of compulsion? Admittedly not. Will it always succeed in deterring the persecutorily minded from concocting a rationalization for their preferred measures? No; but then what argument could? If there are people fanatical enough to persecute even when faced with such long odds, then that is much more a sad fact about the human condition—an unfortunate truth about the ‘Faults from which Humane Affairs can perhaps scarce ever be perfectly freed’ (LT 11)—than it is a defect in Locke's defense of toleration. Waldron may very well be right that the ‘convergence’ of ‘reason and liberal commitment’ is unlikely to ‘take place at the level of instrumental rationality’. ⁷⁷ Yet, it is not unreasonable to suppose that, in the real if not in the philosophical world, the evidence of persecution's ineffectuality and counterproductiveness has gone some way toward convincing decent people to stay their hands. And even if such positive effects have been slight, surely Locke is not to be blamed for offering the best case he could on the ‘narrow front’ of instrumental rationality. In an important cause, every little bit helps. After all, this argument was, as Locke insisted, just one beam that kept the house standing.