文档介绍：GOD, LOCKE, AND EQUALITY
Are we humans all one another’s equals? And if we are, what is this
equality based on and what are its implications?
In this concise and engaging book, Jeremy Waldron explores
these questions in pany of the seventeenth-century English
philosopher John Locke. Waldron believes that Locke provides us
with “as well-worked-out a theory of basic equality as we have in the
canon of political philosophy.” But for us it is a challenging theory
because its foundations are unabashedly religious. God has created
us equal, says Locke, and a proper grasp of the implications of this
equality is inseparable from an understanding of ordinary men and
women as creatures of God, created in his image and “made to last
during his, not one anothers Pleasure.”
The religious foundations of Locke’s political thought have been
noted before, but they have never been explored more sympatheti-
cally, or with greater attention to their implications for modern
debates about equality. Jeremy Waldron is one of the world’s lead-
ing legal and political philosophers, and this book is based on the
Carlyle Lectures that he presented in Oxford in . It provides
new perspectives on Locke’s egalitarianism and the tribute he paid
to the status and dignity of the ordinary person; it examines the
problems Locke faced in defining the human species for the pur-
poses of mitment to basic equality; it explores the relation
between his egalitarianism and his Christian beliefs; and most im-
portant, it offers new interpretations of Locke’s views on toleration,
slavery, property, aboriginal rights, the Poor Law, the distribution of
the franchise, and relations between the sexes.
But this is not just a book about Locke. God, Locke, and Equality
discusses contemporary approaches to equality as well as rival in-
terpretations of Locke, and this dual agenda gives the whole book
an unusual degree of accessibility and intellectual excitement. In-
dispensable for