Locke's Latitudinarian Sympathies

For Locke, as the standard story goes, good and evil assume a specifically moral significance only by dint of their being attached to divine legislation. This would seem to leave little to no role for intrinsically moral motives to play in reasoning practically about one’s moral duty. However, a re-examination of certain of Locke’s texts, particularly against the backdrop of the seventeenth-century Latitudinarian tradition, suggests that Locke is not uniformly committed to an externalist account of motivation. There are a number of instances throughout Locke’s works, I want to show, where he refers not only to the inherent righteousness of moral law as reason-giving for moral agents, but also to particular moral feelings as motivating moral acts.