Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights

Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Locke on Slavery and Inalienable RightsAuthor(s): Jennifer WelchmanSource: Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Mar., 1995), pp. 67-81Published by: Canadian Journal of PhilosophyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40231899 .

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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 67 Volume 25, Number 1, March 1995, pp. 67 - 81

Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights

JENNIFER WELCHMAN

University of Maryland, Baltimore County Baltimore, MD 21228-5398 USA

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't.1

So begins the first of Locke's Two Treatises of Government. But this

Englishman, gentleman, and self-styled 'lover of liberty' was not himself above pleading for slavery when it suited him. That plea has been an embarrassment to his admirers ever since. Locke attempted to legitimize slavery by portraying it as a form of punishment for crimes committed where no central political authority or justice system exists. If a victim of an assault is entitled to take his attacker's life in self-defense, Locke reasoned, he must also be entitled to take his attacker's liberty. Thus

slavery is permissible as a form of penal servitude. But problems arise when we apply this defense of slavery to its seventeenth-century incar- nations. Few if any of the African slaves serving on New World plantations had ever been guilty of criminal assaults on their European owners. Their children certainly had not. How could Locke have viewed the enslavement of Africans as justified? What are we to make of Locke's defense of an institution so apparently inconsistent with his own doctrine of natural human rights?

1 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslett, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988), 141



68 Jennifer Welchman

The mainstream response has been that these questions are of merely historical interest and that consequently, it is for historians, rather than philosophers, to try to answer them. How as a matter of fact a philosopher comes to hold the views he or she does or to advance the arguments he or she advances is entirely irrelevant to their critical evaluation or interest. Thus the Encyclopedia of Philosophy dismisses Locke's defense of slavery thus:

Curiously, Locke justified slavery on the grounds that those who became slaves were originally in a state of wrongful war with those who conquered them, and, being captive, forfeited their freedom. Apart from being bad history, this argument ignores the rights of the children of slaves. Locke's inconsistency here may merci-

fully be passed over.2

Even those less mercifully quick to pass over Locke's 'inconsistency' have seen little of philosophical interest in its origins, which are typically attributed to gaps in Locke's education or socialization. The suggestion is that if only Locke had grown up in a society that recognized Africans as human beings to whom doctrines of human rights applied or if only he had been informed about New World slavery, he would never have considered, let alone offered, a defense.3

Comforting as it would be to believe that Locke's inconsistency arose simply from false beliefs, this solution can not be supported by the facts. We have no reason to suppose Locke was unable to recognize Africans as fellow human beings. His few specific remarks about Africans suggest he

2 James Gordon Clapp, 'John Locke/ Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan [1967] 1972) 499

3 For an overview of recent interpretations of Locke's defense of slavery, see Wayne Glausser, 'Three Approaches to Locke and the Slave Trade/ Journal of the History of Ideas 51 (1990) 99-216. For a range of interpretations of Locke's defense as an error of philosophical judgment arising from either racist or bourgeois socialization see Richard Popkin, 'Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism/ in Craig Walton and John P. Alton, eds., Philosophy and the Civilizing Arts (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press 1974) 126-65; Martin Seliger, 'Locke, Liberalism, and Nationalism/ in John W. Yolton, ed., John Locke: Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969) 19-33; C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1962); Ruth W. Grant, John Locke's Liberalism

(Chicago: Chicago University Press 1987). For a slightly different view, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press 1960) who argues that Locke's defense does at least work as a defense of some forms of classical slavery.



Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights 69

was well aware of their humanity.4 And as we shall see, there is little reason to suppose Locke was unaware of the nature of New World slavery.

Yet on occasion the very facts that would seem to convict Locke of gross moral and/or philosophical turpitude have been made the basis of ingenious reconstructions of Locke's defense of slavery - most recently by James Fair.5 Fair argues that since Locke must have known that the African slave-trade was not justifiable as punishment for criminal offenses, and since he must also have known that to defend contemporary slavery was to commit himself to reconciling a political theory based on the premise that all men are equal with an institution based on the premise that some men are not, Locke cannot have meant his defense of slavery to apply to contemporary events. Farr suggests:

If we wish to get a purchase on Locke's intentions, we must divorce his theory of

slavery from the context of Afro- American slavery and remarry it to the English political context of the 1680s. Local targets were in Locke's sights.6

His local targets, according Farr, were those divine right monarchists who claimed the Norman Conquest established the divine rights of the

English monarchy over the English people. The argument ran like this: neither party to a military contest can conquer the other without divine favor. Conquest is therefore a sign of divine appointment over the

conquered. Having been divinely appointed, the conqueror's authority may not be impeached or even questioned by the subjects God has put into his hands. Thus by his conquest of England, William of Normandy received a divine appointment to rule his English subjects, an appointment the succeeding monarchs have inherited.

