Introduction

In the last lecture we looked at the theories of Niccolo Machiavelli and Thomas Hobbes concerning the justification and the proper use of political power. We noticed in particular that they took a strictly humanistic and pragmatic attitude towards the nature of obligation. Remember that by ‘humanistic’ we just mean characterized by an emphasis on facts about humans – and this is to be opposed to an emphasis on facts about the gods or God; and by pragmatic all that is meant is that something is accepted as being true (or at least likely to be true, or perhaps just acceptable as a ‘truth’) if it seems to work in the real world. You’ll recall that the virtues are supposed to be justified by the fact that they will help to achieve certain ends. These are attitudes that were fairly common in the classical world and are going to become more common as the modern world continues to emerge. pragmatic attitude you might think is not too unusual, given the way that these The humanistic attitude is is something that’s going to become more and more typical of the thinkers that we will talk about.

The thinkers that we’ve looked at so far have represented what we take to be the mainstream of Western thought on these matters. And let me emphasise again that this course is only interested in the Cultural and Ethical values of Western civilization - for reasons that I outlined in the introductory lesson. So, no Buddhist ethics, no Confucianism, no study of Islamic doctrine or the Hindu teachings. None of the great thinkers from those other traditions will get a look in. Each of those traditions have their own mainstream. So what do I mean when I talk about these thinker being mainstream? Well, all I mean is that they fall into the appropriate category of interest for this class. We’re trying to show you a little bit of how Western Civilization got to be the way that it is; so when I say mainstream I just mean that it just so happens that their influence has been felt all the way through to our own time, either directly or through their work being adapted by others. Of course, we’re not necessarily claiming that these were the best thinkers or schools of their time – simple luck and accidents have a lot to do with which cultural items are successful and which fade away without trace. All those other thinkers and moralists can profitably be studied in their own right in more specialised courses and you can learn valuable things from them. It’s interesting, for example, to learn about how the ancient Greek Democritus came up with a purely philosophical justification for atomic theory; and it’s interesting to learn about how Manichaeans thought that the world was orgainized in terms of the opposing powers of Good and Evil; but those represent sidetracks and dead ends, and so we could easily ignore them, and feel no guilt in the matter.

Things change as we get closer to the present time, however, because it’s no longer clear to us where the mainstream is going to be. Consider what the situation would have been like for someone giving this course about the time of Christ. It would not have been clear that Neo-Platonism was a minor branch, and that the Stoics were vastly more important. A lecturer in that period would have had to make a decision about what represented the essence of the civilization that he was discussing, and what had a future, and what would have lasting value. But all the other branches would have looked equally vital, and might have been preferred by some other lecturers. Well, the situation starts to look a bit like that now. I’ve decided, and you may disagree, that the mainstream will be the stream that leads to the civilization that I see prospering, with its values and norms, and only thinkers that I believe are essential to that stream are therefore included for consideration. So we’ll be looking at the thinkers who have contributed to the emergence in its current form of a liberal democratic capitalist society. On the other hand, we shall exclude from consideration many whose influences are actually still felt, but point in a rather different direction. We do not discuss Rousseau, for example, and we don’t discuss Karl Marx; but that’s not to say that these are bad thinkers or had less valuable ideas considered just as pure ideas. Moreover, we will see many more English speakers than non-English speakers. This may give the appearance of parochialism, but it’s not simply that, for it is in large part the English-speaking world that has created the ethical world that we now inhabit. That’s certainly the case in Australia , for the obvious reasons. On the other hand, a lecturer from a slightly different tradition might make slightly different choices of philosophers who have shaped Western civilization as he sees it. The Frenchman, for example, would include Montesquieu, whose book on The Spirit of the Laws was important in the intellectual changes of the enlightenment.

