Comment: ‘Reason teaches all mankind who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty and possessions’ (Locke) (1992)
This is John Locke‘s definition of the law of nature in §6 of the Second Treatise of Government (1689, dated 1690), which opens “reason, which is that law”. Before any government exists, reason itself is the moral law, and it forbids harm. From it Locke derives natural equality, natural rights and limited government.
Unpacking the statement
- Liberty, not licence: the state of nature is one of “perfect freedom” and of equality, “wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal” (§4). Yet it is “not a state of licence” (§6).
- Reason as access: the law is not innate; anyone “who will but consult” reason can read it. It is therefore universal, binding strangers with no common ruler.
- Equal and independent: nobody is born subject to another, because all are the workmanship of one Maker and “his property”. Jeremy Waldron (God, Locke, and Equality, 2002) argues this theological premise does more work than secular liberals admit.
- Four protected goods: the duty not to harm life, health, liberty and possessions yields matching natural rights. A positive duty to preserve mankind applies where one’s own survival is not at stake.
- Executive power: each person may punish breaches, a “very strange doctrine”, Locke concedes (§9).
Why government is still needed
The law is clear but men are partial judges in their own cases. The state of nature lacks a settled, known law, an indifferent judge and a power to enforce (§§124–126). People surrender only the private executive power, never the rights, and government is a trust limited to the “common good” (§131). A peaceful but “inconvenient” state of nature warrants a limited state. Thomas Hobbes‘s war of all against all (Leviathan, 1651, ch. 13) had warranted an absolute one.
Critiques
- Hobbesian realism: if passion outweighs reason, a law that binds only those who choose to consult it governs no one.
- Class: C. B. Macpherson (The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 1962) reads “possessions” as the real key. The equal individual is the owner of his own capacities, and the argument ends by defending unlimited accumulation.
- Patriarchy: Locke defeated Robert Filmer‘s Patriarcha on paternal power. But, as Carole Pateman (The Sexual Contract, 1988) shows, he gave the wife’s subjection “a foundation in nature”.
- Colonialism: Barbara Arneil and James Tully show that Locke’s rules of appropriation made Amerindian land “vacant”. Universal reason had a selective reach.
- Positivism: Jeremy Bentham called natural rights “nonsense upon stilts”.
Legacy
The sentence passed into the “unalienable rights” of the US Declaration of Independence (1776). Article 1 of the UDHR (1948) declares all “born free and equal” and “endowed with reason and conscience”. India’s Part III guarantees equality (Art. 14) and life and liberty (Art. 21). In K. S. Puttaswamy (2017) the plurality held that life and liberty are not “bounties conferred by the State”: natural rights the Constitution recognises rather than creates.
Conclusion
Property, gender and empire narrowed Locke’s universal reason. Yet every critique appeals to the premise that all are equal and independent. The sentence has outlived its author’s exclusions because its own logic condemns them, and it remains the charter of human rights.