Locke teaches that morality needs a lawgiver and that the lawgiver is God. If one obeys or breaks God's law then pleasure and pain, respectively, will be experienced in this world and in the next life. Locke believes that ethics can be made a deductive and demonstrable science like mathematics. He contended that his political theory was underpinned by self-evident truths of a demonstrable science of ethics. He says that morality is scientific, rational, provable, and a deductive certainty. Unfortunately, he never gave the proof for this deductive ethics. Nowhere does he endeavor to deduce such a systematic code.

          Locke explains that natural rights exist in the state of nature before the introduction of civil government. He interpreted natural law as a claim to innate, indefeasible rights inherent in each individual. These natural rights are attributes of the individual person. He says that natural law implies natural rights and correlative duties. Locke explains that all individuals are endowed by their creator with a right to life, liberty, and estate. Men are all the workmanship of one omnipotent and omniscient Maker. Because men are God's property to be morally used by God for his purposes, it is wrong to damage God's property. It follows that Locke's ultimate validation of rights is based on religion. All human beings have natural rights inherent in their created nature and have moral obligations to respect the rights of others.

          The purpose of natural rights is to sanction the sovereignty of the choices of each individual person. Individual rights imply a sphere where one is free from force. Locke understood that only individuals think, judge, will, and act. He knew that reason is an attribute of the individual and that each individual has free will control of his reason. Locke also realized that men are metaphysically equal, not in their talents, but in the fact that a man's life is a gift from God and that he has right to use his life as he chooses. Rights are possessed by all men by virtue of being human, and there is no right to violate rights.

          Locke recognized that the natural right to freedom is necessary for the possibility of moral action. It follows that the purpose of natural rights is to protect individual autonomy and accountability. He saw that it is illegitimate to use coercion against a man who does not first undertake the use of force. It follows that in the state of nature all men equally have the legitimate right to punish transgressors. It is proper to use force in self-defense against unjust violence. In other words, victims can enforce the law of nature in the state of nature. When the law of nature is violated the result is a state of war in which an unjust aggressor has violated someone's rights.

          Locke explains that the defect of the state of nature is that it has no organization to give effect to the rules of right. He says that there are deficiencies in a system that must depend upon self-execution of the natural law. It follows that men would seek an institutional device that would make more secure the rights they already possess. The political power of such an institutional device would be derived from the transfer of individuals to enforce the law of nature. Locke says that civil power can have no right except as derived from the individual right of each man to protect himself and his property. He explains that the individual does not surrender his substantive natural rights but only his right of executing the law of nature. Men are said to leave the state of nature when they voluntarily give their natural right to self-defense to a common public authority. The power of the government is nothing except the natural power of each person resigned into the hands of the community. This is a better way of protecting natural rights than the self-help to which each person is naturally entitled. Locke states that any number of persons can make a compact to leave the state of nature. He explains that the individual is driven into political society by inconveniences of his natural conditions rather than by nature itself. Men are motivated to form a civil society by their desire to avoid the annoyances of the state of nature and not by the fear of destruction. A government might better guard natural justice and avoid the inconveniences that disorder men's properties in the state of nature.

          Civil society originates when, for the better administration of the law, people agree to delegate that function. In order to acquire mutual protection, men place the retaliatory use of force under established, settled, objective, known law interpreted by an impartial judge. In addition, the combined force of individuals helps to overcome the strength of rights violators. Men form into societies in order to have the united strength of the entire society to secure and defend their properties and to have standard rules by which everyone may know what is properly his. Power is needed to back and support these standard rules, to give them due execution, and to punish the crimes committed against them. Of course, the power is limited by the purposes for which they were made.

          The law should be received and permitted by common consent to be the standard of right and wrong and the common measure to settle all controversies. In order to have objective administration of the law, society requires a known and impartial judge with authority to determine all differences according to the established law. Locke explains that it is unreasonable for men to be judges in their own cases because self-interest will be apt to make them partial to themselves and their friends.

          Locke's social contract theory sees the establishment of a government as a two-step process. The original compact by which men incorporate into society is one to form a civil society. Once this society is established, the people must then proceed to set up a government. Civil society is derived from the consent of its members. No man, without his consent, can properly be subjected to the political authority of another. Through the social contract, men transfer to the newly created community the power to execute the natural law which is the power they held in the state of nature. The people are the parties to the social compact with each person agreeing with all the others to form one society. Locke states that unanimity is necessary to form the social compact to make an individual a member of civil society. Consent to join a community is binding and cannot be withdrawn. Anyone who refuses to join may go his own way and provide for himself elsewhere.

