Natural Law
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Natural law, as Locke saw it, was something above and beyond laws made by Man. "He is quite confident that civil laws do not necessarily oblige the individual conscience, but he maintains there is a law of God which forbids 'disturbance or dissolution of governments'" (Laslett, 1999, p. 35). It is interesting to note that this sort of "natural" law's premises were founded on the belief in the superior power of God, and that God, literally as well as figuratively, created governments that rule, and laws that regulated that rule. It may be obvious, then, that America's Pledge of Allegiance, refers to "one nation under God"- which seems a direct descendant of the idea of natural laws as developed in the seventeenth century, a hundred years before the idea of an American democracy became fact. If, as one presumes from the basic definition of "natural laws", every nation -- in order to be recognized as an entity -- must be a god-fearing nation, one whose basic laws and governments are beholden upward to God, and downward to its citizens. It is also fairly obvious that God's laws cannot be repealed, or changed. Man's laws can be. We usually think of law as a rule -- a command or prohibition -- which should be obeyed, but can be disobeyed. This is, of course, the sort of civil law Locke refers to. God's law -- natural law -- is not something that can easily be disobeyed. There is a difference between legal disobedience (we certainly see it in environmentalists and consc
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does not seem to fall under Locke's Natural Laws.
Laws of nature are symbolized by property. Property implies certain rights.
It is because they can be symbolized as property, something a man can conceive of as distinguishable from himself though a part of himself, that a man's attributes, such as his freedom, his equality, his power to execute the law of nature, can become the subject of his consent, the subject of any negotiation with his fellows (Laslett, 1999, p. 103).
A hundred or so years later, we have the phrase "with the consent of the governed" appearing in our Constitution. It is clear, however, that this consent comes from the fruits of man's labor -- his property, and not so much from some divine intervention.
In looking beyond Locke's initial theory, what does man's liberty and feeling of equality really stem from? If a man has no property (given that a factory worker's labor is not his property, but that of the factory owner) what rational and natural rights does such a man possess?
Locke explains his theory of property as God-given: "God gave the Worldato the use of the Industrious and Rational" (Laslett, p. 104). To settle any conflicts among these Industrious people, God, so Locke explains,
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Approximate Word count = 1257
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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