Experience and the limits of understanding › The Intellectual Battlefield

Locke begins Book I by examining the claim that certain principles and ideas are innate. One argument he addresses appeals to universal agreement: supposedly everyone recognizes certain logical or moral truths. He contests both the alleged agreement and the inference from agreement to innateness. His target is a claim about knowledge already present in the mind, rather than a denial that humans possess natural faculties. In Book I, chapter II, he distinguishes the capacity to know from actual knowledge. Treating every truth we are capable of learning as innate would, he argues, make the label apply too broadly to explain anything. The argument also concerns how authority operates. Near the end of Book I, Locke warns that presenting principles as innate can discourage people from examining them. A learner who is told a principle is beyond question may accept it without asking how it is justified. This does not make Locke a skeptic about all moral truth. His rejection of innate moral principles concerns how we acquire and justify them. It does not establish that moral claims are merely conventions or that every belief is equally defensible.