I suppose there is also the danger that this approach to the history of ideas might seem to be what is sometimes called Whiggish. Whiggishness consists of seeing history as a process that has a definite direction; it accepts that there’s somewhere that history is taking us – and also that that destination is a good thing and should be praised. The term comes from a time in English history (actually the time we’re going to talking about today) when Whigs were a political party whom you can think of as standing for the rights of Parliament over the competing claims of the King, Church, and aristocracy, who were supported by the Tories. They tended to make claims for the historical inevitability of the triumph of their side, much like the communists of more recent memory, and wrote history with that in mind. Historians sneer at this view of history, because they think that the influence of completely unpredictable circumstances is so great that there can’t be any actual fixed and determined direction or any final end towards which everything is unstoppably moving. Probably they’re right to sneer, but that doesn’t affect what I’m doing here. I accept that the future might see other things as having more lasting value, but therse are the things that are held to be valuable by us, here, and now. The future must write its own lectures. Finally, When I make broad general claims about the course of Western ethical thought, like the acceptance of the Will as the moral focus of judgement rather than simple Actions, or like the imposition of concepts drawn from notions of Law on our ethical imagination, pushing aside notions of final goods or virtues of character, I’m not sayig that that’s inevitable or irreversible (indeed I would like to see some of it reversed,) I’m just observing what has happened.

So, having gotten these necessary preliminaries out of the way, today we are going to take a look at the political philosophy of Hobbes’ most important successor: the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704). John Locke is widely regarded as the greatest of all English philosophers: and he’s not just a moralist; he did important work in epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics and philosophy of language as well as political philosophy. He wrote two philosophical masterpieces: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) and Two Treatises on Government (published anonymously, also in 1689). The lecture today examines some of the main themes from the second (and more significant) of the Two Treatises of Government. The first treatise was an argument against the divine right of kings that was so effective that it’s now entirely irrelevant. No one any longer has any interest in that supposed divine right, so the whole argument in the First Treatise is of historical interest only.

Background

This business of the divine right of kings was a claim that the authority of the king was delegated to him by God in some fashion, and that it would be impious to rebel against him since that would be to put yourself against the Will of God. The arguments that the kings and their supporters put forward for this thesis are various, but in the Christian tradition they generally reference a passage from the New Testament that says:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.[1]

James II (r. 1685-88) was the last monarch of England who took this seriously. But his other policies scared important elements of the population so badly that they felt they had to overthrow him. The particulars of his controversial policies don’t really matter: it all had to do with the struggle between the Roman Catholic church and the various Protestant groups for the power to tend men’s immortal souls – and to have the political power to do so. When it looked as if James was going to re-establish a Catholic monarchy, there was a Glorious Revolution, as the winners named it, and in 1688 James was removed from the throne. The English shyed away from killing another king, and James was allowed to flee the country to live under the protection of Louis XIV in France (where the Divine Right of kings was maintained for another 100 years.) The throne was claimed by William and Mary, who were a Protestant branch of the royal family – no one wanted a repeat of the unpleasant republican experiment that I mentioned last time (Cromwell, etc.) And the power and authority of Parliament was further entrenched. It’s generally accepted that it was the political settlement that accompanied this replacement of the king that marks the emergence of the form of Constitutional Monarchy that England still enjoys today.

A significant part of this settlement was the passing in 1689 of the English Bill of Rights. Its full name is An Act Declaring the Rights and Liberties of the Subject and Settling the Succession of the Crown, which pretty well describes what it does. In very general terms it builds upon the work done from Mediaeval times onward to limit the power of the kings – it’s in the tradition of the Magna Carta for example. It’s most important achievement (as far as we’re concerned) is to force the monarch to accept that no law can be passed without the consent of the people as represented in parliament.

Now all this was very good, but it’s never enough to just grab power; there has to be some sort of justification for the grabbing or the exercising. There didn’t seem to be any justification available for the sort of constitutional structure that the Glorious Revolutionaries had set up. You certainly couldn’t get to where you wanted by following the arguments of Hobbes. As you may recall, Hobbes would have allowed the sovereign to do almost anything without there being any justification for revolution. As we saw part of the motivation for that hard line was that Hobbes had seen what happens when a monarch is overthrown and he really didn’t like the confusion and bloodshed and tyranny that seemed to follow. The Glorious Revolution had at least shown now that those consequences aren’t necessary consequences of revolution.

