That’s the sort of thing that we would expect him to say. Locke began the First Treatise by writing that “Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation that ‘tis hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it” (§1). I said that I thought Locke could only have said that slavery is justified if he could show that slaves had forfeited their rights, much as he thought criminals do. Or maybe the loser’s efforts don’t contribute to the final product, in which case the loser has simply lost the labor expended on it. It might be that such competitions are ruled out by Locke’s theory: a loser who labors has a claim to a share, so maybe there can’t be a winner take all competition.īut maybe they both agree that it’s winner take all, in which case the loser gave up the claim. Suppose Able and Baker were not working together to hunt the boar but were rather in a winner-take-all competition.

We talked about how this might work in a cooperative enterprise but never got back to his original question about a competitive one. Peter started us off by asking questions about how the labor theory would apply in cases where there is more than one person laboring.

Score a point for interdisciplinary work! Competition Green explained how appreciating these points, especially the one about money, led him to see that Locke was more interested in questions about equality, and less interested in the labor theory of property, than he had previously appreciated. In particular, it enables Locke to explain why inequality in wealth is compatible with his restrictions on the acquisition of natural resources: it can’t spoil and it does not take away from anyone else’s access to natural resources. So it is an excellent way of storing and exchanging value.

Money, like gold, cannot be consumed or used to produce anything else. Production comes with the introduction of property rights, as people are willing to improve natural resources if, but only if, they have rights to the product of their labor. We start with a simple story about using the things that God has left to humanity in common. Brown noted that one thing interesting about Locke to an economist was his tacit distinction between three kinds of goods: We discussed Locke’s chapter on property, putting more emphasis on the end of the chapter and less on the labor theory of property rights than is usual.

Under locke