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Locke (1632-1704)
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Bio
John Locke is certainly one of the most influential thinkers in human
rights philosophy. He was an English Enlightenment philosopher whose
notions of government with the consent of the governed and the natural
rights of man (life, liberty, and property) had an enormous influence on
colonial Americans, allowing them to justify revolution and shape a new
government. Locke was one of the ‘British Empiricists’, which also
included David Hume and George Berkeley.
His most influential work is his Two Treatises of Government. The First
Treatise describes the current condition of the civil government, while the
Second Treatise (by far the most cited) describes Locke's justification for
government and his ideals for its operation. In the Second Treatise, Locke
advocated that all men are equal and that each should be permitted to act
as long as he harms no other. Using these foundations, he continued to
make a classic justification for private property by declaring that the
natural world is the common property of all men, but that any individual
could appropriate some bit of it for himself by "mixing" his labor with the
natural resources:
"Though the earth, and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet
every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to
but himself. The labor of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say,
are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature
hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it
something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property." (sec. 27)
This notion of property rights would not be complete, however, without a
well-known "Lockean proviso," in which Locke stated that the right to take
goods from the natural commons is limited by the consideration that
"there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet
unprovided could use" (sec. 33). In other words, one should not simply
take whatever one wanted, but must also take the common good into
consideration. But key to this proviso is the idea of "improvement." That is,
if we take raw resources, which might belong to all of us, we are still
justified if our use of it improves it (especially in the productive sense):
"the inhabitants think themselves beholden to him, who, by his industry
on neglected, and consequently waste land, has increased the stock of
corn, which they wanted" (sec. 36).
(Excerpts adapted and portrait taken from the Wikipedia article on Locke. Click here
for complete article.)
Works
Two Treatises of Government
