Kim- Blog Post 1

  

In chapter V, Locke writes how a person comes to have property through labor. He reasons on the basis that every man has property to his own person and the “labor of his body”. By putting in time and energy into taking something out of its “state in nature” a person excludes the common right other people had on the thing in nature and makes the thing his own property. He argues that labor puts a “distinction between them[property] and common[things in nature]”. 

Locke claims that God has given men the world “to make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience”. He seems to be claiming that it is a natural right for people to use the land to gain greater utility. He explains the idea of added value of labor in which 10 acres of land that is farmed provides 10 times more utility than 100 acres of land that is not farmed. As an example, he gives the quality of living of Native Americans. He describes a chief of a “large and fruitful territory”  as “clad worse than a day-laborer in England”. He claims so that not farming the land would be wasteful, putting in the idea of responsibility and duty to work the land.

Is it right to call people that live in a hunter-gathering society wasteful? Locke’s argument makes sense from an economic standpoint. If people labored the land as he claims, there is probably no doubt that GDP may go up. However, the cost in doing so may be the taking away of culture and the identity of who the people are. Standard of living in terms of physical aspects may increase, but a different form of labor may be destroying the very aspects that make life worth living. 

I have questions as to the legitimacy of labor being the dominant factor in determining property. In modern history, we look at the treatment of Native Americans when the colonists first came over as inhumane and wrong. The fact that we think that there was wrong done on Native Americans seems to suggest that labor may not be the only factor that determines property or that this idea does not cross over into nations where the concept of labor being the foundation of property is not a part of the society.

Comments

Paul Hurley said…
An interesting direction in which to take the "wastefulness" argument. I wonder, however, whether Locke would say that the nomadic tribes in North America were being wasteful. If, in his view, they never develop a property in the land, how can they claim a wasteful property in land? Still, you are clearly on to something important here.
January 28, 2021 at 1:49 PM
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