I will argue that Locke's defence of private property is plausible as far as it goes, but that it cannot support the extensive property rights which Locke is seeking to justify. However, Locke's thesis can form the basis of a much more successful defence of private property, and I will be looking in particular at Nozick's development of Locke's ideas in the latter part of my essay.
It will be useful to start by looking at what Locke hoped to achieve in formulating his theory of private property, and especially setting it in the context of his polemic against Filmer, which occupies much of the First Treatise. I will then outline what I understand to be Locke's principal arguments for private property rights, as given in chapter five of the Second Treatise. The latter part of my essay will constitute an assessment of Locke's arguments and will highlight a number of limitations to his theory. I will then briefly look at how Locke's theory can be taken as a basis for a compelling account of how we can come to have a right to private property, concentrating in the main on Nozick's discussion of Locke.
In the First Treatise, Locke's discussion of property constitutes an attack on Filmer's position, and I would argue that Locke's criticisms of Filmer are a sound basis on which he builds his own theory of property. Locke seeks to refute Filmer's thesis that supports the Divine Right of Kings and is grounded on the belief that at the creation God gave the world to Adam as sole proprietor. Locke also takes the Bible as his justification, but reaches the contrary conclusion that Adam was representative of all mankind and that therefore God gave the earth to mankind in general:
"Whatever God gave by the words of this Grant, 1Gen. 28 it was not to Adam in particular, exclusive of all other Men: whatever Dominion he had thereby, it was not a Private Dominion, but a Dominion in common with the rest of Mankind."
I would argue that Locke's reading of Scripture is more accurate, and it overcomes the problem encountered by Filmer's view that, since absolute monarchy is justified, the monarch has absolute rights over his subjects and therefore people are viewed as being the property of the monarch. Locke wants to argue that only material objects can come under the term 'property' and people cannot be owned in the same way. Locke also argues that God still owns the earth and only gave it to men to use and steward:
"Yet in respect of God the Maker of Heaven and Earth, who is sole Lord and Proprietor of the whole World, Man's Propriety in the Creatures is nothing but that Liberty to use them."
We are tenants, rather than outright owners, therefore we are not at liberty to do just as we please. There is an apparent inconsistency between what Locke says in the First Treatise and what he says in his fuller discussion of property in the Second Treatise. In the First Treatise he maintains that users do not become owners, and so mankind in general does not own the earth, but in the Second Treatise he wants to maintain that use is inextricably linked with ownership. However, I think that a distinction of scope governing the word 'ownership' could release Locke from this contradiction. Even though God owns the whole earth (and always will) it is possible to have ownership within ownership. So when I own, say, an apple tree, this means that I have certain rights over it including the right to stop other people from using it. But this is consistent with God owning the whole earth. I own my own body, but in another important sense God owns it. These two can be reconciled because of the special nature of God. To clarify, when Locke talks about ownership in the Second Treatise, it seems to me that he is restricting his discussion to the context of human relationships.
The other important issue that is raised in Locke's attack on Filmer is his point that the relationship between political power and the ownership of property is purely contingent. He asks:
"How will it appear, that Property in Land gives a Man Power over the Life of another? Or how will the Possession even of the whole Earth, give any one a Soveraign Arbitrary Authority over the Person of Men?"
The crux of Locke's argument is that consent is essential to political authority, but not to property ownership (the importance of the idea of consent with relation to property is discussed below). This distinction could only be made if Locke was correct in arguing that the relationship between the two is not a logically necessary one, and I would argue that he is right in maintaining the contingent nature of the relationship.
Locke's main arguments in defence of private property rights are to be found in the Second Treatise, where he develops a number of arguments grounded on his assertion in the First Treatise that the earth was given by God to mankind in general. The reason why Locke argues that we must be able to have rights to private property, and why he tries to show how we can legitimately acquire property, is grounded on his claim that we have a natural right to survive. It is obvious that in order to survive we must consume things, and it seems equally obvious that in consuming something you make it your own (since no-one else is at liberty to use, say, an apple once you have eaten it). So the conclusion of the survival argument is that there must be a justified way of coming to own something. Locke also aims to show that we must be able to acquire property from the common stock without the express consent of everyone else (since, as the number of people grew it would obviously become impractical and impossible to gain everyone's consent before consuming any food):
"But I shall endeavour to shew, how Men might come to have a property in several parts of that which God gave to Mankind in common, and that without any express Compact of all the Commoners."
Having established the importance of defending private property rights, Locke is now concerned with examining the process by which we could come to legitimately own something. There are three main arguments that he uses to do this, namely the labour-mixing argument (often known as the argument from self-ownership); the value-added argument; and the argument from moral desert. I will summarise each of these in turn, and then devote the latter part of my essay to an appraisal of Locke's arguments and a consideration of Nozick's response to them.The labour-mixing argument holds that, since you own yourself, you also own your labour and when you labour on something you link your labour inextricably to that object. It is necessary to write in an assumption which Locke makes but does not explicitly state, that in inextricably mixing something you own with something you do not own, you come to own that which you did not previously own. The conclusion, then, is that if we labour on something, it becomes ours:
"Whatsoever then he removes out of the State the Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property."