4 See 'A Letter on Toleration/ in The Works of John Locke, corrected ed., vol. 6 (Aalen: Scienta Verlag [1823] 1963), 54 and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P.H.

Nidditch, ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1975), 607. Moreover, Locke never speaks of

slaves, classical or contemporary, as being less than human or incapable of distinctively human activities, including judgment, warfare, and religion. See, respectively, Locke's

Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul, Arthur W. Wainwright, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1987) esp. 201-2 on slaves' erroneous judgments about their status

after conversion to Christianity; Two Treatises of Government, 237, describing New

World slaves as capable of combat; and 'A Letter on Toleration' on religion (cf . The

Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina/ n. 10 below.

5 James Farr, 'So Vile and Miserable an Estate: The Problem of Slavery in Locke's

Political Thought' Political Theory 14 (1986) 263-89. See also John Dunn, The Political

Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1969) for a similar

sort of interpretation.

6 James Farr, 'So Vile and Miserable an Estate/ 281




Fair sees Locke's definition and defense of slavery as the opening move of a strategy designed to turn this monarchist argument on its head. Locke first defines the condition of servitude to an absolute ruler as 'slavery/ and then concedes that conquest may entitle a conqueror to enslave the vanquished. But Locke does not concede that every conqueror has the right to the life or liberties of those he has conquered. As Locke interprets the Law of Nature, a conqueror's rights are a function of the justice of his cause.

To see why, we must recall, as Locke puts it: 'what State all men are naturally in, and that is, a State of perfect Freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of Nature'7 - a law whose provisions are evident to anyone possessed of reason. Reason informs us, e.g., that our natural rights to order our own actions, persons, and possessions are limited by the rights of others to do the same. And reason informs us that the social cooperation essential to human flourishing depends on a mutual recog- nition of Natural Law. Thus to rob another is not only to break the Law of Nature but also to break faith with the community whose existence depends on that Law. By making war on the interests or person of one, the criminal makes war on the entire human community, entitling his victims to reply in what ever manner is necessary to defend their lives, liberty, and community. If taking his liberty is necessary for this purpose, his enslavement is justified.

It is self-defense, according to Locke, whether of one's own life or one's community, that entitles one to claim the life or liberty of an unjust opponent. Even so, the just conqueror's rights are limited. First, just conquest, or conquest in self-defense, does not entitle the conqueror to claim his subordinates' lives and liberties. They do not become his subjects just because he led them in battle. Second, just conquest does not entitle the conqueror to claim the lives and liberties of his enemy's subjects, if any, if those subjects did not authorize their leader's criminal acts. The Conqueror may demand compensation from his enemy's coun- trymen, but even this he can claim only so long as their survival is not threatened. Third, just conquest does not entitle the conqueror to claim the lives or liberties of his enemy's household, including spouse, children, and other non-combatant dependents. Their rights to life and liberty survive the loss of the enemy's rights, just as they would survive his natural death. Again the conqueror may legitimately claim compen-

7 Locke, Two Treatises, 269




sation from his enemy's estate, but his right will be limited by the

family's right of survival. If we apply Locke's interpretation of the rights of conquest to Wil-

liam's conquest of England, it follows that if William's conquest was just it entitled him to claim the life and liberty of Harold himself, his Knights, ministers, or other confederates who voluntarily joined Harold's cause. But William's conquest could not entitle him to claim the lives or liberties of the English people, the contents of the English Treasury, nor even the full contents of Harold's estate. Thus, William's victory gave him no divine appointment over the English to which subsequent monarchs could succeed. Farr argues that it was this conclusion alone that Locke's defense of slavery was meant to support. 'Those were the stakes for Locke,' Farr concludes. '... For this fight, the shores of Africa and America were out of sight and out of mind.'

