“Marrying Her Husband’s Son”: Locke, the Politics of Sexual Morality, and the Case of Incest at the Church at Corinth
Smith B.
July 2023Johns Hopkins University Press
Journal of the History of Philosophy
2023#61Issue 3425 - 449 pp.
This paper explores the tension between the role the magistrate plays in Locke’s letters on toleration and the theory of sexual morality he develops in his analysis of the case of incest at the church at Corinth in his “Paraphrases” on Paul’s Epistles. A son had married his father’s ex-wife, a practice decried as “heinous” by seventeenth-century commentators. Contrary to the political uses of this case by members of the Anglican Church, Locke argues that moral communities should police themselves through private censure. At first glance, this sits uncomfortably with the view that the magistrate should punish adulterers and those who engage in “heinous enormities.” This paper seeks to reconcile these two visions by showing how the incentive structure of the civil law was meant to supplement the maximalist moral commitments of the religious communities that make up society.
John Locke , natural law , Pauline Epistles , sexual morality
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Political Theory, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
Political Theory
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