29 September 2026 · Ethics and the State

Locke on Natural Freedom, Equality, and Property

John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government around 1689, during a period when English politics had just gone through a revolution over exactly this question: where does a ruler's power actually come from. His direct target was Sir Robert Filmer, a royalist writer whose book Patriarcha argued that kings rule by the same right Adam had over his children, passed down through history as the one true line of inheritance. The First Treatise is Locke's point by point rebuttal of that claim. The Second Treatise is where he builds his own answer from the ground up: what government is actually for, and why people would ever agree to set one up.

Taking apart Adam's inheritance

In chapters three and four of the First Treatise, Locke goes after Filmer's claim that God made Adam monarch of the world at the moment of creation, before Adam even had any children to rule over. Locke points out the simple problem: Filmer wants Adam to be a governor in principle from the instant he existed, while admitting there was no one for him to govern yet. Locke calls this being a king in habit but not in act, which he says in plain terms just means having no actual title at all.

He then turns to Filmer's second argument, that God directly granted Adam lordship over the earth in the book of Genesis, when God gives Adam dominion over the fish, birds, and other creatures. Locke reads the text closely and makes two points. First, that grant is about rule over animals and nature, not over other people, so it proves Adam had property in the natural world, not monarchy over mankind. Second, the same blessing in Genesis is given in the plural, to Adam and Eve together, and a nearly identical blessing is later given to Noah and all of his sons jointly after the flood. If the wording made Adam sole ruler of the world, Locke argues, the same wording would make Noah's sons joint rulers too, which Filmer's own argument cannot really allow. Locke closes this section by noting that even if private ownership of the entire earth really did pass to one man, nothing in that would explain how owning land turns into the right to rule over other people's lives, since property and political authority are simply different things.

The state of nature

Book two opens with Locke defining political power on his own terms, carefully separating it from the power a father has over children, a master over a servant, or a husband over a wife, which Filmer's theory tends to blur together. Political power, for Locke, is the right to make laws, backed by real penalties, for the sake of protecting property and the public good, and to use the community's force to carry those laws out.

To explain where that power could legitimately come from, Locke starts, like Hobbes, with a state of nature: the condition people are in before any government exists. But Locke's version looks very different from Hobbes's. It is a state of perfect freedom, where people can act and dispose of their own possessions as they see fit, within the bounds of a law of nature, without needing anyone's permission. It is also a state of equality, since everyone shares the same basic nature and capacities, and no one has a natural claim to rule over anyone else unless God has specifically appointed them to. Locke stresses that this freedom is not lawlessness. Reason itself, which he treats as the law of nature, teaches that since everyone is equal and independent, no one ought to harm another person's life, health, liberty, or possessions. Everyone also has standing to punish those who break that law, since without some way of enforcing it, the law of nature would mean nothing. Locke is careful to say this is a limited power to punish in proportion to the offense, not an unlimited one.

The state of war is not the same as the state of nature

Locke devotes chapter three to a distinction he thinks Hobbes collapsed. The state of nature is people living together under reason, with no common authority to judge between them, but still basically at peace. The state of war is something else: one person showing a clear, settled intention to destroy or enslave another. Trying to get someone into one's absolute power without their consent, Locke argues, is itself evidence of a design against their life, because nobody wants that kind of power over another person except to use it however they like. So an attempt to enslave someone is already an act of war, whether or not any blow has been struck.

The key difference between the two states is the presence of a judge. In the state of nature, if someone commits a real act of aggression and there is no common authority to appeal to, the state of war continues until the aggressor offers real peace. Locke's famous line here is that where there is no common judge on earth, the only remedy left is an appeal to heaven. This is exactly the gap, he says, that pushes people to leave the state of nature and form political societies, not because the state of nature is secretly a state of war, as Hobbes thought, but because without a settled judge, any dispute that does turn violent has no way of being resolved.

Why slavery cannot be based on consent

Chapter four is short but important. Locke argues that no one can voluntarily enslave themselves, because nobody has absolute power over their own life to begin with, and a person cannot hand over a power they do not possess. The only situation Locke allows as a kind of lawful slavery is a captive who, through some act deserving death, has forfeited their own life to a lawful conqueror. In that narrow case, the conqueror may delay taking that forfeited life and use the person's labor instead, which Locke treats as doing the captive no further wrong, since the alternative was death. This is really just the state of war continued in a different form, lasting only as long as no actual agreement for limited service and obedience is reached between the two sides, at which point Locke says the relationship becomes something other than slavery.

Mixing labor with nature to create property

Chapter five, on property, is probably the most famous argument in the whole reading. Locke starts from the idea, shared by scripture and by reason, that God gave the earth to all people in common. His problem is explaining how anyone could ever rightfully come to own a particular piece of it without first getting the consent of every other person alive, which would be impossible in practice.

His answer: every person owns their own body and therefore their own labor, and whenever someone takes something out of the common state nature left it in and mixes their labor with it, picking fruit, hunting an animal, tilling soil, they attach something that is unquestionably their own to it, and in doing so make it their property. He gives the example of someone gathering acorns or apples: nobody doubts those nuts and fruit belong to the gatherer once picked, even without asking permission from every other person on earth, because requiring universal consent for every act of subsistence would have left humanity to starve. The same logic, he says, extends from gathering to farming: whoever encloses, tills, and improves a plot of land makes that labor, and therefore that land, their own.

Locke does attach a limit to this right, sometimes called the enough and as good condition: a person may rightfully claim as much as they can put to good use, and no more, as long as there remains enough of similarly good land or resources left in common for others. In the early world, with land plentiful and people few, this limit was barely a constraint at all, since one person's claim rarely crowded out anyone else, and Locke points to how much better cultivated land in a place like England supports people compared to vast but unfarmed stretches of America, as evidence that labor, not land alone, is what creates nearly all of the real value people live on.

He then explains how the invention of money changes the picture. Left to crops, meat, and other perishable goods, nobody has much reason to accumulate far beyond their own needs, since anything left to rot is simply wasted labor. But once people agree, by mutual and voluntary consent, to treat something durable and scarce like gold or silver as valuable in exchange, they can trade away perishable surplus for something that does not spoil, and so build up far larger holdings than they could ever personally use. Locke treats this as the real origin of the unequal distribution of property that exists once societies settle land and adopt money, and he is careful to present it as something people brought about themselves, through agreement, rather than as a change forced on them by any government.

Why this still matters

What makes this material worth reading closely, especially next to Hobbes, is how differently the same starting move, imagining people without government, can be made to work. Hobbes uses the state of nature to justify handing almost unlimited power to a sovereign, because he thinks the alternative is constant war. Locke uses the same device to argue the opposite: that people already have real rights, including a right to own property, before government ever exists, and that government is created specifically to protect those existing rights, which means a government that violates them has broken the actual point of its own authority. That argument, built directly against Filmer's case for absolute monarchy by inheritance, became one of the most directly influential texts behind later ideas of natural rights, limited government, and consent as the basis of legitimate rule.

Source: John Locke, First Treatise of Government (circa 1689), Chapter 3 (Of Adam's Title to Sovereignty by Creation) and Chapter 4 (Of Adam's Title to Sovereignty by Donation, Genesis 1:28), and Second Treatise of Government, Chapter 1 through Chapter 5 (Of Property).