There is, I think, something to be said for this interpretation. Locke

certainly did put his discussions of slavery and just war to the uses Farr indicates. But in the main, Fair's argument is a solution to which there is no problem. There is no inconsistency between Locke's political philosophy and the institution of chattel slavery. And a brief review of some

highlights of Locke's career will soon reveal how utterly incredible it is that there would be.

II

Much of Locke's philosophical writing was done in the 1680s after events in England interrupted the political and scientific activities he had hitherto conducted under the roof of his patron, the first Earl of Shaftes-

bury .9 It was through Shaftesbury that Locke first became involved with the English Triangular Trade.'10 In 1668, Charles the Second granted the

territory of Carolina to eight 'Lords Proprietors' who would in return

promote colonization and the establishment of a market for English goods. Chief among the Lords Proprietors was Shaftesbury, who per- suaded Locke to serve both as the Board's, and his own, unofficial

8 Farr, 'So Vile and Miserable an Estate/ 285

9 Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, went under a variety of titles

during his lifetime. For the sake of convenience, he will be referred to as 'Shaftes-

bury' throughout.

10 In what follows I am drawing on standard sources; e.g., Maurice Cranston, John Locke: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984) and Henry Richard Fox

Bourne, The Life of John Locke (Aalen: Scientia Verlag [1876] 1969).



72 Jennifer Welchtnan

secretary. Among his other administrative duties, Locke was asked to draft a constitution for the new colony.11 Though probably not the sole author, Locke was evidently very largely responsible for the version adopted by the Lords in 1669.12 This constitution established a colony governed by an aristocracy and supported at its base by slave labor. The document specifically provides that 'Every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves' with one

exception: owners were obliged to tolerate their slaves' religious beliefs and practices:

it shall be lawful for slaves as well as others, to enter themselves and be of whatever church or profession any of them should think best, and thereof be as fully members as any free man. But yet no slave shall hereby be exempted from that civil dominion his master hath over him, but be in all other things in the same state and condition he was in before.13

Three years later, Shaftesbury was appointed to a newly formed Council of Trade and Plantations, charged with advising the Crown on British

political and financial interests in America and the West Indies. Shortly thereafter, Locke was officially appointed as its secretary. He continued in this position until the Council was disbanded two years later. The slave trade was a subject of considerable interest to the Council, since it

produced profits for Britain and labor for British colonial development. Most of the correspondence conducted by the Council passed over Locke's desk. If he had been ignorant of the nature of slavery in the New World before, his new post soon put him right.

1 1 'The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina' in The Works of John Locke, 10th ed., vol. 10 (London 1801) 175-99

12 There is extant a draft of the Fundamental Constitutions in Locke's own hand (Public Records Office, London, 30/24/47/3). Precisely how large a part Locke

played in its composition is disputed. P. Des Maizeaux, the first to print it under Locke's name (A Collection of Several Pieces of John Locke, P. Des Maizeaux, ed. [London 1720]), presented it as Locke's own work on the authority of an unnamed friend of Locke's who had shown Des Maizeaux a copy. Fox Bourne disputes the

suggestion that the work is wholly Locke's on the grounds that (1) Des Maizeaux's sources had proved faulty in another of his attributions and (2) Shaftesbury was in his opinion not the sort of man to keep his hands off such a project (Fox Bourne, A

Life of John Locke, vol. 1, 239). However, there is some independent evidence for Locke's being the Fundamental Constitutions' primary author - a letter from Sir Peter Colleton, who credits Locke for 'that excellent form of government in the composure of which you had so great a hand' (Bodleian Library, MSS Locke, c. 6, f . 215; quoted in Cranston, John Locke, 120).

