Foundations of Environmental Ethics Page: 65
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LAND USE ATTITUDES 65
what earlier period of political turmoil in English history. Locke's Two
Treatises was written and published near the end of a century characterized
by major changes in the British political system. The power of the king and
the aristocracy was beginning to give way to the kind of party system that
still dominates British and American politics today. Locke had been a theo-
logical student at Oxford during Cromwell's dictatorship. During the last
part of the reign of Charles II and all of the reign of James II he was in
exile in France and Holland, returning to England during the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 with the new rulers, William and Mary. Locke wrote his
Two Treatises for political purposes. He hoped to justify the revolution
settlement and also to help create a political climate favorable to the politi-
cal party of his late friend, Lord Shaftesbury. This party was an alliance of
a few liberal aristocrats with the discontented rich of London and other
major towns.
A new theory of property ownership was important to these people.
Previously, property rights had been tied to inheritance and to the divine
rights of kings. A person owned property because his father and his
father's father had owned it and also because at some point, at least the-
oretically, the property had been given to his family by the king. The king's
right to bestow property was based on certain agreements made between
God and Adam, and later Noah, in which He gave the entire earth to the
children of God. The king, as a descendant of Adam and as God's desig-
nated agent, served more or less as an executor for the estate. Since the
doctrine of the divine rights of the king was being rescinded by act of
Parliament, a new theory of property was needed to justify private
ownership.
The divine rights of kings had been defended by Robert Filmer in a
book titled Patriarcha, published posthumously in 1680.22 The first treatise
is a direct and all-out attack on Filmer's arguments. The second treatise
develops Locke's own position. It is this position which I am primarily
concerned with here.
In the second treatise, Locke bases property rights on the labor of the
individual:
Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet,
every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but
himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are
properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath
provided, and left in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it some-
thing that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.23
This theory of property served Locke's friends well since it made their
property rights completely independent of all outside interest. According
to Locke, property rights are established without reference to kings, gov-
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Hargrove, Eugene C., 1944-. Foundations of Environmental Ethics, book, 1989; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc52172/m1/77/: accessed May 7, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Center For Environmental Philosophy.