John locke believed that people
Home / Scientists & Inventors / John locke believed that people
In Locke’s theory, divine law and natural law are consistent and can overlap in content, but they are not coextensive. Whereas natural law emphasized duties, natural rights normally emphasized privileges or claims to which an individual was entitled. Some recent discussions have called into question the very idea of self-ownership (Rasmussen 2008 and Phillips 2013), denying that this concept is necessary in order to capture the inviolability of the human person.
There is a further question whether self-ownership affords a basis for thinking about property in external objects other than my body?
From this natural state of freedom and independence, Locke stresses individual consent as the mechanism by which political societies are created and individuals join those societies. The literature on Locke’s theory of consent tends to focus on how Locke does or does not successfully answer the following objection: few people have actually consented to their governments so no, or almost no, governments are actually legitimate.
Yolton (1958), Colman (1883), Ashcraft (1987), Grant (1987), Simmons (1992), Tuckness (1999), Israelson (2013), Rossiter (2016), Connolly (2019), and others all argue that there is nothing strictly inconsistent in Locke’s admission in The Reasonableness of Christianity. According to G.A. Cohen (1995) a person owns himself when he has all the control over his own body that a master would have over him were he a slave.
As we have seen, the Lockean critique of this sort of approach was always that urgency of material need left no time for social consent. and eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
And then one tells a story about why it would be sensible for individuals to appropriate land and other resources for their personal use and about the conditions under which such appropriations would be justified.
His central claims are that government should not use force to try to bring people to the true religion and that religious societies are voluntary organizations that have no right to use coercive power over their own members or those outside their group. doi:10.1017S0018246X17000450
So when it is said that ‘people in general’ are better off under private property arrangements, we have to ask ‘Which people? When someone says ‘X is mine’ and X is an action, we see interesting questions about intentionality, free-will, and responsibility, which philosophers will want to pursue.
Everyone? Hume, by contrast, was interested in the possibility that the relevant settlement might emerge as conventions from ordinary human interactions rather than as impositions by an acknowledged figure in authority (Hume 1978 [1739], p. Simply by walking along the highways of a country a person gives tacit consent to the government and agrees to obey it while living in its territory.
Historical Overview
There are extensive discussions of property in the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Marx, and Mill. doi:10.2307/1953604