13 Locke, 'The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina,' 196




Neither job paid Locke a salary. Nevertheless he benefited financially from the opportunities for investment they put in his way. In 1671, for example, a new monopoly, the Royal Africa Company, was formed to supply slaves to British colonies. Locke was one of its original subscrib- ers. And Locke increased his investments in 1674 and 1675. Around the same time, Locke was given a chance to get in on the ground floor, so to speak, of a company of Merchant Adventurers, sponsored (in part) by Shaftesbury, formed to develop trade with the Bahamas. As a result, Locke was earning dividends both from the sale of slaves to Bahamian planters and from their subsequent labor as well. In his own and Shaf- tesbury's interests, Locke conducted an extensive correspondence with Europeans residing in the West Indies, who supplied him with information and advice. This included advice against investments Locke con- templated but never made. For example, in 1673, Sir Peter Colleton, a planter in Barbados, and a fellow Merchant Adventurer, advised Locke not to add farming to his other speculations in the Bahamas:

the Bahama trade ... will turn to account if you meddle not in planting, but if you plant, otherwise than for provision for your factor you will have your whole stock drowned in a planation and bee never the better for it.... If other men will plant here

(I mean the Bahamas) hinder them not for they improve our province but I would neither have you nor my Lord engage in it.14

Of course, planting was done with slave labor. So it would seem that if Locke never directly owned slaves himself, it was only because other investments promised better returns.

In the 1680s, Shaftesbury fell out with the King, putting his entourage, including Locke, at risk - a risk which only increased after Shaftesbury 's death in 1683. Locke fled to the Continent, where he remained until the Glorious Revolution of 1689. His return to England was followed by a return to public life. In 1696, Locke was appointed a Commissionar of the Board of Trade, a body directly responsible for developing and

implementing policy on trade and colonial affairs. The work was par- celled out according to the interests or expertise of the active commis- sionars. Locke naturally gravitated towards the British American and West Indian interests with which he was already acquainted.

Nothing in either the Board's or in Locke's own records has suggested any concern on Locke's part about the legitimacy of the African slave

14 See E.S. de Beer, ed., The Correspondence of John Locke, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford

University Press 1976), 395. The letter is quoted in Cranston, John Locke, 196, and Fox

Bourne, A Life of John Locke, 292.




trade. Nor does he seem to have been disturbed that the children of slaves were enslaved from birth. There is some evidence to suggest he continued to believe in religious tolerance for slaves. And in a famous set of instructions to the Royal Governor of Virginia, drafted by Locke in 1698, Locke encouraged the Governor to try

to gett a law pass'd restraining of inhumane Severities ... towards Slaves, and that Provision be made therein that the willful Killing of Indians and Negroes may be

punished with Death, and that a fit penalty be imposed for the maiming of them.15

But the idea that slavery itself might be an inhumane severity seems not to have occurred to him.

If Locke was defensive about anything, it was about his advocacy of tolerance for slaves' religious beliefs. It was sometimes argued in the seventeenth century that the Old Testament injunction against the enslavement of Jews by Jews was a ban against the enslavement of one's co-religionists that applied to Christians as well. So if a Christian's slave were to became a Christian, the owner would be obliged to set his slave free. Religious tolerance could thus cost a slave-owner dearly.

Locke disagreed. After ill health forced his resignation from the Board of Trade in 1 700, Locke found an opportunity to reply to this concern in his Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of St. Paul. For example, 1st Corinthians 7:20, 'Let everyman abide in the same calling wherein he was called/ Locke paraphrased as 'Christianity gives not anyone any new privilege to change the state or put off the obligations of civil life which he was in before.'16 In his explanatory note to this verse, Locke wrote:

a man should not think himself discharged, by the privilege of his Christian state and the franchises of the Kingdom of Christ which he was entered into, from any ties or obligations he was in as a member of the civil society.... The thinking themselves freed by Christianity, from the ties of Civil society and government was a fault it seems that these Christians were very apt to run into. For St. Paul ... thinks it necessary to warne them against it directly ... and that in the form of a direct command not to change their condition or state of life ... upon a presumption that Christianity gave them a new or peculiar liberty soe to do.17

As Locke sees it, Christ's new dispensation does not dispense with slavery.

