John Locke and acquiring property ownership
there are 2 options to write on. i would like for the paper to be on option number 1. i will link a docx file with the 2 prompts. The correct prompt will be prompt #1, which has to with John Locke and acquisition of property.
David de Bruijn
Write a 4 to 5 page paper (double-spaced; 12 pt.; standard margins) on one of the two arguments below. Note that whether or not you agree with the argument sketched in the prompt, you should consider how someone would respond to the object. (In other words: if you agree with the argument in the prompt, you must defend it from some objection).
(1) Locke:
In a central passage of his Second Treatise of Government (§27), John Locke develops a theory of how a person can come to legitimately acquire property:
[Everyone] has a property in his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself. ‘The labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly his. Whenever someone, by his labor, changes a thing from its natural state [to make it more useful] he ‘mixes his labor’ with it. He ‘thereby makes it his property’, for ‘it hath, by this labour, something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men’.
In response, critics of Locke have argued that this passage cannot explain how labor leads to ownership. After all, consider mixing a drink with a large body of water: surely this does not lead to ownership of all the water. So why would “mixing labor” lead to property ownership?
In this paper consider this objection to Locke. Are the critics right? How might Locke defend himself?
(2) Nozick/Rawls:
From Nozick’s perspective, the Wilt Chamberlain example provides a powerful argument against Rawls. For Nozick, no one can claim injustice if only Chamberlain benefits from the voluntary sale of tickets: not those individuals who buy the tickets; nor those individuals who are not involved and do not benefit from the sale. Accordingly, for Nozick the core flaw in Rawls’s thinking is that individuals have the right to do with their property whatever they choose to.
Is Nozick right? How might Rawls defend himself against the idea that no individual could complain about the way only Chamberlain benefits from the sale of tickets, and no one else? (It may be helpful here to consider what Rawls shares in common with Rousseau’s view of property).
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