John Locke and Primal Authority

Yes, I believe (in a fictional world without any present government) that we could delegate authority to Nathan to be our ruler, so long as we meet at least two conditions (there may be more, I’m still thinking through all this):

(1) We are not acting in defiance of a divinely chosen leader, and do not know of one presently on the earth.

(2) Nathan, on our behalf, does not do anything that we could not do ourselves were he not our ruler. That is, his rule would be very limited. For him to do more than that which we have the moral authority to do ourselves, he would exceed any authority which we could delegate to him; thus, he would have to either claim that authority from God, or manufacture it from thin air.

Thus, Nathan would not have the executive privileges of a king, because those privileges require divine mandate to perform. We cannot consent him to exercise powers we ourselves do not have.

I will, of course, talk all about this in my next post. The philosophy I will present may be a little different than Locke’s; from Locke the founders drew the idea that man has certain God-given rights, and can therefore form government based upon those rights. I haven’t quite finished reading Locke (I hope to in the next few days), so I don’t know the extent to which he limits government power.

“Nathan, on our behalf, does not do anything that we could not do ourselves were he not our ruler.”

I find this a little unclear. Are you referring to a moral “could” dependent upon religious belief? Because there are a lot of things that we could do without Nathan 🙂 that you would no doubt take objection to were they done by a ruler.

For example, it’s difficult to discern where issues like long-term imprisonment would fall in this situation. Certainly we could intern others in makeshift cells during a period of anarchy, but whether this was morally acceptable may depend upon several factors including danger posed to others by the offender. Maybe the concept of a government made up of a mere half-dozen individuals at the most is just too difficult a concept. . .

I’m coming into this a little late, but I only just received Nathan’s invitation. Maybe he’s looking for more support in the upcoming regal election. (Equal dog-and-bun packaging for all!) 🙂

I think perhaps you’ve started from a false premise, Jeffrey. You have assumed from the beginning that a man might possibly have the proper authority to rule over other men. That doesn’t strike me as a non-controversial assumption. I think it’s quite probably that man lacks the authority to rule over other men.

We often say in the Church that God Himself lacks the authority to overrule our freedom of choice.

It seems to me that the power rule another is the power to overrule that person’s freedom of choice. I can choose to pay taxes or not, until the tax man comes and overrules my freedom of choice (usually with at least the implicit threat of physical force).

If God, then, lacks the proper authority to rule us (in the sense that earthly governments rule us), how can we suppose that any man could have that authority? Does man have more authority than God? Quite the contrary, according to the quote from Joseph Fielding Smith. Man can be given the authority to rule the earth, but he couldn’t possibly be given the authority to rule other men, since the Source of all authority Himself lacks that authority.

I think you make a strong case for the idea that those who possess the authority to govern men (that is, the governed men themselves) might surrender that authority to another and so rightfully imbue that other individual with authority. That makes good sense. That is, in fact, how we can each give the Lord true lordship in our lives.

But if that’s the case, where does that leave the individual who refuses to surrender his authority to govern himself (and, for that matter, his God-given authority to govern the earth) to another? In our earthly governments, we usually bully those people into submission. Such a course would be unrighteous dominion, though. It would be better to simply leave that individual alone to do his own thing.

Where then would that leave government? The United States’ government established by the Constitution made provisions for such things as punishment of crime. But isn’t punishment of crime the usurpation of authority from an individual who refuses to willingly surrender it, and therefore unrighteous? And so wouldn’t a government that did such unrighteous things be, to the extent that it behaves unrighteously, also unrighteous?

I’ll read further posts and see if my questions are cleared up in what you’ve already written.

I think the distinction between freedom and agency that Elder Oaks attempts to draw is flat wrong, and I’ve thought so since he first started saying it. He speaks of “the distinction between agency (the power of choice), which is God-given, and freedom, the right to act upon our choices, which is protected by the Constitution and laws of the land.” Agency is actually the power to act. That’s just what the word means — check any dictionary of the English language. In the Book of Mormon, it’s talked about as the power to act and not to be acted upon. So agency, which is God-given, is in every way synonymous with the thing Elder Oaks is calling freedom in his talk. Agency is the freedom to act.