15 Public Records Office, London, C05/286/266-303 and quoted in Farr, 'So Vile and Miserable an Estate/ 269

16 Locke, Paraphrase and Notes, 198, 201

17 Ibid., 201. See also his notes on 1st Corinthians 7:23 (202) and Romans 13:1-7 (588).




III

The man whose career I've just described to you is not a man likely to construct or defend a theory of political or natural rights incompatible with slavery. Nor does it seem likely that 'the shores of Africa and America' were ever far enough from Locke's thoughts to account for an oversight of the magnitude Fan attributes to him. So I suggest we consider another approach to the problem. Instead of asking ourselves how Locke could have failed to see that seventeenth-century slavery violated the natural rights of slaves or their children, we should ask ourselves whether their enslavement did violate their rights. To answer that question, we need to look more closely at Locke's conception of natural rights: specifically what he thinks our natural rights are; what it means for a right to be 'inalienable'; and most importantly, why it is we have natural rights at all.

According to Locke, in a pre-political state of nature the only possible human rights are natural rights. Moreover there is, he argues:

nothing more evident, than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to the all the same advantages of Nature, and the use of the same

faculties, should also be equal one amongst the another....18

So in a pre-political State of Nature, if anyone has rights, everyone has

rights and furthermore has exactly the same rights. But how do individuals in a State of Nature come to have rights at all? Locke's answer - by the grace of God who 'hath given the World to Men in common ... to make use of it to the best advantage of Life, and convenience.'19 God has given us life, energy, and ability in order that we may develop the Earth's resources as He intends. We are, Locke

says, 'all the workmanship of one Omnipotent and infinitely wise maker; ... sent into the World by his order and about his business, [we] are his property, whose Workmanship [we] are.'20 So our rights in a State of Nature will be whatever rights accrue from God's grant or concession to us of our lives, our bodies, and our world. As Locke

depicts it, nothing in God's creation has been given to mankind outright - to use just as we will. What God has given, he has given in order


19 Ibid., 286

20 Ibid., 271




that certain services may be performed consistent with his designs. Strictly speaking, what God grants mankind in a State of Nature is a concession.21

Our rights in a state of nature are thus the rights of concessionaires. And what concessionaires are conceded is the use of some property and the profits that accrue from its management, consistent with the uses

specified by the owner. Provided the property is used as the owner intends, no one may rightfully interfere with the concessionaire's use of the property conceded to him. But note: The rights the concessionaire obtains are rights of use only. He has no right to alienate the property conceded from its proper owner. He may not sell the property to a

third-party, abandon it to passers-by, or destroy it. The nature of the relation between the concessionaire and his concession forbids any such transaction.

Likewise the nature of the relation between ourselves and the property conceded to us by God forbids us to alienate it from its proper owner. We may not legitimately sell, abandon, or destroy our lives or bodies for as Locke puts it,

[a] man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact or his own consent, enslave himself to anyone, nor put himself under the Absolute, Arbitrary Power of another to take away his life as he pleases. Nobody can give more power than he has; and he that cannot take away his own life cannot give another power over it.22

Nor may we legitimately alienate the Earth's resources conceded for our use by waste or pointless destruction. 'Nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy,'23 Locke insists. The only property that we

may rightfully alienate in a State of Nature is property we, rather than God, produce. As with any other concession the profits we produce by our own labor are ours alone. It should be noted that Locke does not consider children products of human labor to be claimed as personal property. Parents, he says, are merely 'occasions of life' to their children, 'instruments' God uses in his workmanship.24 So, Locke reasons that

21 On Locke's conception of our natural rights to property in such things as liberty and the fruits of our labors, etc., as a form of usufruct, see James Tully, A Discourse on

Property: John Locke and His Adversaries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1980).


23 Ibid., 290

24 Ibid., 311




a parent's title to his children's lives is no better than his title to his own. Every parent's children, he writes, are 'by Nature as free as himself or any of his Ancestors were/25 so that 'when [a child] comes to the Estate that made his Father a Freeman, the Son is a Freeman too.'26

The lengths of our individual concessions are known only to our Creator, but it was evident to Locke that they are 'made to last during his, not one another's pleasure.'27 Until it pleases Him to cancel our concessions, we are obliged to maintain the properties conceded to us and to use them as the Creator intended, to benefit human life. Or in Locke's words, each of us is 'bound to preserve himself, and not quit his station willfully' and bound 'when his own Preservation comes not in

competition ... to preserve the rest of Mankind/28 Should we violate the terms of our concessions, we abrogate the

relationship and with it our natural rights. Interestingly, this entails the result that in one respect, murder and suicide are morally identical: each transforms the person who commits it into a non-person, a thing without rights.29 To Locke, any deliberate act that violates either or both of our two natural duties to preserve or enhance our own and others'