Locke

Locke makes for a fascinating contrast with Hobbes. The Second Treatise is often interpreted as an attempted refutation of Hobbes’s Leviathan, however Locke and Hobbes also share common ground. Like Hobbes, Locke thinks that the legitimacy of government is based on a tacit or implied social contract. Like Hobbes, he also sees the social contract as a rational response to deficiencies within the state of nature. On many important details, however, Hobbes and Locke disagree.

Let us start with Locke’s characterization of the state of nature. Recall that Hobbes thought that the state of nature would be a state of war of all against all. Locke’s view of the state of nature is much less dire. The reason for this is that Locke considered humans to be naturally moral beings. We do not always or automatically act well, but we all have the capacity to understand what it is to act well. Humans have a moral conscience, and would have a conscience even in the state of nature. Hobbes, by contrast, thought that our moral character is derived from civil society. He thinks that decency and virtue are achievements of civilization, not features of unadorned human nature. According to Locke, however, we not only have a conscience in the state of nature, we also have rights. Locke famously asserts the existence of natural rights, and with them, natural law.

By natural law, Locke means just what Aquinas meant: it is a prescription of the way we ought to act, which reflects God’s authority over us, and is something that we can discover for ourselves just because we are human and rational. This differs from what Hobbes thought of as “Laws of Nature”: Hobbes’s laws of nature are rational principles of prudence (e.g. seek peace) and rational consistency (honour covenants). Although Locke and Aquinas share a belief in natural law, they nonetheless had a different ideas about what is involved natural law. Recall that Aquinas says that natural law enjoins us to seek good and avoid evil (and do so in ways that respect the fundamental goods of life, procreation, society, knowledge, etc.). According to Locke, by contrast, natural law enjoins us to respect others’ natural rights. Locke argues that we are everywhere and always in possession of these rights – rights that we possess naturally, simply in virtue of our humanity, and not in virtue of our belonging to a particular society, or class, or club. This is the idea that would eventually develop into the contemporary conception of human rights.

What are 'Rights'?

Now, since we are going to be talking about these ‘rights’ things a good deal in this lecture, we’d better have a look at just what it is that we mean when we use the word (or any of its related terms.) This little discussion will also be useful to you in your everyday life, since whenever we have discussions of ethical matters these days the arguments very quickly turn into a competition between claims to certain rights. Just think of the abortion debate: there are one one side champions of the woman’s ‘right to choose’, and on the other side partisans of the child’s ‘right to life’. In that case the arguments tend to become sidetracked into issues of when human life begins, or what can be owed by one person to another, or questions like that. These are questions that are rather similar to questions about when a law can or cannot be said to apply, or which law takes precedence in which circumstance. But, let’s be clear, it’s not actually necessary that our ethical discussions take this form. You might like to consider how arguments over the propriety of abortion would look in a community that accepted a type of Aristotelian virtue ethics. It would certainly be very different.

Claims or Permissions

One can think of rights as almost all falling into one of two large categories: a right can be either a claim or a permit (or a privilege.) (Offhand, I can’t think of any that don’t fit into these categories, but perhaps you can. Have a go at thinking of one.) An example of a ‘claim’ right would be the sort of right that I exercise or appeal to in my terms and conditions of employment. I undertake to provide so many hours of labour (hard, tedious, unrewarding labour) to this University, and in return I understand that they will pay me for that work. If they decline to do so, I will feel aggrieved, and I will remonstrate, and I will say that they ‘owe’ me money, that they have an ‘obligation’ to pay me, and that I have a right to that mony. All of which would be supported by the legal system in pretty much those exact terms if I decided to take my grievance to law. My ‘right’ to that money is created by the same act that creates an ‘obligation’ or a ‘duty’ on the part of the university to provide me with the money. And this is a situation that is utterly typical of claim rights. In short we can think of ‘claim’ rights as creating an obligation in someone else. So:

                If I have a claim right to x from person s, then s has a duty to provide me with x.