I agree, of course, that we are not free to avoid the negative consequences of our actions. But consequences follow naturally from actions. That’s what consequence means. They are not artificially introduced punishments. If I get drunk, my judgement and perception will be impaired as a consequence and my ability to drive well will suffer. Being fined or jailed for drunk driving is a completely unrelated and artificial thing. It is not a consequence of my action, but rather an independent action on its own.

I think that just as the rewards for righteous action are nothing more than the natural consequences of those actions (as opposed to gifts God gives to pay us for doing what he wants), so the punishments for wicked action are nothing more than the natural consequences of those actions. The Brigham Young manual from ’97 to ’99 has a lot more on that, if you’d like to investigate that further.

Those natural results, natural consequences, are the consequences that we would be foolish to think of as unjust restrictions on our freedom; and the proper understanding of those consequences are the exact moral laws that Lucifer wanted and wants us to rebel against (as you discuss in your post on Law and Moral Agency).

Reactions, though, are not consequences, but actions in their own right. Almost all our penal system focuses on reactions designed to limit convicts’ freedom to act (that is, agency), not on consequences. God, on the other hand, lets the consequences be sufficient punishment.

As for self-defense, I think you’re right. I think we have the right to defend ourselves, or to delegate that right to governments as we choose. And you’re right in pointing out that God has often used or sanctioned force to prevent evil from occurring (as in the case of Nephi and Laban) or to stop ongoing evil from continuing (as in the case of Jesus and the moneychangers). But with people who have committed the evil and are doing it no longer, God seems to be content to wait until Judgement Day to sort it all out.

But our criminal system doesn’t work that way. It functions primarily on hunting down and punishing those who have already completed evil actions, not on stopping them while they are in the act. That doesn’t really seem to be how God works.

I think if we had a government based on the principles you’re suggesting, we’d have to revamp our whole philosophy of criminology to such an extent that what would be left would so little resemble government as we now know it that we might have to call it something else, if we even decide that it’s worth the hassle at all.

“Is not self-defense imposing an “artificial” consequence on another person’s actions? If I were to do nothing, he would not be harmed. But if I act in defense, then he is; thus his harm is not a “natural” consequence of his action, but an imposed one.”

Not necessarily. For example, I think the best martial art for physical self-defense is aikido. In aikido, instead of launching counterattacks against your assailant as you would with karate or judo, you simply divert the force generated by your assailant away from you and those you are protecting. When aikido is practiced properly, any damage your opponent suffers is derived from the abusive force he himself is exerting, just as a man running into a brick wall hurts himself rather than suffering the action of the wall. The practitioner of aikido simply refuses to participate in the assailant’s abusive behavior.

The thought behind this is that to attack another is to take an inherently weak position. The practitioner of aikido uses the attack to introduce the attacker to the natural weakness of his chosen position. In fact, if the attacker stops attacking, it is impossible to use aikido to do anything to him. The same is not true for karate.

Those who are really into aikido tend to think that any other form of physical self-defense is merely brutality kept on a tight (or not so tight) leash. And those who are really into aikido use the same principles in other forms of self-defense.

So I think it’s very possible to defend oneself without counterattacking, but merely by bringing the natural consequences of the attack to the fore. And I think that that’s how God would prefer us to defend ourselves.

“Your distinction is an interesting one; however, if we are to only allow the natural consequences of any action, then it follows that we cannot interfere in any way, for interference would make it “unnatural,” in the sense of the word as you seem to be using. In that case, because any human action exerts an influence on the world in some way, then any human action/interference would result in an “unnatural” consequence.”

I’m a little uncertain with what this means toward the end. It almost sounds like you’re saying that I’m saying that if someone does us wrong, we should basically curl up in a ball and do nothing for the rest of our lives. I’m not saying that. I think, though, that I ought to explain myself better on the distinction I see between consequences and reactions on the post about Law and Moral Agency; I think it fits in better there.

Nathan posted: “Heya Wes! Good to see ya!”

Thanks! and thanks for the invitation!

