Locke's Argument on Property

 In Chapter V of Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Locke argues that “before the desire of having more than man needed had altered the intrinsic value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the life of man…the same plenty was still left to those who would use the same industry” (Section 37). Prior to the creation of money and the agreement to give it value, Locke believed there to have been a time where people would only take what they “needed.” However, this means there was a point where human greed did not exist. I do not view this as plausible because people have different definitions of need, and even when people were simply acquiring what they could to survive, concepts of jealousy and desire still existed and pushed them to believe they “needed” their neighbor’s land or cattle. Furthermore, as written in Hobbes’ Leviathan, “passions that incline men to peace” include “things that are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them” (78). People chose peace in order to achieve comfortability, and this desire resulted in wanting more than what was necessary for survival even without the invention of money. 

In Locke’s example, “the hare that any one is hunting, is thought his who pursues her during the chase…whoever has employed so much labour about any of that kind, as to find and pursue her, has thereby removed her from the state of nature, wherein she was common, and hath begun a property” (Section 29). A question I had while reading this section was what would happen if two people were laboring for the same thing. Specifically in this scenario, if two people agreed to hunt for the hare, one by chasing the hare and cornering it and the other person ultimately killing it, who would the hare belong to? Would it be split proportionally based on how much labor was put into it? How would they determine who put in more labor? Furthermore, what role does luck or timing (simply being in the right place at the right time) play in determining a person’s property? If one person sowed seeds into the ground, but another person happened to walk by when the seeds grew into a plant producing fruit, would the first person be entitled to the fruit because they sowed the original seeds or would the second person be because they made the effort of removing the fruit from the plant?