25 Ibid., 315

26 Ibid., 307

27 Ibid., 271

28 Ibid.

29 Recently, Locke's position has been challenged by A. John Simmons, who questions whether the loss of one's natural rights to life and liberty entails a loss of all one's

rights. He writes: 'Locke seems to have thought that if one forfeits the right not to

be killed, one must in the process have forfeited all other ("lesser") rights. He is far

from alone in this view. But we may allow, contra Locke, that the warmaker retains at least some rights (e.g., the right not to be cruelly degraded), even while losing the

rights not to be killed or used for labor' (A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1992), 196).

The problem Simmons leaves unresolved is how such an allowance can be

given any sense. To take his own example, how can a slave be further degraded? Surely to be enslaved is the ultimate degradation since it is to be reduced to the

status of an entity incapable of degradation, i.e., property. This does not mean Locke is obliged to turn a blind eye to the behavior of cruel

slaveholders. Locke can hold that slaves ought not be treated cruelly, just as he can hold that animals ought not be treated cruelly, on the grounds that it violates the owner's duties to be virtuous, rather than any 'rights' of the beings owned.




natural rights puts our natural rights in jeopardy.30 This would include not only deliberate attacks on others' lives or liberties, but also the tolerance of such acts by those in a position to prevent them. Our duty to preserve mankind obliges us to not only refrain from violence ourselves but to defend others from violence if we can, unless or until a civil authority is established to relieve us of our obligation.

If this is correct, we can begin to see why Locke would not have been concerned by the historical facts about slavery to which his critics often point; in particular the facts that (1) few Africans were enslaved in punishment for assaults against white Europeans; and (2) the slave owners treated the children of their slaves as slaves by birth.

Let's begin with the first. Though it is true virtually no African slaves of European owners were ever in a state of wrongful war with their owners, this fact alone does not determine the validity of their enslavement. One does not have to be the victim of violent aggression oneself to have the right, even the duty, to restrain or punish the aggressor. In a State of Nature, everyone has the right and duty to enforce God's injunction against acts prejudicial to human preservation.

And sub-Saharan Africa was, by Locke's standards, a State of Nature. Its peoples lived as did the native peoples of North America, in extended family groups, obtaining their livelihoods through hunting, fishing, and gathering, or through primitive forms of agriculture on largely unim- proved, usually unenclosed land, and settling disputes arising among themselves without the benefit of established (i.e., written) laws. Locke thought it 'easie to discern' that individuals so situated were not 'in Political Society together' for:

Those who are united into one Body, and have a common established Law and Judicature to appeal to, with Authority to decide Controversies between them, and

punish Offenders, are in Civil Society one with another: but those who have no such common Appeal, I mean on Earth, are still in the state of Nature....31

30 For Locke, acts that violate one's natural duties in the relevant respects include not

only deliberate assaults upon others' rights to freely command their persons, but also their liberty and property. Locke writes: "This makes it lawful for a man to Kill a Thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his Life, any farther then by the use of Force, so to get him in his Power, as to take away his

Money, or what he pleases from him; because using force, where he has no Right, to get me into his Power, let his pretense be what it will, I have no reason to suppose that he, who would take away my liberty, would not when he had me in his Power, take away every thing else' (Two Treatises, 279-80).

31 Locke, Two Treatises, 324. On the distinction between political or civil society and life in a State of Nature, see esp. 323-6.




Occasional cooperation among extended family groups for the limited

purposes of war, trade, or festivals was not sufficient to establish the existence of political society in the 'wild woods and uncultured wast of America left to Nature/32 And those regions of Africa similarly organ- ized would thus be similarly wild, uncultured wastes inhabited by clans or tribes of people between and among whom a State of Nature pre- vailed.33

Consequently, it would be sufficient cause to enslave a man in sub-Sa- haran Africa if he was known to have threatened at least one person or if he had tolerated or concurred in one such assault. It would not be

necessary that the captor be the person attacked, nor would it be neces-

sary that the captive remain in his captor's hands. Being property, the

captive might be sold, bartered, or given to whom ever his captor pleased - even Europeans.

