This makes property more or less useless in Hobbes’s state of nature. Hobbes and Locke agree that individuals have a right to property in the state of nature, but Hobbes denies that individuals have any duty to respect the property of others. The difference with Hobbes is clearest in Locke’s argument about property. The source of this duty, he says, is natural law. Locke’s claim is that individuals have a duty to respect the rights of others, even in the state of nature. This is why the state of nature was a state of war. They had no duty to respect the rights of others. Hobbes had argued that freedom and equality, and the priority of individual right, meant that individuals in the state of nature could pursue their survival and interest without limitation. What is Locke’s position? In Chapter Two of the Second Treatise of Government, he asserts that men in the state of nature are free and equal, and at liberty to do as they wish-but only “within the bounds of the law of nature.” This limitation separates Locke from Hobbes. Either the individual’s right, or his duty to moral law, must come first. Natural law and natural right may be combined, but if they are, one must take precedence over the other. But what is the basis of Locke’s theory? Is it natural law or Hobbesian natural right? The Founding Fathers, in the Declaration of Independence, speak of both natural rights and natural laws. It was Locke’s formula for limited government, more than Hobbes’s, that inspired the American Founding Fathers. He goes even farther than Hobbes in arguing that government must respect the rights of individuals. He champions the social contract and government by consent. Locke speaks of a state of nature where men are free, equal, and independent. This is the basic recipe for the political philosophy of liberalism-Locke’s philosophy. The sole purpose of the contract is to safeguard the rights of each citizen. Society is not natural to man, but is the product of a “social contract,” a contract to which each separate individual must consent. Individuals create societies and governments to escape this condition. According to Hobbes, one consequence of this is that the state of nature is a “war of all against all”: human beings are naturally at war with one another. The priority of individual right reflects our separateness, our lack of moral ties to one another. This right is the fundamental moral fact, rather than any duty individuals have to a law or to each other. The moral logic is something like this: nature has made individuals independent nature has left each individual to fend for himself nature must therefore have granted each person a right to fend for himself. Is Locke a follower of Hobbes, basing his theory on right rather than natural law? What difference does it make? One characteristic of a rights theory is that it takes man to be by nature a solitary and independent creature, as in Hobbes’s “state of nature.” In Hobbes’s state of nature, men are free and independent, having a right to pursue their own self-interest, and no duties to one another. Thomas Hobbes created a new approach when he based morality not on duty but on right, each individual’s right to preserve himself, to pursue his own good-essentially, to do as he wishes. Morality is fundamentally about duty, the duty each individual has to abide by the natural law. Natural law theories hold that human beings are subject to a moral law. This is probably the greatest controversy in Locke interpretation today. They say that Locke’s political philosophy is not based on natural law at all, but instead on natural rights, like the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Some argue that this is a misguided question. What is Locke’s interpretation? What version of natural law supports liberal politics? But there are many different interpretations of the natural law, from the Ciceronian to the Thomistic to the Grotian. In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke’s most important political work, he uses natural law to ground his philosophy. This is the philosophy on which the American Constitution and all Western political systems today are based. John Locke is one of the founders of “liberal” political philosophy, the philosophy of individual rights and limited government. JOHN LOCKE and the NATURAL LAW and NATURAL RIGHTS TRADITION
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