On the other hand, an example of a ‘permit’ right or a ‘permission’ right, would be the sort of right that I exercise or appeal to when I make use of the permit that I have purchased from the University to park my car in their parking lot. This permit I’ve bought gives me permission to do that. Because I have permission to do that I should feel no obligation not to do that. I am in no way obliged not to park in their parking lot. And that means that they have no right to sanction me for doing so, or no right to prevent me from entering, and so on. If you look closely at these ways of formulating the nature of claim and permission rights you may see a certain symmetry there in the way that the dutes and obligations to act or not act match up for me and the university. That’s probably not accidental, and it’s probably interesting , but we don’t need to go into that here. The point just is that this is a situation that is quite typical for permission rights, and we can think of them as destroying any obligation not to do something. So:

                If I have permission to do x, then I have no duty to avoid doing x.

Positive or Negative Claims

There is a further subdivision of types of rights which has turned out to be of considerable importance in debates in recent times. This division breaks the category of claim rights into two. One subcategory being the  so-called positive claim rights and the other being, as you might have guessed, the negative claim rights. A positive claim right is a right I have that someone else should do something (and it’s always something for my benefit.) A negative claim right is a right that I have that someone else should not do something (and it’s always something that is to my disadvantage.) The previous example of a claim right was actually an example of a positive claim right. I was claiming that I have a right to be paid by my employer for my work, or, to make it absolutely clear, I have a right that the university should give me money for my work. On the other hand, I also have a negative right that the university should not spy on me during my work hours. (The camera operating up there by my consent is not spying on me,because it’s recording me according to my explicit consent. But a camera in the toilets intended to make sure I wasn’t drinking or taking drugs in work hours would not have my consent and would be a violation of my rights. This si the so-called ‘right to privacy.’ Note that the way that this is sometimes phrased may make it seem similar to a permission claim, but it’s really not. We could more formally state these claim rights as:

                If I have a positive claim right to x from person s, then s has a duty to provide me with x.

                If I have a negative claim right to x from person s, then s has a duty not to deprive me of x.

As a matter of interest, a very similar distinction was made famous by Isaiah Berlin ’s with respect to kinds of liberty. All liberties are supposed to be kinds of freedom, but Berlin distinguished positive liberties from negative. Positive liberty is the freedom to achieve one’s goals, whereas negative liberty is the freedom from restraints preventing you from achieving your goals. Typically people make claims to positive liberties when they want the government ot supply them with something like health care. Without good health I can’t flourish as a human so I must have it so it must be provided me. By contrast, people typically make claims to negative liberties when they want the government to stop interfering with them. Laissez-faire capitalist theory is the best known of the large scale claims to negative liberty. The government should stop trying to prevent people exchanging goods and services in the way that they see fit. But claims that the Government should let cigarette smokers alone is also a negative liberty claim.

However, we are concerned here only with the question of positive and negative rights. We see these concepts used implicitly all the time in disputes over public policy, so it’s important to get a grip on them and how they are used. Some more examples may make the concepts even clearer.

1.             Right to Education?

So consider, for example, the claim that

All children have a right to an education.

What sort of a claim is this? Well, it’s legitimate to see it as stating either a positive claim right or a negative claim right, and the policy prescriptions that flow as a consequence of accepting the truth of the claim are different for the two cases. If you view it as stating a positive claim right then you are claiming that for each child someone is obliged to provide the education of that child. Now it would seem to follow that we need to know for each child who is their obligated education-giver: and this seems to suggests that what we need to discover is some sort of set of assignments like ‘Bob is obliged to provide Carol’s education and Ted is obliged to provide Alice ’s and so on.’ But since to state the problem in that way is to see how absurd such an approach would be, we immediately rephrase it to read as saying that we must discover who it is who is obliged to provide the education of every child (that is: which single person has that obligation); and once it is stated in that way, it’s obvious that the only reasonable answer is that it is the sovereign – or the government – who is so obliged. Well, I suppose it’s obvious. It certainly seems to be the common understanding, although why it shouldn’t be the responsibility of the government of Nigeria isn’t quite clear, or perhaps these days it should be the United Nations.