“As Jeff mentioned, Elder Oaks isn’t the first prophet to talk about that distinction.”
(and from Jeff: “Elder Eyring says essentially the same thing last month’s Ensign article; so did Bruce R. McConkie and many others. Elder Oaks claim is not unsubstantiated by other prophetic counsel.”)

That Elder Oaks is a prophet is certain. That President Eyring and Elder McConkie are also prophets is equally certain. That false ideas, even in the mouths of two or three prophets, are prophetic counsel is just not right. False ideas are false no matter who says them.

The idea that agency is not the power to act is just false. That Elder Oaks said otherwise doesn’t make him right.

As for whether President Eyring said it in last month’s Ensign article, I can’t find it at all. The closest I can see is this: “We have moral agency as a gift of God. Rather than the right to choose to be free of influence, it is the inalienable right to submit ourselves to whichever of those powers we choose.” But that doesn’t seem to me to say that agency isn’t the freedom to act — just that agency isn’t the freedom to act in such a way that we can somehow avoid the consequences of our actions.

As for whether Elder McConkie said it, I really have no idea. I do know that, despite his having said they never would, blacks do now hold the Priesthood. He even helped receive the revelation that they should. That proves that not everything Elder McConkie said was true. So the fact that he said something is not sufficient evidence of its truthfulness.

“It [i.e., agency] has got a couple meanings, and that’s one of them. The question is what the Lord means by it when he uses it. The words spirit, demon, and love also have several meanings, depending on who’s using it. When reading the scriptures, the question is what did the Lord mean when he used the word. Isn’t that one of the reasons we have living prophets, to tell us that? Especially in situations where the Lord is revealing deep realities that human language is inadequate to describe. Shouldn’t we expect him to use terms slightly differently from how we do in everyday speech? If he’s revealing a new truth, we’re not going to have a word for it. So he picks one that’s close, and then uses prophets to explain the slight difference in meaning. I kind of think that’s the case with intelligence as used in the scriptures, too.”

I don’t think we should expect God to use terms slightly differently from how we do in everyday speech. It reminds me of the words of Nephi: “For my soul delighteth in plainness; for after this manner doth the Lord God work among the children of men. For the Lord God giveth light unto the understanding; for he speaketh unto men according to their language, unto their understanding” (2 Ne. 31:3). I think we should expect God to speak plainly and in accordance with our language as we understand it.

However, I think you’re right that there might be times — on occasion — when the clunkiness of our imperfect languages impedes his ability to express some concepts thoroughly in them. However, in such circumstances, how could a mere mortal prophet have a greater ability to clarify God’s meaning than God himself was capable of? Wouldn’t you think God would be more apt with our languages than any one of us? God can speak as clearly as is humanly possible without any editing needed from any prophet.

If God decided to use the word agency — a word that meant “the power to act” to all men at the time — through the Prophet Joseph Smith, why would he tell the prophet Dallin H. Oaks that agency didn’t really mean the power to act? Why would God pick a word that expressly conjures up false images in the minds of its hearers? Is He really that inept with English? Surely he could have said “freedom of choice” or even something like “election” if that’s what he was really talking about. It’s far easier for me to suppose that God knew what he was doing when he directed Joseph Smith to use the word agency and that Elder Oaks just got it wrong than to suppose that God got it wrong and it took Elder Oaks’s superior grasp of English to set the record straight. Of course, I am assuming in all of this that the Doctrine and Covenants are a more reliable indication of the mind of God than is a BYU devotional — that could be a false assumption.

“It would be interesting to compare the D&C’s use of agency and freedom.”

Ooh! I agree! Very much!

“But if the consequence of my opponent’s attack were truly “natural,” it wouldn’t need me to do anything to bring it to the fore.”

The consequence of his attack (according to the philosophy of aikido as I understand it, and I’m no aikido expert) is weakness. That weakness may or may not be apparent, depending on the circumstance surrounding the attack. The weakness lies in the fact that the attack depends on the victim’s cooperation for the attacker maintain his strength. If the attack is a well-performed attack and the victim does not actively refuse to participate, that weakness will not be as readily apparent. On the other hand, if the defender does actively refuse to participate in the attack, then the attacker’s own force will dramatically reveal his own weakness.

