 Shaftesbury resists Locke’s attack on innate ideas, particularly as it applies to morality. Shaftesbury maintains that the “main scope and principal end” of Characteristicks is “to assert the Reality of a Beauty and Charm in moral as well as natural Subjects” (C 3.303), and he believes that Locke’s rejection of innate ideas undermines that moral reality. Locke’s rejection of innate ideas, as Shaftesbury sees it, implies that our moral ideas must be nothing but the result of custom and instruction, and that they are therefore relative to the contingent events of each person’s own society and upbringing. But morality, if it exists, must be based in a uniform nature. Morality is natural or it is nothing at all. And Locke’s rejection of innate ideas implies that morality is not natural. (For discussion of Shaftesbury’s attack on Locke’s view of innate ideas, see Carey 2006, 98–99; Uehlein 2017; and Stuart–Buttle 2019: 90–102. Stuart-Buttle responds to Spellman (1998: 201), who argues that Shaftesbury badly misinterprets Locke.)