In any case, that is just the consequence of understanding the claim as being a positive claim right; if we understand it as a stating a negative claim right then all it means is that no one may actually prevent any child from getting an education. The policy prescriptions here are quite limited: education may be provided or not provided by any assortment of educators or none. In particular, it can’t be claimed that we must have a Department of Education as a basic human right. On the other hand we may not accept the sort of educational policies adopted by the Taliban in Afghanistan before that country’s liberation, where girls were not allowed to go to school.

2.             Right to Free Speech?

Well then, how about this claim that we hear so much about:

                Everyone has the right of free speech.

What sort of a claim is this? Again, it’s legitimate to see it as stating either a positive or a negative claim right, but in this case it is also possible to see it as stating a permission right. Let’s consider the case that it is stating a positive claim right. Then what it is saying is that someone else is obliged to provide the means by which I may successfully speak. So, if I’ve written a book then someone is obliged to publish it on my behalf. (I don’t think it means that someone is obliged to read it, but I guess that would be arguable too: some might say that it’s not really speech if no one is listening.) Using the same sort of reasoning as we applied to the previous example, we might argue that it is therefore a basic human right that the government be the sole publisher of books – or that the government is obliged to publish any book that anyone wants published. Possibly because of the economic impossibility of this interpretation of the so-called ‘right’, this conclusion is never argued for. We do see the idea of a positive claim right to free speech being used however, when people find it hard to get their views out, or if they are punished for the things that they say. For example, it’s not uncommon for an opinion columnist in a newspaper to be dropped because of some controversial views he may have expressed. In such cases there are usually cries of ‘censorship’ and ‘where’s my free speech?’, or ‘this is how Hitler started’ or ‘come and see the violence inherent in the system’. The apparent belief here is that a newspaper owner is obliged to publish an employees offensive speech, but this claim is never argued in quite those words: speaking in terms of rights sounds much more noble.

On the other hand, if the free speech claim is viewed as stating a negative claim right, then all it means is that no one may act to deny your ability to speak. Thus, both governments and non-governmental groups can infringe this right by directly attacking those who are speaking as they attempt to speak. A protest group for some cause or other – anti-globalization springs to mind – can be guilty of this type of infringement if it sets out to attack speakers, or to prevent them from reaching the stage, or to cause so much damage and disturbance that the civil authorities will stop the speaker.

And finally, the claim may be seen as a statement of a permission right, in which case it just means that one has no duty not to speak freely. Governments can infringe this right by passing laws against people’s speech and punishing violators of that law – as very many governments do. It may also be an example of a permission right violation for a group to so intimidate a society that it becomes acepted by the victimised society that there is a duty not to speak in such a way that the intimidating group will be offended. A relatively mild version of this has been endemic in the West for some decades in the form of what is called ‘political correctness’, but a more serious challenge has arisen recently with attempts by radical Islamist groups to create an environment in which no speech even slightly critical of Islam is acceptable. We’ve seen this sort of thing with the riots and death threats that resulted from the publication of cartoons depicting Mohammed, for example, or with the sentence of death passed on Salman Rushdie for his book ‘The Satanic Verses.’

Legal Rights and Natural Rights

I’m going to assume that what’s been said above is enough to allow you to get to grips with the idea of the various kinds of rights – or rather, with the way that these rights are supposed to be related to what people are allowed or obliged to do. But there is another division between kinds of rights which I’ve found through experience with talking to students really needs to be emphasised; and that is the differeence between legal rights (or civil rights or created rights or some other qualification) and natural rights (universal, eternal, innate, god-given, etc.) The distinction is pretty obvious in its intention anyway: legal rights are the sorts of rights that are created by a legal system. They are the sorts of things that you find in a Constitution, Bill of Rights, international conventions (like the Geneva conventions on the treatment of Prisoners of War for example,) Common Law (which is just the traditional case law that isn’t necessarily based on foundational documents. Legal rights are possessed by everyone only by virtue of their falling under the jurisdiction of the law and satisfying the other conditions required for the right to be granted.

