Abstract:

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke is confronted with a distinctly modern moral problematic. First, he rejects any boundaries in the natural world independent of human reason: “in all the visible corporeal World, we see no Chasms, or Gaps” (3.6.12). However, he also asserts a sharp distinction between moral agents and non-agents. So, he is confronted with the problem of delineating between agents and non-agents without an appeal to metaphysical facts about the soul or physical facts about species-boundaries. His solution to his delineation problem lies in his account of personhood. In the Essay, Locke defines persons as “intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery” (2.27.26) and further claims that the potential for personhood is a part of the real essence of human being.

However, not every being descended from humans is a person in this sense. According to Locke, changelings lack a rational soul and so do not share in the real essence of human being. They are, instead, “a species between man and beast” (4.4.16). Locke is at pains not just to lay out this definition but to defend it against common sense objections and spell out the very clear implications of his claims—changelings have no share in any future of immortality because they are “something neither man nor beast, but partaking somewhat of either” (4.4.16). Contemporary reconstructions of Locke’s account of personhood rarely if ever mention Locke’s account of the changeling, though a case has yet to be made why it should not matter for our understanding of his broader account of personhood.

This paper has two aims. The first is to situate Locke’s claims about the changeling as a soulless non-person against the backdrop of his predecessors and contemporaries. Though it is tempting to see Locke’s claims as emblematic of longstanding ableist prejudices, such a view obscures the fact that his predecessors (like Paracelsus and Felix Platter) and prominent contemporaries (like Thomas Willis) explicitly rejected the view that Locke advances—that changelings are soulless creatures with no hope of an afterlife. The Essay makes a radical claim by excising the soul from the changeling and situating them outside the essence of human being. This radicality has been long neglected and shedding light on the novelty of Locke’s definition might help to clarify the ways our modern understanding of intellectual disability has developed. The second aim is to understand the relation between Lockean non-persons and the delineation problem. Again, Locke is one of the first to give a modern articulation of the delineation problem. The problem has persisted in contemporary debates over moral personhood (and its many cognate concepts). Reconstructing Locke’s account of the problem and his solution promises insight into these contemporary debates and the possible afterlives of the Lockean changeling.