I can think of something that might be an example of this from my own fighting experience. One time someone tried to attack me by kicking me. When he failed to make contact with me, the force of his kick — without the steadying influence of the expected countering force of contact with my torso — caused him to fall on his butt. The weakness that came as a natural result of his attack was made immediately apparent by my refusal to cooperate with the attack. Now of course, that was a poorly-performed attack on his part, so the weakness was easier to see. Aikido studies far superior attacks and the way to refuse to cooperate with them than that. In fact, that’s why I say “refuse to cooperate” instead of something like “dodge”, since I think a lot of the refusal to cooperate goes way deeper than simply dodging. But, if I’m not mistaken, the principle is the same — you’re not really doing anything to the attacker, you’re just not doing what he counted on you doing when he overextended himself.

“It seems to me that Heavenly Father delays punishments in order to give us a chance to have a change of heart, not because the punishment itself is unwarranted or unnatural.”

This idea of giving us a chance to repent — and to repent on our own initiative — seems critical to me, and I’m glad you’ve brought it up. It seems to me that that’s a critical difference between any punishment the Lord might do and the kind of punishments that governments inflict. I don’t get the sense that earthly governments are big on giving criminals a chance to repent. At best, they seek to force some aspect of repentance, but usually they’re content to just avenge the wrong — but, “Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord (see Romans 12:19 and surrounding verses).

That’s why I think our whole approach to crime would have to change if we grant governments only that power that we ourselves righteously possess.

“If your son was being bullied at school, what are the “natural” consequences that would deter the bully from continuing?”

Say “_might_ deter the bully,” and I’d say there are plenty to create a deterrence.

First, the bully will naturally earn the enmity of my son’s friends. That will decrease his standing in society in proportion to the amount of friendship my son enjoys on the one hand, and the extent of his bullying on the other. That puts a natural limit on the amount of benefit he can derive from bullying before the cost exceeds the benefit.

Second, my son will naturally want to avoid being attacked. He might even go so far as to wear leather armor studded with razor-sharp spikes — and since he’s _my_ son, that’s not such an unlikely prospect! 🙂 If he did that, the bully would likely feel some disinclination to continue the bullying.

His desire to avoid being attacked might also inspire him to do something like learning aikido. If he did that, then he might learn how to stop cooperating with the bully’s attacks to such an extent that continued bullying would be effectively impossible.

He might even do one thing I did when I would get attacked in school. I was always one of the biggest people in class, so when people attacked me, I could usually prevent the attack just by putting my hand on the attacker’s head and holding him away from me until he got tired of swinging punches at the air and quit the attack. My son would likely be big like me (especially since men in my wife’s family are even bigger than I am), so the same option would likely be open to him. But then, I think my size made it so that I never really fell prey to what you’d call a bully.

If he were smaller, he could still do another favorite option of mine from my fighting days and catch their punches and kicks in his hand. He’d have to practice his speed, but that doesn’t take size. Continuing an attack gets boring really quick when every time you go to punch or kick or grab someone, his hand gets in the way — especially when he laughs at you for your inability to hit him (I was kind of cruel to my attackers that way).

But none of these (except maybe laughing at your attacker) would constitute a punishment or an artificial “consequence” the way a counterattack would. Many of these things involve action, but not punishment — it’s punishment that I think we might not have a God-given right to, not action. As I have said I think the ability to act (agency) is very much within our God-given rights.

But our governmental approach wouldn’t operate this way. We go for punishments, counterattacks. The way we do things today, my son goes to someone bigger than the bully (like a teacher or vice principal or whatever) and enlists his aid. Then the bigger bully bullies the little bully into submission using tactics not unlike those the little bully had used on my son.

I don’t know that such an approach is within our God-given rights — we are commanded not to recompense evil for evil, but that if any should smite us on the one cheek, we should turn to him the other also.

The bully will naturally earn the enmity of my son’s friends.

How is that natural? Couldn’t it just as easily be considered a passive-aggressive punishment on your son’s part, doing as much as he can in his limited scope to punish the bully’s actions? It seems like it all depends on the label. If there is a line between “natural” and “artificial” consequences, I’m having a hard time seeing where it is.

