LOCKE

Question 1

What is Locke’s property argument?

Answer 1

1. Property exist only as a right among social relations (not absolute).
2. People come to own property by mixing their labour with it.

Question 2

What does property consist of?

Answer 2

1. Life
2. Liberty
3. Estate

Question 3

What is Locke’s authorization formula?

Answer 3

1. Government is legitimised by the public’s unwritten consent (express/tacit) and trust.

Question 4

What is Locke’s account of government?

Answer 4

1. Limited
2. Divided into judicial, executive and legislative elements
3. Protects private property
4. Makes impartial legal system

Question 5

What is Locke’s description of the state of nature?

Answer 5

1. Peaceful on the whole
2. People adhere to reason and morality
3. People aim for self-preservation
4. Tendency for slipping into state of war (absolutist domination) because of lack of impartiality.
5. No superior power over individuals

Question 6

What are the problems with Locke’s description of political obligation?

Answer 6

To have a political obligation is to have a moral duty to obey the laws of one’s country or state.

Locke does agree with Hobbes, of course, in deriving obligations to obey the law from the consent of the governed. In developing his argument, however, he reveals three problems that have bedeviled social contract theory. One problem has to do with the nature of the contract: is it historical or hypothetical? If the former, then the problem is to show that most people truly have entered into such a contract. If the contract is meant to be a device that illustrates how people would have given their consent, on the other hand, then the difficulty is that a hypothetical contract “is no contract at all” (Dworkin, 1977, p. 151). The second problem has to do with the way Hobbes and Locke rely on tacit consent. If only express or explicit statements of agreement or commitment count as genuine consent, then it appears that relatively few people have consented to obey the laws of their country; but if tacit or implied consent is allowed, the concept of consent may be stretched too far. Hobbes does this when he counts submission to a conqueror as consent, but Locke also runs this risk when he states, in §119 of the Second Treatise, that the “very being of anyone within the territories” of a government amounts to tacit consent. Finally, it is not clear that consent is really the key to political obligation in these theories. The upshot of Hobbes’s theory seems to be that we have an obligation to obey anyone who can maintain order, and in Locke’s it seems that there are some things to which we cannot consent. In particular, we cannot consent to place ourselves under an absolute ruler, for doing so would defeat the very purposes for which we enter the social contract — to protect our lives, liberty, and property (Pitkin 1965).