Week 4- Post 1: Property Rights

 Source: Justice course on EdX by HarvardX

Lecture 7: John Locke- Property Rights

• Locke is a powerful ally of the libertarian
• he believes that tehre are certain fundamental individual rights that no government can override them.
• these certain fundamental rights include a natural right to life, liberty, and property. 
• furthermore he argues that the right to property is not just the creation of government or law, its a natural rght attached to individuals as human beings, even before government comes into the scene, even before parliaments and legislatures enact laws to define rights/enforce them.
• in order to think about what it means to ahve aniatural right, we have to imagine the way things are before government and law, and thats what he means by the state of nature
• the state of nature is the state of liberty. human beings are free and equal beings. there is no natural hierarchy. no one was born to be a king or queen, we are free and equal in the state of nature.
• yet he makes the point that there is a differecne between the state of liberty and the state of license
• the reason is that even in the state of nature, there is a kind of law (not the kind legislators enact), its the law of nature. it constrains what we can do even though we're free and in the state of nature
• the only constraint given by the law of nature si that the rights we have (the natural rights we have) we cant give up, nor take them from somebody else. udner the law of nature im not free to take somebdoy else's life, liberty, or property. nor am i free to take my own life, liberty, or property. even though im free, im not free to violate the law of nature.
• not free to take my own life, or give myself to someone else, or to give someone else absolute power over me
• where does this constraint come from? (locke tells us these 2 answers)
• they're not, strictly speaking, yours, because after all you are a creature of god and he has a bigger property right in us.
• "For men, being all the workmanship of one omipotent, and infinitely wise maker, they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's pleasure"
• for those that don't believe in god: if we propoerly reflect on what it means to be free, we will be lead to the conclusion that freedom cant just be doing whatever we want.
• "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it which obliges everyone: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and indepenent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or posessions"
• these lead to a puzzlling feature of  Locke's account of rights.
• the idea that our natural rights are inalienable. (its nto for use to alienate them or to give them up to trade them away or to sell them)
• so in one sense, an unalienable right, a non transferable right, makes something i own less fully mine (because i can use it for my self but cant trade it away. ex. airline tickets are nontransferable)
• the idea that rights are unalienable seems to be what distances locke from the libertarians. Locke is distanced from the libertarian idea that we hold a property right in ourselves and can do whatever we want, because lcoek says that if you take natural rights seriously then you will be lead to the idea that there are certain constraints on what we can do with out natural rights