Locke On Distribution

Any Lockeian scholar would be lying if they told you that any topic in the secondary literature on the Two Treatises of Government was more famous (or infamousÉdepending on who you talk to), widely debated, or caused more controversy than the old Oxford gradÕs theory of property. Some are shouting from the left that Locke argues a rights claim for subsistence for all individuals, that it may even support MarxÕs theory of exploitation. Yelling back are those from the right who claim that he formulates a moral justification for capitalist appropriation of property. Then of course there are those somewhere in between who are telling everyone to shut up because

Locke wrote the damn thing over three hundred years ago in the political context of 17th century England and to derive these kinds of modern political presumptions is ludicrous. They all make fine cases for their respective theories. This humble treatise, however, will merely essay to provide a fairly objective explanation of John LockeÕs disputed offering to the political and economic understanding of property and how it relates to poverty and the distribution of wealth. It will then continue to examine the two most preeminent, contemporary champions of welfarist and entitlement theories in that of John Rawls and Robert Nozick respectively, focusing specifically on what they, standing on LockeÕs shoulders, offer as an acceptable system of economic justice.

Locke begins by stating that each person has a natural right to preserve his or her life. "God has given the Earth to all people in common for their sustenance." (Locke 310). In the state of nature, each person owns everything in nature equally with everyone else. However, some things in nature must be

"appropriated" in order for one to derive any sustaining benefit from them. As an example, Locke says one must take possession of acorns or apples in order to eat them and, so, derive sustenance from them. But one must do something positive in order to appropriate the acorns or apples and, thus, make them one's own. A person possesses his or her own body and the actions of that body.

One owns oneself. By virtue of exercising the labor of one's body in conjunction with the machinations of nature on land held in common by mankind, one removes a thing from the state of nature and makes it one's own. Locke says that one's labors puts a ...

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...tion."

Welfarist ethics are not without their own difficulties, however. Many reject such theories because they do not value rights except to the extent that they improve the welfare of individuals. Others find the interpersonal comparisons of utility required by welfarist theories to be not only difficult to make, as most supporters of welfarism would admit, but also meaningless.

The rejection of an exclusively welfarist ethic does not necessarily imply acceptance of an ethic that is exclusively entitlement-based. Conceivably, a just society could consider both the welfare of individuals and entitlements in determining a fair system of distribution. Optimal taxation analysis should be of interest to those who believe in a mixed ethic, since it provides insight into the tax structure inspired by any theory of distributive justice that is at least partly concerned with individual welfare. Ultimately it is the duty of society to see how the redistributive features of various progressive rate structures comport with a wide variety of welfarist ethics, ranging from utilitarianism to the Rawlsian leximin, in order to discover the best structure for the society in which we live.