In his A Letter Concerning Toleration John Locke argued that legal coercion could not be used to enforce a state religion. The state provided only for ‘civil interests’:

‘The commonwealth seems to me to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. Civil interests I call life, liberty, health, and indolence of body; and the possession of outward things, such as money, land, houses, furniture and the like.’

This early modern debate about toleration involved opposing models of legal authority and direction. One model, presupposed by Locke and defended earlier by Thomas Hobbes, understands legal direction as coordinative – a model of legal direction that is still highly influential in modern legal philosophy. The other model, defended by Aristotelian-scholastic natural lawyers such as Francisco Suarez, viewspolitical community as a community of shared belief, and understands legal direction as importantly communicative, and the state as a coercive teacher.

These rival models disagree about the metaphysics of legal direction. Does legal direction produce compliance as Hobbes and Locke supposed - only through ordinary causation, the same power of causation that operates to produce change in more general physical nature? Or does legal direction produce compliance as the scholastics supposed - through a force of reason, a form of causation specific to human or rational nature that operates through witness and argument?

I shall be arguing that this debate about legal authority and direction extends beyond past questions of religion. The debate involves modern forms of state activity – and remains unresolved.

Biography

Thomas Pink is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. He works on ethics, political and legal philosophy, philosophy of mind and action and the metaphysics of causation and free will, and on the history of all these subjects, especially in the early modern period. His most recent book is Self-Determination(Oxford University Press, 2017). He has edited Francisco Suarez’s moral and legal works for Liberty Fund, and is currently editing The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance for the Clarendon works of Thomas Hobbes.

tom.pink@kcl.ac.uk