Berkeley’s 1712 Passive Obedience is the closest thing to a systematic work of moral theory he ever wrote, and it isn’t very close. The overarching argument can be paraphrased as follows:
- We have a negative moral duty of passive obedience to government.
- No negative moral duty admits of any exceptions – i.e. we are morally obligated to fulfill our negative duty in absolutely all cases.
- We are morally obligated passively to obey the government in all cases.
Therefore,
The work is concerned primarily with the defense of (1) and (2).
(A few terminological clarifications. A negative duty is just a duty not to do something. Passive obedience means not doing the things the authority tells you not to do, as distinct from active obedience, which is doing the things the authority tells you to do. The doctrine of passive obedience – which was a standard Tory position at the time – is thus a predecessor of the view that non-violent resistance is sometimes justified, but violence is not.)
Passive Obedience has puzzled commentators, because in the course of defending (1) and (2) Berkeley seems to endorse two conflicting moral theories, namely, rule utilitarianism and divine command theory. Now, as far as an extensional normative ethics – that is, a theory of what sorts of things are right and what sorts of things are wrong – there is no conflict, because Berkeley is quite explicit that he thinks that God has commanded precisely those rules which, if everyone followed them, would maximize the well-being of his creatures. So Berkeley can consistently hold that the right actions are all and only those prescribed by rule utilitarianism, and also that the right actions are all and only those commanded by God, since the two coincide. The problem arises because Berkeley also sometimes seems to be making stronger claims, claims about why those rules are binding. He often seems to be supposing that the rules prescribed by rule utilitarianism are right just in virtue of their maximizing well-being (if everyone follows them), but he also explicitly says “that nothing is a [natural] law merely because it conduceth to the public good, but because it is decreed by the will of God” (sect. 31). I want to propose a simple resolution to this conflict.
Early in Passive Obedience Berkeley seems clearly to be grasping one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma. Specifically, he seems to be claiming that God commanded the rules which maximize utility because they were already (independent of God’s command) right. But then in sect. 31, he says that God’s decree is the only thing that can make a rule a natural moral law. There is no contradiction between these claims unless ‘R is a morally good rule’ entails ‘R is a natural moral law.’ However, in Medieval and early modern philosophy it was often thought to be a conceptual truth that a law is a rule imposed by some authority and enforced by some system of reward and punishment. Now the fact that a rule is morally good certainly doesn’t entail that it is imposed and enforced by an authority (unless God exists necessarily and necessarily commands all the good rules). So my simple solution is just this: the utilitarian rules are morally good, and indeed obligatory, quite independent of God’s commands and his system of rewards and punishments. However, it takes God’s command and his system of rewards and punishments to make those moral rules into laws.
Let me conclude by mentioning one other odd feature of Passive Obedience that I think has not been sufficiently appreciated by its (few) commentators. It is not clear how utilitarian what I’ve been calling the ‘rule utilitarian’ theory really is. Berkeley says that what God commands is “the observation of certain, universal, determinate rules or moral precepts which, in their own nature, have a necessary tendency to promote the well-being of the sum of mankind, taking in all nations and ages, from the beginning to the end of the world” (sect. 10, emphasis added). Berkeley’s view is not that we must follow those rules which, if followed, would actually maximize human well-being. Rather, his view is that we must follow those rules which, by their own nature, have a necessary tendency to promote the general well-being. This actually makes Berkeley’s theory much more permissive than standard version of rule utilitarianism (maybe too permissive to capture his actual moral views), since there can’t possibly be very many rules like that!
(cross-posted at blog.kennypearce.net)
Hi Kenny. Nice post. Two things I’d love you to clear up for me.
1) I don’t see how, for Berkeley, “the utilitarian rules are morally good, and indeed obligatory” without God. How do those rules obligate in the absence of God on his theory? Another way to put this is to ask what distinction you’re trying to draw between those things that are obligatory and laws? The standard early modern account you mention sees them as the same thing, no?
2) I’m not sure why you think that there “can’t possibly be very many rules” of the sort Berkeley mentions. Surely, it includes for Berkeley all the standard natural law perfect duties–e.g. duties to not violate the natural rights of others, duties not to harm one’s body or mind through suicide, self-mutilation, debauchery, etc. That’s a pretty big grouping. It would probably include, given God’s role as the source of moral order, the standard imperfect duties too (e.g. charity). Is it the language of “necessity” that’s bothering you? Or something else?
