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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 12: THE BRITISH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ARGUMENT JOHN LOCKE’S Two Treatises of Government was published in England in 1690 with the avowed motive of justifying the Whig rebellion and revolution of 1688, which had put William of Orange on the English throne.

Locke wished to defend the new regime by showing that rebellion by Williamites against King James had been legitimate, but that rebellion by Jacobites against King William in 1689 and after would be illegitimate. Thus Locke poses once more the Hobbesian questions, In what does the legitimate authority of a sovereign consist? and, When, if ever, is rebellion justified? Like Hobbes, Locke begins from a portrait of the state of nature.

But the Lockean state of nature is not in fact presocial, nor premoral. Men in it live in families, in a settled social order. They have and enjoy property. They make and acknowledge claims upon one another. But their life has defects.

Every rational creature is aware of the law of nature; but the bias of interest and lack of attention cause men to apply it more rigorously in the case of others than of themselves, while crimes that are committed may well go unpunished for lack of a proper authority. Disputes between men have no impartial arbiter to decide them, and every dispute will therefore tend toward a state of war between the parties.

All these considerations make desirable the handing over of authority to a civil power in whom trust can be reposed. So the contract. The aim of the contract is to create an authority adequate to safeguard our natural rights, and for Locke the most important of rights is that of property. Locke begins from a position not too dissimilar from that of Overton. A man’s person and his property are so closely linked that his natural right to liberty must extend from one to the other.

To what property am I entitled? To that which my labor has created. A man may acquire as much property as his labor enables him to make use of. We must remember at this point that what is being spoken of is a man’s rights in a state of nature, prior to the laws of civil society. Locke supposes a state of affairs where land is unlimited and transfer of property not yet instituted. Can such a state of things exist?