It is a “crime against nature and reason

Text by professor Timo Airaksinen

This is to say, you need not actively serve the supreme power if you are convinced it is wrong, say, you may refuse to pay some taxes; but nothing justifies an exemption to your negative duties. You may act against your positive duty (do x) but then you must not resist punishment (PO 1). To act on conscientious grounds against positive duty may be justifiable unlike negative duties. For instance, adultery is never justifiable; it is a "crime against nature and reason." (PO 48). In such a case, disobedience is always unconditionally wrong. PO's theory of two types of duties is crucial to his argument, but I cannot go into its detailed evaluation here.[i]

Loyalty is unlike any other duty because it says: do not act against your negative natural duties specified as royal commands and civil laws. In this sense, loyalty is an umbrella notion and a formal duty: you are loyal only when you obey. As Berkeley says (PO 25), "that precept which enjoins obedience to civil laws cannot itself be accounted a civil […] law"; however, the norm of obedience follows from the divine duty of loyalty.[ii] Loyalty (negative) trumps the duty to do good (positive):

But this point hath been already considered; and in truth it can give small difficulty to whoever understands Loyalty to be on the same foot with other moral duties enjoined in negative precepts, all which, though equally calculated to promote the general well-being, may not nevertheless be limited or suspended under pretext of giving way to the end, as is plain from what hath been premised on that subject. (PO 36, my italics)

These two quotations are instructive but also problematic. Notice the definition of loyalty in the first one speaks of the "punctual performance" of what is dictated by duty and virtue. And to accept penalty may look like a positive norm, too. This makes loyalty a positive duty. But in the second quotation above Berkeley specifies that loyalty is a negative duty, which is to say that only omissions count. For instance, chastity or "be chaste," is an unconditional duty in its proper, Berkeley's own carefully specified, negative sense: "do not commit adultery." "Do not kill" becomes "do not murder." (PO 32, also PO 52).

[i] Georg Pitcher (Berkeley. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, p. 230) repudiates this distinction without much argument. Two problems: can we find a categorical or natural duty; and, metaethically, can we formulate the same duty positively and negatively? See J. Sterba, Ethics: The Big Questions. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998, p. 238.

[ii] Of course, civil laws exist but it is difficult to say how they are related, in PO, to the commands of the prince.