Abstract

Of the historical figures that Gorman examines, none is more antithetical to the pluralist account of often antagonistic and conflicting rights that he favors than John Locke. To the questions that he poses for Plato and Hobbes—about how rights can be authoritative, how individual choices can be constrained by rights, how rights can be justified, and how can such moral considerations motivate people—he finds in Locke the most simplistic and unsatisfactory answers. Locke’s reliance on both God and reason to ground the authority of rights and his embrace of natural rights as objective, independent, and knowable by all through reason, represent a world of fixed truth and a consistent reality that Gorman finds entirely unpersuasive. As he noted in his introductory chapter, in a world of warring ideologies, of Eastern Fundamentalism and Western pluralism, such a Lockean vision of the moral landscape seems antiquated, along with his understanding of reason as univocal. Despite observing notable differences between Plato, Hobbes, and Locke, Gorman sees among them a common thread of “reason” as something independent, eternal, unchanging in its truth, and universally applicable, and he finds this rationalist position justifiably criticized by empiricists, most prominently Hume.