This argument is subject to two provisos:
(1) That there be enough and as good left for others, and
(2) That what you take does not spoil ("As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils; so much he may by his labour fix a Property in. Whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others." )
The value-added argument maintains that working on something makes it more valuable and if you increase something's value then you're entitled to it. Therefore if you labour on something you are entitled to it. This argument is also subject to the provisos above, as is the argument from moral desert, which holds that there is no good reason for thinking that people who have worked on the land should not keep it (because the only reason why we would want what they had got would be if we were too lazy to do the same work ourselves, which is not a legitimate reason), so they are entitled to it.
So, does Locke succeed in defending private property? There are a number of points and criticisms that I should like to raise, before looking at Nozick's treatment of the issue. Firstly, the survival argument does not justify the acquisition of land as it is possible for everyone to survive by growing food on common land, without any individuals owning the land. So this argument only justifies the right to have the things necessary to survive (such as food and clothing) and cannot be used to justify the appropriation of land. However, I do think that the argument is successful in showing how we can legitimately own the things necessary for our survival. It can only be challenged by denying that we have a natural right to survive which includes the right to the means of survival (ie arguing that the right to survive is a right on non-interference, and therefore does not automatically ensure the right to be kept alive). However, this is not a convincing criticism and we can grant Locke the limited success of his survival argument.
Secondly, the labour-mixing argument assumes that people will only be motivated to work on a piece of land if they individually own it. But it seems perfectly possible for there to exist a scheme of social cooperation whereby the land is owned in common and everyone does their fair share of work on it. Locke also assumes that if something you own is inextricably mixed with something you do not own, you come to own the other thing, rather than lose what you owned in the first place. Locke seems to answer this criticism by arguing that labour is a special case because it adds value to the land. But his value-added argument is not without its faults. The third criticism I would make of Locke is that he does not show how making the land more valuable entitles us to ownership of the land itself, and not just the extra value we have created. I will return to this criticism in my discussion of Nozick. The strength of the value-added argument is that it does seems as though land can be used more profitably and efficiently if it is divided up and owned by different people, because individuals would not have to get the consent of everyone else in order to be able to experiment with producing different goods, and so on. My fourth point is that the argument from moral desert does not seem to supply anything more than the value-added argument, and so is somewhat redundant.
Nozick raises some further criticisms of Locke and puts forward his own theory, which I would argue is more persuasive than Locke's, whilst starting from the same basis. The problem with Locke's labour-mixing argument is that he does not specify what constitutes mixing our labour with something. Nozick gives the example of someone who puts a fence round a piece of land and suggests that, "building a fence around a territory presumably would make one the owner of only the fence (and the land immediately beneath it)." Another example that Nozick gives is that of someone throwing some tomato juice in the sea to show that it is not intuitively obvious that mixing what I own with what I do not own is a way of coming to own something new rather than losing what I owned already. In the tomato juice example we would surely want to say that we would lose our juice, rather than gain ownership of the sea. However, as we saw earlier, Locke makes a special claim about labour in that it augments the value of the land.
It is worth looking briefly at Nozick's treatment of Locke's two provisos. Nozick rightly points out that we do not need the non-waste condition if the sufficiency condition is met. However, there seems to be a problem with the sufficiency proviso in that, when it is not met, we seem to get a regression back to the first person to appropriate. Nozick calls this the 'zipping-back argument', but he makes the important point that it does not work against the weaker Lockean requirement, which he wishes to hold, because even if someone is in a position where they cannot appropriate legitimately, they may not be in a worse position than before because they may be able to continue using land as before. So Nozick's theory resists the criticisms that can be made of Locke.
Nozick replaces Locke's idea that the earth is given by God for all men to have in common, with the atheological view that in the state of nature nothing is owned by anyone. He preserves Locke's two main views that you do not need everyone's consent to legitimately appropriate and that you are allowed the fruits of your labour, subject to the 'enough and as good' proviso being satisfied. To pick up on the first point, the idea of consent may have produced a problem for Nozick who, as a libertarian holds that you ought not to restrict someone else's liberty without their consent. However, Nozick makes it clear that it is not the actual restriction of liberty that is important here, but rather whether or not appropriation worsens someone else's situation. The 'enough and as good' proviso (or 'sufficiency condition') ensures that no-one else is put in a worse net situation after appropriation than the one they were in before appropriation took place.
To conclude, I hope I have established an argument for the limited success of Locke's theory. The best that Locke's argument, as he forms it, can do is justify the right to use land profitably for as long as you want, on the grounds that, by adding your labour to it, you are making it more valuable and are therefore entitled to the extra value that you have produced. However, Locke's theory provides a basis on which to build a more adequate justification of private property rights. The principles contained in the Second Treatise can be expanded upon to provide a plausible defence of private property, along the lines of Robert Nozick, maintaining that the important issue is whether or not you worsen the situation of others by appropriating. My own approach would be to preserve the theological basis of Locke's argument, that God gave the earth to mankind in common, but to incorporate Nozick's refinements of Locke's theory in order to overcome the problems faced by Locke.
© Anne Witton 1997. No part of this article may be copied without my permission.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ashcraft, R Locke's Two Treatises of Government Allen and Unwin, 1987
Locke, J (ed Laslett, P) Two Treatises On Government Cambridge University Press, 1960
Nozick, R Anarchy, State and Utopia Blackwell, 1974
Sreenivasan, G The Limits of Lockean Rights in Property Oxford University Press, 1995
Holy Bible, New International Version Hodder and Stoughton, 1991