          Locke says that by consenting to the agreement to form a political body, each man obligates himself to acquiesce to majority rule. Once an individual has agreed to the original contract he is bound thereafter to accept the decisions of the majority. Why is it that in the original contract unanimous consent be required and in subsequent acts of government only majority approval is necessary? Can't the majority occasionally exploit its greater power to violate individual rights?

          The principle of majority rule does not have the immediate and obvious validity that Locke thought it had. Perhaps he considered the establishment of a government as less important than the original agreement that makes a civil society. Of course, he did argue that an individual's rights are less severely threatened by majority rule than by monarchist absolutism. He wanted political society to be constructed so that it would be unable to oppress its citizens. Locke attributes no special wisdom to the majority and seems to base his argument on expediency and the law of the greater force. In a democracy the majority will have the greater force and will prevail.

          Locke furthers the fiction of a social contract with the additional fictions of unanimous consent and tacit consent. He explains that if anyone accepts the benefits of a government he has tacitly consented to the conditions the government imposes on him. Locke understood that most people live under a government that they never explicitly authorized to make decisions for them but have given their tacit consent. He says that a government is legitimate because its power derived from the people who gave their consent at its formation and that any person who is born within a particular government and accepts the protection supplied by it gives tacit consent as to the government's legitimacy.

          Locke realizes that the main powers of a government ought to be separated because it may be too great a temptation for the same individuals who have the power of making laws to also have the power to execute them. He explains that legislative power is superior to executive power and that the power of the government must be limited by law. Limited rule is justified under a government that gains its authority from the people and holds its power in trust for their benefit. Being responsible to the people, the government's power is limited by moral law and by constitutional traditions and conventions. Locke states that the legislature should be a representative body subject to periodic re-election. He says that federative power, as a member of the international community, should be in the same hands as executive power which achieves peace, order, and security of property. According to Locke, the protection of property is the principal business of the government because there is a natural right to property that antedates the establishment of civil society.

          The survival of each person requires that he be able to use material objects to sustain his life. Because God wants each individual person to live and prosper, he instituted the right to property as a corollary to the right to life. Locke's supposition is that God gave the earth and its fruits to all men in common. It follows that in the state of nature property was common in that every person had the right to gain subsistence from whatever nature provided. Originally, nobody had a private domain exclusive of the rest of mankind. God not only gave the world to men in common, he also gave them reason to make use of it. The problem that Locke faced was to explain how commonly available resources can become legitimate private property to the exclusion of the right of other men. Locke employs the principle of individuation in the world to explain how collective property can become individual private property. He says that a person transfers his individuality into matter through his own labor. This individuates and decommunalizes property.

          Private property does not and cannot come about by universal consent. According to Locke, natural man enjoys property in his own person which is the foundation of all other property. This concept of self-ownership is the cornerstone of individualism and personal freedom. Every man owns not only his own person but also his own labor. It follows that people can legitimately turn common property into private property by mixing their labor with it thereby using and improving it. Because individuals mixed their bodies in the form of their labor with unowned (free) resources, they created something new that was their property. What a person does when he applies his labor to a natural object is to endow it with certain attributes belonging to one's own mode of existence. The Lockean view is that the quality of the owner's very personality is embodied in his property. The right to private property arises because by labor man can extend his own personality into the objects created. This natural right to private property exists even in the primitive society of the state of nature. The right to private property precedes civil law and is grounded in natural moral law.

          Nature itself severely limits property in the state of nature. The natural fact of spoilage drastically limits property in the state of nature and acts as a type of rule to maintain a fair distribution of goods in the state of nature. This leads Locke to proclaim that spoilage limits the right of clear and exclusive acquisition in the state of nature. Private property is thus limited to as much as anyone can make use of before it spoils. Men should not allow things to go to waste in the state of nature. We could say that nature has put both a moral and a practical limit on the amount of property that anyone can accumulate. The limit is not defined by the amount of what is owned but only by the consequences of the ownership. As long as nothing spoils in one's possession, it makes no difference how much property he owns. Property ownership is thus qualified to as much as anyone can make use of to any advantages of life before it spoils. This is known as the "Lockean proviso."