Natural rights, by contrast are rights that are conceived of as existing whether or not the legal arrangements are in place to grant them as legal rights. In fact the legal system may actually deny these rights – as the Taliban denied the right to education for girls in Afghanistan , or as  the Chinese government denies the right to Free Speech for well over a billion people in China – but the people still possess that right. That is, they possess that right if such a right is what they call a natural right. So when you ask whether the right to free speech exists in society X, you may say ‘yes’ no matter what the laws and enforcement practices of X are. Lockle thought that these sorts of rights were granted to all people by God, and we’ll see how that is supposed to work in a moment, but there are many attempts in recent years (that is, in the last few centuries) to make the possession of these rights independent of the existence of God. The idea of Human Rights – which is an idea invented in the West quite recently, is a secularised  adaptation of the idea of Natural Rights.

What are our Rights

Where do they come from?

What are our natural rights, according to Locke? We have three: a right to life, liberty, and property. Our right to life, according to Locke, is a right not to be killed or allowed to die when we could readily be saved. Our right to liberty is the right not to have our activities interfered with so long as we aren’t interfering with the activities of others. The right to property is the most interesting natural right. Even without any social arrangements to support private ownership, Locke thinks we can recognize when something is legitimately controlled and used by another (i.e. is truly their property). A right to property is the right to acquire things which are as yet unowned (this is called original acquisition), a right to exchange things with others, a right to give things away, and a right not to have your property stolen or seized or otherwise forced from you. I will have more to say about Locke on property below.

So there are natural rights in the state of nature, and people in the state of nature would be aware of this (provided they are clear-headed enough). Along with natural rights come duties. If I have a right to life, then you have a duty to rescue me if you easily can. If I have a right to liberty, then you have a duty to leave me to do my own thing (providing doing my own thing doesn’t involve infringing on the liberty of others). Of course, the mere fact that there are these rights and duties in the state of nature, and people are aware of this fact, doesn’t mean that people in the state of nature will always respect them. But it does mean that they will respect them often enough to make life in the state of nature a much more peaceable and contented affair than the life envisaged by Hobbes. According to Locke, the state of nature is not going to be a war of all against all.

But what sense can there be to the claim that the state of nature is a realm of natural law and natural rights if there is no authority and no civil power to support them? Who will enforce natural rights if there is no civil authority? Locke answers that when a natural right is violated in the state of nature, then the injured party or their family and friends will act as judge, jury and executioner. This minimal enforcement is sufficient to evade the anarchic war of all against all that Hobbes imagined. But it is hardly satisfactory. For a start, as the victim or a friend of the victim, you are hardly in a position accurately determine any violation of natural law and justly respond to it. Secondly, it will often enough be the case that you are not able to adequately enforce natural law: say, for example, that the perpetrator has run off with your goods and you have not the means to track him down. A more objective, secure, and effective means of law enforcement than any available in the state of nature would be highly valuable, if we could secure it without too much cost. This is the value of civil society. This is why it would make sense to get out of the condition of the state of nature and create a civil society.

What makes a legitimate government

Hobbes’s social contract was a covenant between all people in a state of nature to give the governance of their own lives up to a sovereign. In return, people get security and access to all the goods of civilization that are dependent upon security. Locke’s vision of the social contract is quite different. In Locke’s view, a proper transition from the state of nature to a civil society would consist in two logically distinct steps. First, a social contract is made; this is a free, uncoerced, agreement between people in the state of nature that they be governed by the principle of majority rule. In the next step of the process, the majority will create (i.e. vote in) a governing body that will enact laws and enforce them. (This needn’t be a democratic parliament – it could be a monarchy if that’s what the majority wanted. Locke recommends, however, that the branches of government – the legislature and the executive – be separated, so there is an effective balance of power in government.)

