Berkeley’s two most obvious targets in Alciphron are Shaftesbury and Mandeville. However, as numerous commentators have pointed out, there is good reason to think Berkeley additionally targets Anthony Collins in this dialogue. In this paper, I bolster David Berman’s claim that “Collins looms large in the background” of Dialogue VII, and put some meat on the bones of Raymond Martin and John Barresi’s passing suggestion that there is a connection between the Clarke–Collins correspondence, Alciphron, and the objection that Berkeley raises regarding persons and their persistence conditions therein. Specifically, I argue that we have evidence that Berkeley’s objection to consciousness–based views of personal identity, as found in VII.8, is a response to a challenge that Collins raises to Clarke in “An Answer to Mr. Clarke’s Third Defense of his Letter to Mr. Dodwell.” This is significant not just because this objection is usually—and consistently—taken to be an objection to Locke, but also because Berkeley’s objection works against Collins’s theory of personal identity in a way that it doesn’t against Locke’s.

Samuel Rickless has recently defended an act utilitarian interpretation of Berkeley’s Passive Obedience. Part of his argument is a criticism of my natural law reading of Berkeley, particularly my contention that natural lawyers are committed to a distributive notion of universality, while utilitarians are committed to a collective sense of universality. This essay is, in part, a reply to Rickless’s criticisms. I argue that if we assume that Berkeley was either a natural lawyer or a utilitarian, and if we can find grounds for distinguishing natural law theories from utilitarian theories, then a natural law theory provides a more philosophically defensible fit with the texts than does a utilitarian theory.