The advantage I see to punishments is this: many of the eternal consequences of the bullying are not apparent for a long time. By the time the bully sees him, if he ever does in this life (and many don’t), it may be an ingrained habit that will be very hard for him to break. He loses and others lose.

Conversely, if I apply artificial consequences that don’t naturally proceed from his bullying, he is forced to think about the consequences of his bullying sooner than later. The imposed consequences can be used to help him see the more subtle ones, and long before he may have realized them on his own, and before they’ve become a part of his character.

I agree with you that some punishments are more effective than others; if I just beat the bully without ever addressing what he’s supposed to learn or do differently, he’s not going to learn. I’m for applying effective consequences; I guess I just don’t see the problem with naming them for what they are: good punishments, as opposed to bad punishments. Artificial consequences designed to help us identify and the natural consequences of our actions and avoid them by changing actions.

Why would God pick a word that expressly conjures up false images in the minds of its hearers?

Specific choices of terminology aside, do you see the distinction between two concepts that Elder Oaks is drawing? One ability to choose or desire things, and the other the number of things that the first ability can actually be applied to at the moment. One constant and unremovable, the other subject to the actions and conditions of external factors. I can restrain a holocaust Jew in a concentration camp so that he has far fewer options than he had a year ago, but I cannot take away his ability to choose options, however few they are (such as when Victor Frankl says that one human freedom that can never be taken away is the freedom to choose your attitude, no matter the situation). Do you see that distinction? If so, what labels would you prefer for the two concepts?

Nathan: “How is that natural?”

Hmm, maybe it’s just natural for me. I just naturally don’t like folks who beat up my friends. 🙂

“The advantage I see to punishments is this: many of the eternal consequences of the bullying are not apparent for a long time. By the time the bully sees him, if he ever does in this life (and many don’t), it may be an ingrained habit that will be very hard for him to break. He loses and others lose.”

I can definitely see what your saying. I think it’s our duty to warn our bully of a brother that his actions will lead to eternal sadness. But at some point, we have to also let him decide whether he’s going to exercise faith or not. Protestantism can also become an ingrained habit that’s very hard to break and that can lead to some unsavory eternal consequences, but I’d be out of place to do anything more than warn my brother about that. Trying to force him would be out of line.

The only reason I might be able to force the bully is because he himself is exerting unjust force. But then I go thinking about scriptures about turning the other cheek and not returning evil for evil and doing good unto those that hate me, and I wonder whether I really am justified in using force on the bully. Self-defense is one thing, but punishment is something else.

“Specific choices of terminology aside, do you see the distinction between two concepts that Elder Oaks is drawing? One ability to choose or desire things, and the other the number of things that the first ability can actually be applied to at the moment. One constant and unremovable, the other subject to the actions and conditions of external factors. I can restrain a holocaust Jew in a concentration camp so that he has far fewer options than he had a year ago, but I cannot take away his ability to choose options, however few they are (such as when Victor Frankl says that one human freedom that can never be taken away is the freedom to choose your attitude, no matter the situation). Do you see that distinction? If so, what labels would you prefer for the two concepts?”

I do see the distinction. You’ve got the freedom to choose and you’ve got the freedom to act. If we had to, we could call the freedom to choose ‘election’, and the freedom to act ‘agency’. Both are real freedoms. Election can’t be taken away; agency can be severely limited.

My quarrel with Elder Oaks on this isn’t his choice of words, but rather his saying that the second of these freedoms is not the freedom God’s talking about when he says “agency”. I think he’s wrong. I think the freedom God’s talking about is the freedom to act. I think God opposes restrictions on that freedom to act, and he wants to remove all barriers to that restriction. If his desire is for us to become like him, then he must want us to eventually have an incomprehensibly huge range of freedom to act. I think he opposes every single restriction on our freedom to act. This freedom, which I (and I think God) call agency, is something we should all be concerned with.

The other freedom, which I’ll call election, is mostly silly to talk about, I think. It’s an important freedom for oppressed people to keep in mind, because it helps them hold on to sanity while they’re being raped, or beaten, or tortured, or otherwise abused (and after the fact). But I think it’s something of a red herring otherwise. The freedom to focus on is the very freedom Elder Oaks kind of seems to tell us to avoid thinking about. In discussing things like the ethics involved in Viktor Frankl’s time in a concentration camp, the thing we should really focus on is whether it was right to limit Frankl’s freedom to act by locking him up for his ethnicity, not whether or not it was possible to limit his freedom to elect.