The positive laws passed by this governing body must be consistent with natural law if it is to remain a legitimate government. Either the laws regulate and protect natural rights – e.g. they encode adequate property rights – or they must be directed toward the benefit of citizens with the approval of the majority. Even in the latter case, the benefit of the majority cannot be won at the expense of the natural rights of the minority. For example, a majority may be in favour of stripping all property from a minority religion (e.g. the Catholic Church in 17^th century England ). Even it the majority approved of this course of action, or indeed wanted it desperately, such a law would not be just because it violates natural rights. Natural rights function in civil society as a means of avoiding tyranny of the majority and the abuse of minorities.

Because the legitimacy of government depends upon the consent of the majority and the respect of natural rights, it is possible for governments to exist without legitimacy. In these cases, says Locke, rebellion and revolution are just. (Note, this is the exact reverse of Hobbes’s view.) Locke’s views on the legitimacy of revolution were highly influential. Indeed, much of Locke’s political philosophy exerted a great influence on the founding fathers of the United States .

A government is legitimate only because everyone has tacitly agreed to abide by majority rule, thinks Locke. (Notice, this is very different from saying that the majority has agreed to abide by its own rule.) How can Locke say that we have given such consent? We show our consent by continuing to live in the civil society so formed. But forced agreement is not true consent, so it must be that we aren’t forced to live in our society. And Locke thinks that, indeed, we aren’t forced to live in our society; we have the option of migrating, for example. And because the state of nature is not the disaster Hobbes imagined it to be, we always have the option of opting out. Any legitimate government must allow its citizens some possibility of opting out. Otherwise it is not operating under genuine consent of its people.

What gives a right to property?

Recall that one of our three natural rights, according to Locke, is the right to property. Indeed he thinks that one of the chief virtues of the move to civil society is that it is very difficult in a state of nature to adequately protect this right. But how can there be such a thing as property before there exists any of the institutions that support private ownership: e.g. laws of contract, laws of inheritance, a monetary system, and so on? Locke needs a theory about what property is and how it comes about, one that makes the facts of property ownership independent of institutional support.

How do you ever acquire property? You might be given it. But then, how did the gift-giver acquire the property to give? You might earn it or trade for it. But how did your employer or trading partner own the means to provide wages or the goods to trade with? Perhaps they were given them, earned them, or traded for them. But we can’t go on asking these questions, forever. We need a theory about the first origins of property. How did anyone every acquire property for the very first time? To a first approximation, Locke’s theory is this: something becomes property for the very first time if it is not owned by anybody and you mix your labour with it. To mix your labour with something is work to improve it or make it more useable. For example, if you are wandering through a forest – one that is not owned by anyone – and you pick up a stick, you can’t be said to own the stick. It isn’t your stick, yet. It’s just a stick up picked up. But say you whittle away at it, making it into a carving of a snake. It now becomes your snake-carving. Consider another example. Say you encounter a pear tree – unowned by anyone. If you go to the trouble of picking the pears and placing them in your bag, you now own the pears. You have changed them from relatively inaccessible fruit, to picked fruit, fruit that is ready to eat. So the pears are now yours. (The pear tree isn’t yours because you haven’t done anything to improve it.)

There are two further conditions on original acquisition. First, you must not acquire so much that it spoils or so much that you can’t make proper use of it. Second, you must leave enough and as good behind you. Say there is only one pear tree in the region and pears are popular. You don’t own the pears if you pick all of them, or even most of them. Nor do you own the pears if you only pick the best and juiciest of them, leaving behind only over-ripe or worm infested pears. You might claim ownership, of course, by you do not own the pears by natural right; you do not have a natural right to the pears you have taken in this way, according to Locke.

Locke’s theory of property is an important element of his political philosophy. It constitutes is the most important reason to create a civil society. Whereas Hobbes thinks of civil society as, above all else, the protector of our security, Locke thinks of civil society as, above all else, the protector of our property.