John Locke Vs Positive Law

While every person in this world lives under some state which is composed of a mixture of positive and negative laws enforced by a government, people rarely reflect on the morality of the laws they are forced to follow. Take for example the positive law, a law that tell citizens what they must do, of paying taxes. While law abiding citizens pay a certain amount of taxes every year, many have tried to claim that they have the right to refuse to pay taxes because the government spending of public funds doesn’t align with their personal morals. These people never win this argument. John Locke was a philosopher born in the 17th century and spent much of his career writing and thought about the morality of laws and rights. He believed that every

While Locke used religious thinking to make this claim, the same argument can be claimed without religious backing. (Barry,2000,32.) So as ideology secularised the religious justification of rights naturally shifted to the idea of positive law, that there needs to be some law that promotes ‘good’ behaviour of the society. One of the ideologies that Locke rejected was utilitarianism, the idea that state needed just to promote overall happiness because thinking just for the greater good violated the rights of induvial. However, this paper will use the same logic to argue that the state cannot be obligated to satisfy every individual idea of morality and, in turn, liberty. This is based on the same idea that there is no universal sense of freedom, and the only role of the state is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. This paper will prove that rights are morally based, but the morality of rights cannot justify the transcending law because by doing so the rights of others would be

Beginning his argument with the logic that every person is equal, he wrote his book Two Treaties of Government “This equality of men by Nature, … makes it the foundation of that obligation to mutual love amongst men on which he builds the duties they owe one another” (Locke,1988,107.) Locke is merely describing that there will be a sense among people that they have an obligation to follow a certain set of moral codes. Proving that the laws, which are created by people, will always reflect the moral obligation humans have to one another. At this point, it has been proven that laws will take into account the morality of people, so referring to the tax example one can start to chip away at why one must conform to the positive law. So far, in a context of the case of taxation, the tax law of a given state has been morally backed, but the next thing that must be proven is how the morals relate to rights and how rights are