          Locke believed that greater productivity of some would raise the general standard of living. He says that a person is wrong to think that a man deprives others by enclosing land and cultivating it for his own use. It follows that all his neighbors benefit because cultivated land is more productive. The poor frequently gain as an unintended consequence of the acquisitive actions of others. Because the productive use of resources by one person tends to enrich everyone, we could say that men's interests are not in conflict and that wealth is not a static quantity – one man's gain is also everyone else's gain.

          Locke recognized that spoilage is a necessary, applicable, and effective means toward fair distribution only in the case of a scarcity of perishable goods. The invention of money renders the accumulation of property essentially harmless and avoids the disadvantages inherent in the original natural limits to property ownership in the state of nature. The invention of money, which does not spoil, made it desirable and reasonable for a person to produce more than was required for his family's immediate needs (i.e., more than they could consume before it spoiled). Men could exchange money for perishable and other goods. There would be no limit to the private acquisition of wealth if held in the form of money. Without money, a person had no incentive to expand his holdings and produce a surplus.

          Money came into existence through a natural mutual consent process in the state of nature. Through this process the most durable and easily tradable commodity ultimately becomes acceptable as a money commodity. Locke's theory of the origins of social institutions provided the framework for his consent theory of money. Money allows the more talented, rational, and industrious to create more, to accumulate the products of their labor, and to increase their wealth relative to others. According to Locke, money makes possible a benevolent form of property accumulation that enriches some without making others poorer.

          Locke thought that labor was the major creator of economic value but that the market or relative value or the price of an object depended upon its usefulness and scarcity rather than the amount of labor embodied in it. In Locke's system one earned property through his own efforts, but the value of that property was determined by the market. It follows that Locke's writings implied no theory of labor exploitation. There is no evidence that Locke believed there would be a relationship between the amount of labor that goes into a product and its market price.

          Locke explains that money so transformed the conditions of the state of nature that it was no longer desirable for men to live together without greater protection for their possessions. Lockean man therefore quits the state of nature and forms into civil society for the protection of his life, liberty, and estate. Locke sees the economy as logically prior to government and explains that government arises to remedy inconveniences that occur in the state of nature. The purposes of the government are to protect property, to keep order, and to provide a peaceful environment in which each person can freely pursue his own ends. Locke says that some government regulation of trade is necessary to protect and foster commercial interests. Here he is talking about procedural rather than substantive regulation. Permissible regulation for Locke includes contract enforcement, dispute adjudication, and the registration of deeds and titles. As an advocate of free markets, he is against the regulation of interest rates on both economic and moral grounds Locke's reflections on the interest rate show that he is strongly against fixing the rate of interest by law.
 

Tyranny and Toleration

          At the end of the Second Treatise Locke speaks about the nature of illegitimate governments and the conditions under which rebellion is legitimate and appropriate. He says that an illegitimate civil government violates the national rights of its citizens and puts itself into a state of war with them. Whenever legislation attempts to take away or destroy people's property or reduces them to slavery the government puts itself into a state of war with the people in such cases Locke defended the moral right of revolution to resist tyranny.

          In his writings on toleration, Locke teaches that religious persecution by the state is wrong and that the use of force to get people to hold certain beliefs is illegitimate. He says that the persecution of religious diversity generates turmoil and that religion should be treated as a purely private and individual matter. Churches are said to be voluntary private organizations with equal legitimacy before the law. Boundaries separating church and state should be fixed and immovable. A secular state provides for peace, order, and safety. Public force can protect life and property but it cannot persuade one's conscience. Eternal salvation cannot be forwarded through coercive measures. Government force must be separated from the mind – ideas cannot be forced.

          Locke says that because the mind is fallible we ought to tolerate one another's opinions. Religion is a matter of faith and faith is a matter of inner conviction. The purpose of religion is to help people attain salvation in the hereafter. He explains that "social justice" is not a concern of the church but rather is the business of the civil society only. Locke contends that religion is entirely outside the jurisdiction of the state but he does also say that atheists and Catholics are not to be tolerated! The exception to his support of religious toleration with regard to atheists is based on the idea that the existence of the state depends on a contract, and the obligation of that contract (like all moral law), depends upon the will of God. Locke explains that promises, covenants, and oaths, which constitute the bounds of civil society, can have no hold on atheists. He is also concerned that members of the Catholic Church are potentially dangerous and may pose an additional threat to the social order.