Berkeley’s key moral argument

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen

Berkeley's key moral argument can be summarized in the following way: The good God has given us His laws that promote the good of man, or public good; public good presupposes a well-ordered society, which is impossible without supreme power, or a prince and his laws; therefore, it is God's will that all people accept and obey all these laws. God's laws state unconditional (negative) duties. They are natural laws; He gives us his laws, which are laws of nature and as such have the validity of geometrical axioms. The corresponding duties are categorical because of their source of validity, also because moral laws are like natural laws: natural laws do not allow exceptions.

Berkeley provides an interpretation of the duty of loyalty in a way that may look clear and convincing – in fact, it is problematic and even misleading.

Loyalty means obedience and more specifically, passive obedience: you must not rebel, but if your conscience demands, you may not obey, and then you accept the penalty and punishment. The fulfilling of those laws, either by a punctual performance of what is enjoined in them, or, if that be inconsistent with reason or conscience, by a patient submission to whatever penalties the supreme power hath annexed to the neglect or transgression of them, is termed loyalty; as, on the other hand, the making use of force and open violence, either to withstand the execution of the laws, or ward off the penalties appointed by the supreme power, is properly named rebellion. (PO 3; my italics).

The requirement that one should accept punishment is a harsh condition and legally speaking unintuitive. The modern idea of civil disobedience comes to mind.[i] We may act against the law on conscientious grounds, but here Berkeley draws a crucial distinction between negative and positive precepts (PO 26), and then we must look at the quotation above again. "Do not murder" and "Do not rebel" are negative duties. "Pay your taxes" would be a positive duty. He says positive duties are sometimes, actually too often, mutually inconsistent, conditional, and negotiable; only negative duties are universal and categorical and, in this sense, central to his overall argument. Positive duties are not binding in the same way as the negative duties: "positive and negative moral precepts are not of the same nature, the former admitting such limitations and exceptions as the latter are on no account liable to." (PO 40; also PO 26, 35).

[i] See Warnock, 1986, p. 558.