John Locke

1
John Locke

• Second Treatise on Government

2
Lockes Second Treatise

• I. Liberalism
• II. Social Contract Theory
• III. Biographical/Historical Background

3
II. Liberalism

• Ascendance of liberalism around the world today
• Much of the remaining reading in the course
  centers around this idea

4
II. Liberalism

• Definition
• In United States, liberalism means
• Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Ted Kennedy

5
II. Liberalism

• Historically, liberalism is built on 2 key ideas
• Limited Government
• It was the political solution to the struggle for
  religious toleration
• An Attempt to keep politics out of religion. The
  state should not worry about the state of mens
  souls
• Why is this a good idea?

6
II. Liberalism

• A key component of limited government is
• Rights
• Theoretical underpinning to the notion of
  religious toleration is that individuals have
  rights against the state
• We each have a right not to be interfered with by
  the government or by other people
• These rights are natural they accrue to us
  simply by the fact that we are human beings
• A prisoner example

7
Suppose you are a District Attorney in a
community that is composed of easily recognizable
majority/minority communities. A member of the
majority community has been killed and witnesses
have reliably identified a member of the minority
community as the perpetrator, but the police have
been unable to find the exact person The
majority community is screaming for vengeance and
on the verge of rioting. We know that in the
course of the riot, at least 10 people from the
minority population will be killed in mob
violence. As the DA you suggest the following
course of action to the mayor
8

• In order to avert the riot and save lives, you
  take a member of the minority community at
  random, accuse that person of the crime, and
  stage a very public arrest/execution
• As the mayor, what do you do?

9
II. Liberalism

• Rights mean that no matter how good the
  consequences of a particular action may be, these
  consequences cannot override individual rights
• Why rights?
• Each individual possesses dignity
• Each of us is priceless
• Roots are in the rise of Christianity
• Secularized form in lieu of soul premise
  treat people as ends, not as means to an end
• Every human being has infinite weight, so cant
  use any calculation to justify hurting some for
  the greater good

10
II. Liberalism

• Side bar
• Suppose superior beings from Planet Twylo descend
  to earth and tell us they have a food shortage
• To alleviate this shortfall, they plan on
  harvesting human beings
• Would we accept the same arguments from them that
  we offer to justify eating animals or otherwise
  using animals as means to an end??
• Just food for thought we wont pursue it now

11
II. Liberalism

• So one component of liberalism is limited
  government
• The second component is capitalism
• By capitalism, we mean the idea that as long as a
  transaction has no negative diseconomies and is
  mutually advantageous, the transaction is
  permissible
• A deal made between two consenting parties and no
  one is getting hurt, the state should not get
  involved in the transaction

12
II. Liberalism

• The market is a private place where people
  voluntarily dispose of their own property
• We each have a natural right to property
• The overall idea justifying these economic rights
  is roughly parallel to our political rights in
  that the state should not interfere with people
  doing what they want to do with their property

13
II. Liberalism

• Note, the argument itself need not be limited
  exclusively to property and thus exclusively the
  purview of the (political) right wing
• E.g., sexual freedom, drug freedom arguments
  could work equally well
• Since the world is embracing variants of this
  view today, an examination of its historical
  evolution and philosophical premises is both
  warranted and educational

14
II. Liberalism

• The key idea linking to the two strains is the
  primacy of the individual
• That is, the individual is the basis of power
  political, economic, social.
• Political power does not come from divine right
  or the rule of the stronger, but the will of the
  people

15
II. Liberalism

• 2 Implications
• If individuals are basis, then we cant treat
  others as means to an end each is an end unto
  itself
• We are all individuals with separate and equally
  valuable lives (valuable at least to us)

16
II. Liberalism

• Good political society is one which could have
  emerged from unanimous agreement by these
  individuals
• Locke is not trying to describe an actual
  historical situation hes not doing anthropology
• Nonetheless, the description of human nature in
  this prepolitical situation needs to be accurate
  otherwise we can reject the conclusions by
  rejecting the premises

17
II. Liberalism

• Question we need to face at root of political
  philosophy concerns the necessity of the state
• That is, if the state did not exist, would it be
  necessary to invent it?
• In other words, is anarchy a viable option for
  organizing human society?
• Note lots of other animal species are social,
  but theyre all anarchic

18
II. Liberalism

• This question carries with it important
  implications for understanding the society in
  which we live in that if political philosophy
  could not address and satisfactorily rebut
  anarchist arguments, the state loses much or
  indeed all of its intellectual support

19
III. Contractarianism

• What do we mean by contractarianism?
• Key idea
• Contractarian theory posits a theory of justice
  which holds that our political and social
  institutions are just to the extent to which they
  could have been the object of a hypothetical
  agreement among affected persons
• This is what we mean when we say that they sign
  or agree to a social contract

20
III. Contractarianism

• Basic Structure of Contractarian Argument
• Motivation Thesis
• An account of the emotional/psychological factors
  of the persons
• Environment Thesis
• Description of the pertinent features of the
  environment in which the people are obliged to
  interact

21
III. Contractarianism

• State of Nature (Non-Cooperative Outcome)
• An account of the non-cooperative interaction of
  the persons so motivated and so situated
• Laws of Nature
• Practical principles, the application of which
  marks each contractor as rational in coming to an
  agreement on terms of cooperation
• Social Contract
• The terms of the social and political cooperation
  on which the people would agree

22
III. Contractarianism

• So on to Lockes Second Treatise
• Reminders
• Remember, the state of nature the conditions of
  prepolitical man need not be read so much as a
  factual account as a logical construct
• Its part of the argument in that we are
  postulating prepolitical relations and people and
  then trying to discover what type of government
  would they agree to

23
III. Contractarianism

• Well address a number of questions
• What would cause these people to give up their
  anarchic relations and form a state?
• What would that state look like?
• Remember, for the contractarian tradition, the
  just state is one that could have arisen by
  mutual agreement
• We can choose an institution and ask ourselves
  would it have been the object of mutual consent
  of dissociated individuals?

24
III. Contractarianism

• For example, slavery would not be chosen by
  mutual consent, so it was an unjust institution

25
III. Lockes Second Treatise

• With the preliminary work behind us, we can dive
  into the Second Treatise