Hi Colin,
On point 1, Berkeley says, “laws being rules directive of our actions to the end intended by the legislator, in order to attain the knowledge of God’s laws we ought first to inquire what that end is which he designs should be carried out by human actions. Now as God is a being of infinite goodness, it is plain the end He proposes is good.” He concludes that this end is “the general well-being of all men” (PO, sect. 7). So it’s clear that God commands what he does in order to achieve a good, which is good prior to his command. Perhaps, however, I went too far in the obligation claim, at least from the perspective of the way the word ‘obligation’ is used by Berkeley (and early modern philosophers generally). I thought there was a use of the word ‘oblige’ in the early sections of PO, but I can’t find it now. Anyway, it may be that, at least in Berkeley’s usage, you are ‘obliged’ to obey rules only if those rules are laws for you. What I had in mind in saying that the rules were obligatory prior to God’s command was that a morally good human being would follow those rules even if God hadn’t commanded them (or even if she didn’t know God commanded them). Now, in Alciphron 3, Berkeley argues that, apart from God, there won’t be sufficient motivation for normal human beings to follow those rules, but Berkeley leaves open the possibility that there might be a few ‘moral heroes’ who follow the rules without specifically theistic motivation: in sect. 12, after Crito argues that theism will lead to moral improvement for any particular person, Euphranor says, “To me it seems, those heroic infidel inamorato’s of abstracted beauty are much to be pitied, and much to be admired.” In sect. 13, Crito says that ‘Cratylus’ (i.e. Shaftesbury) “under the pretence of making men heroically virtuous, endeavour[s] to destroy the means of making them reasonably and humanly so.” That means is clearly religion. So it seems that Berkeley doesn’t completely foreclose the possibility that someone somewhere might be ‘good without God,’ and he seems to think that, in the unlikely event that there was such a person, that person would be a sort of moral hero. All of this suggests that God’s command is not what makes it the case that we ought to follow the rules, although God’s command clearly is what makes the rules laws.
On the second point, my concern is just that it seems like just about any course of action could be connected by circumstances/laws of nature with human suffering, and this could be the case across an entire possible world. (Berkeley does worry about moral actions being connected to bad outcomes in particular cases, and defends the claim that we should still follow the moral rules in these cases, but he doesn’t seem to consider the case where this is true universally in a world.) This makes me think that almost nothing is going to count as a rule which by its own nature, necessarily tends to promote human well-being. Since Berkeley thinks the signification relations which make up the laws of physics are arbitrary, he seems committed to this.
Kenny,
On the first point, I take Berkeley’s position to be that, while acts can be good to do and one’s we ought to do (in a prudential sense), they cannot be obligatory–things we ought to do in a moral sense–without God’s sanctions and authority. You know much more about Berkeley than I, but in PO he seems to be defending a voluntarism about obligation (not about goodness, as you note).
On the second point, it may come down to how one reads the force of “necessary tendency”. The ordinary laws of nature, when followed as inviolable rules by limited reasoners (such as we are) in a world ordered by God, are the means that have a “necessary tendency” to the furtherance of God’s end: the well-being of his creatures. Berkeley isn’t trying to be revisionary concerning most of the content of morality (passive obedience excepted), so I’d be surprised if he meant something else by it. Perhaps I’m being too breezy here, but I think Berkeley’s intent is pretty clear and that we should use it to guide our interpretation of the sentence.
You might be right about obligation. I’m not sure.
The use of ‘in their own nature’ strikes me as quite emphatic, which makes it hard for me to put a weak construction on the sentence. It would be interesting to try to connect this with what Berkeley says about moral responsibility and intentions in PHK and DHP.
I’ve been reading PO, and have a couple of thoughts.
1. I think Colin is on the right track about the distinction between moral goodness and obligation. The ground of obligation is God’s will. What God wills is good, so we ought to do what is good. It is true that in PO 7, B says that the end that God proposes is good, and suggests that it is because the end is good that God proposes it (not that the end’s goodness derives from God’s endorsing it). However, B doesn’t stop there. He notes that there could in principle be many good ends. One good end might be God’s own good. So why not suppose that we should be focused on God’s good, in addition to ours, or even instead of ours? The answer is that God is self-sufficient and also that our actions cannot affect him. B concludes from this that God’s *end* is the good of his creatures, and not his own good, or the good of “other orders of intelligences” (e.g., angels). What we are obligated to do is pursue God’s end, not just any or all good things, then. Indeed, it wouldn’t be morally good to pursue God’s good or the good of angels, because their good is not part of God’s end. So the obligation buck stops with what God wills as an end.
2. I think Kenny is overreading the passage from PO 10 in which B says that we should observe those precepts “which, in their nature, have a necessary tendency to promote the well-being of the sum of mankind”. When you look at other passages from PO, it’s clear that this is not the *complete* statement of his view. For example, in PO 8, he writes of laws “which, if universally practised, have, from the nature of things, an essential fitness to procure the well-being of mankind”. Notice here the reference to universal practice, which is absent from the PO 10 rendition. Or take a look at PO 15, where B talks of the law of Nature as “a system of such rules or precepts as that, if they be all of them, at all times, in all places, and by all men observed, they will necessarily promote the well-being of mankind…”, and in the same section he says that “the constant observation of” truth, justice, and chastity “hath a necessary connexion with…universal well-being”. So the necessary connection here lies between universal practise of the rule and the well-being of humanity. I suspect that B is also taking for granted that the rest of the laws of nature (including the laws of human psychology) are as they are. This is a background assumption. Of course, if the non-moral laws of nature were different, then maybe the moral laws of nature would be different. But they aren’t.