“Do you think a government that did not apply punishments, as you’re using the word, would be a bad idea or a good idea? Do you think it would be less or more effective?”

Tough to say.

Well, not entirely. The second question is easy — a government that applies punishments is certainly more effective than a government that does not. And usually, the more reliably and harshly a government punishes it citizens, the more effective it is. Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao all headed some of the most effective governments the world has ever known.

As for whether it’s a good or a bad idea, I don’t know what to think. This series of posts has really fascinated me because it’s opened my eyes to a new way to consider political ethics. I haven’t made up my mind about it all yet.

As a general rule of thumb, I think more effective governmental structures are usually worse, because when taken over by wicked men, they are capable of effecting more wickedness than ineffective government structures.

One of the great things about the United States’ Constitution is that it relies on men’s wickedness to actually reduce the government’s effectiveness — the ambition for power and control is what drives the checks that the three branches of government exert on one another. Those checks on governmental power limit its overall effectiveness, so the more grasping and selfish the rulers are, the less wickedness they can actually bring about. Pretty ingenious idea, I think. One of the biggest problems in our government is the across-the-board elimination of many of those constitutional checks.

But is it good or bad to punish? I am inclined to think it’s immoral, but I’m not certain that we shouldn’t do it anyway. If I followed the mission statement of this blog, I’d throw caution to the wind and just find out what’s morally right and do what is right and let the consequence follow. But frankly, the idea of doing away with punishment altogether is kind of tough for me. If someone were to rape my wife, I’d want to hunt him down, bind him, and dice him from his feet to his head. I don’t think that’s morally right, but I don’t think I’m ready to be right on this one. I really don’t know that I’m ready to accept a world with no punishment for adult criminals.

I do think, however, that I am ready to accept a major reduction in the amount of punishment that currently goes on. Well over half the punishment we do could be eliminated tonight and I’d cheer. How we currently treat one another penally is just repulsive.

“I think I may have figured out one of our conceptual challenges: you’ve been conflating two different meanings of the word natural. In this context, you use it to mean ‘what is to be expected; what is habitual; what is understandable given the conditions.’ In other contexts, you’ve used it to mean, ‘what follows inevitably.'”

Actually, for me that enmity is inevitable, and I was meaning it that way. For Nathan, who is just about one of the nicest, most upbeat folks I’ve ever met, I would bet it would be a choice. For me, it’s not.

But I think the whole discussion of consequences would be better served by shifting the focus away from what I said earlier about the inevitability of consequences to something I said later on the post about the BYU Honor Code. I think we need to distinguish between consequences and punishments.

Too often we use the word consequences as a euphemism for punishment. Then when we read something like, “our freedom does not allow us to be free from the consequences of our actions,” we understand it to mean, “we are not free from punishments that are more or less arbitrarily affixed to our actions.” I think that’s putting a false interpretation on the true statement that we can’t be free from the natural results of our actions, and I think that false idea ends up hurting us. It distracts from weighing the results of our actions (which leads to wisdom) by urging us to focus on punishment (which leads to fear and blind obedience, neither of which is godly).

So my primary point with the distinction between natural consequences and artificial punishments is that they are two rather distinct things and that our ethical focus should be on the former. Working out the exact boundaries between natural consequences and artificial responses seems to me to miss the main point I was trying to make — at the prototypical level, the difference between a natural consequence on the one hand and an artificial reaction on the other is quite clear.

Jeffrey,

This (and the previous article on Government Authority) is an excellent article! I also enjoyed the clarification between agency and freedom that you posted in the comments.

Recently I was explaining to a friend how the basic part of life’s test is to see how we will use our agency (power) in regard to others. Will we be selfish and do things to others that essentially hurt them? Or will we work to become selfless and help others? Because, in most cases, we are not immediately blessed or punished when we make choices, the test is a true/accurate one. Our life will prove how we used our agency and whether or not we are worthy of greater power and authority.