Locke's coercive morality

Several passages in John Locke’s Letters for Toleration suggest he was favourable to an enforcement of the moral code by magistrates. According to John Marshall, Locke was not sympathetic towards moral coercion when he wrote An Essay concerning Toleration (1667), given his insistence on the limits of civil power; his views in this regard changed in the nineties, because of his adhesion to the ideals of the Movement for the Reformation of Manners. However, there is no clear evidence that Locke was contrary to an enforcement of morality by magistrates before he wrote the Letters; more importantly, some manuscript notes which he penned in 1681 reveal that, already in those years, his ideas on morality had undergone an important change which legitimated magisterial action against immorality. The private, super-political nature conferred on the concern for virtue and vice in An Essay concerning Toleration began to be obscured, in Locke’s writings, by his identifying virtue with social decorum, a public concern.