John Locke
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The starting point of Locke's thinking is what he calls the state of nature. This is how he believes that people lived in the earliest times. In the state of nature, according to Locke, people lived in "perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions as they think fit ... without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man" (p. 9). Locke talks about "America," meaning the Native American Indians, as an example of how people lived in the state of nature. Today we would say that the Indians had much more complex societies than Locke realized, and that ancient people had more complex societies also. What Locke is really talking about, however, is not just how people lived in the distant past, or in remote places in his own time. He is talking about how people would live if they did not have a society. Even in the state of nature, however, people must be able to feed themselves somehow, and Locke accepts the biblical idea that the world was created for humans. "The earth and all that is therein is given to men for the support and comfort of their beings" (p. 19). It does not belong to any particular people, however, but to everyone. This is what Locke calls a "common." But food cannot be eaten in common. We can share it before we eat, but if I eat some food, you can't also eat it. Locke has an answer for this. He says that "yet, being given for the use of men, there must of necessity be a means to appropriate them some way or ot
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limit] that property (p. 21).
What Locke calls the law of nature here is really a sort of religious principle. According to Locke, "nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy" (p. 21). If I were to gather or hunt more food than I could eat, the food that I didn't eat would spoil or rot. In Locke's view, I have no right to gather up more food than I could eat, even though I used my labor to get it, if I allow it to simply go to waste.
In the state of nature, then, people had a right to use their labor to obtain enough food to eat, and to make clothing for themselves, and houses to live in. However, no one could become wealthy in this way, because anything beyond what they could actually use would be wasted, and they had no natural right to create waste.
Locke suggests that this began to change with the invention of money. Some things, such as lumps of metal or diamonds, do not go to waste if they are not used right away, as for example food does. Moreover, some lumps of metal -- such as gold -- are regarded by people as beautiful or at least desireable in some way. People like to have them for their own sake. Not only do they like to have them, but they regard them as valuable. If I have a lump of gold, an
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Approximate Word count = 1886
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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