In Chapter 1, I suggested that for us the difficulty in undertaking serious philosophical exploration of the idea of basic equality has two sources. There is, first, an awkwardness at the prospect at having to make explicit whatever religious or spiritual assumptions lie behind our conviction that humans are special and that some of the more obvious differences between them are irrelevant to the fundamentals of moral concern and respect. Secondly, we are discomfited at the prospect of having to take seriously, even if only for the sake of clarity and refutation, racist and sexist positions that seem to deny this equality. I am going to take up the first of these awkwardnesses in Chapter 3 and again in Chapter 8. But we also need to face up to the second, to consider and take seriously (at least for the sake of argument) the premises on which racist and sexist doctrines are based.

There is not much in John Locke on the subject of race, and what little there is – so far as it is relevant to issues about the displacement of aboriginal Americans and about the justification of slavery – I shall postpone for consideration until Chapters 5 and 7. I will talk in Chapter 3 about Locke's discussion of the idea of species, conducted with reference to the species Man, in Books III and IV of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and in that context we will touch upon an observation or two that Locke made about race.