One might object that many Africans were enslaved in order to supply the European demand for slaves rather than to punish crime. Conse-

quently many, if not all, the enslaved Africans' natural rights were violated by their enslavement. To this objection, Locke could reply that while European demand probably did increase the frequency and sever-

ity of inter-tribal warfare, it did not create that warfare. European traders did not compel their African associates to go to war. Moreover, it was

open to the Africans raiding and being raided to protect themselves by joining in a social contract against inter-tribal strife and establishing a civil authority capable of enforcing their agreements. By their refusal to end inter-tribal warfare, each tribe violated their duty to act for their own and others' preservation and thus forfeited their natural rights.

Let's turn now to the second apparently problematic fact, the practice of enslaving the children of adult slaves. It's often argued that this

practice is indefensible from Locke's standpoint, because it contradicts his own assertions that (1) that all men are created the equal possessors of natural rights, and (2) that a child's natural rights always survive the loss of its parents' rights. Locke does indeed say, repeatedly, in the Second Treatise that all men are by nature born with an equivalent complement of natural rights. But the context must not be over-looked. The men of whom Locke first speaks in the Second Treatise are residents of a primor-

32 Ibid., 294; and see 295, 336-7, 339-40.

33 For a discussion of Locke's interpretation of the status of native North Americans in the context of European colonization, see James Tully 's 'Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights/ in his An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1993).




dial State of Nature to which Locke has returned in order 'to understand Political Power right, and derive it from its Original/34 In the original State of Nature all human beings born were born with equal rights to the use of the property conceded them by God. And so it remained until

slavery came into being. Once slavery exists it is no longer the case that human beings subsequently born are all 'Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature/ Henceforth they are born as members of one species but two ranks, right-bearing human persons and non-right-bearing human property. The term 'man' no longer denotes any human being, but only those human beings who are persons. Children born to non-persons are neither the children of men nor entitled to claim rights natural to men.

One might object that this conclusion is inconsistent with Locke's

proviso that just conquerors cannot enslave their enemy's minor children because the enemy's crime 'involves not his children in his guilt or destruction/35 Thus parentage cannot make one a slave. But this objection overlooks an important feature of proviso in question. It applies to children already in existence when their parents were enslaved. Born to free parents, these children have a claim to their parents' rank, as free

persons, by birth, just as they have a claim to their parental title or estate, if any, by birth. Since the claim exists from birth, a parent's subsequent enslavement cannot affect it. So if one parent is a free person at its birth, the child is free. But if neither parent is a free person at its birth, the child is neither free nor a person.36

There is, however, a related objection one might raise with more success. In his discussion of the limits of the rights of just conquest, Locke forbids the enslavement of wives as well as children. So one might object that no African women could have been legitimately enslaved and that the children born to these women would possess the full complement of natural rights. This is, I think, the most convincing argument that can be made for saying there is a serious contradiction between Locke's princi- ples and contemporary slavery. But note that the contradiction is at most one of practice, not principle. It was not in principle impossible that the African women enslaved were active participants in local wars rather


35 Ibid., 389

36 It should perhaps be noted that the later, American practice of making a child's status wholly dependent upon its mother's would be indefensible from Locke's standpoint, since the practice permitted the enslavement of children whose fathers were free.




than innocent non-combatants. Locke was himself careful to say that it was the 'innocent wife and child'37 who could not be enslaved. (Evi- dently other wives and children could.) But in practice, the number of innocent women enslaved must have vastly outweighed the guilty. Thus, Locke probably should have decried the enslavement of African women and their children as a violation of their rights. But there was another alternative. Locke might simply have called for regulations on the purchase of female slaves. Provided they were properly obtained, there was no bar to holding women, even married women, as slaves.

We cannot know whether Locke intended his defense of slavery in the Second Treatise to justify his own involvement with the institution. But we should recognize that there is no reason why he could not. Given the premises from which it starts, Locke's defense of slavery works. It legitimizes the enslavement of Africans as effectively as it condemns the subjugation of the English people by William the Conqueror. Locke's doctrine of natural rights is not as some have supposed a defense against hereditary slavery. On the contrary, hereditary slavery is fundamental to Locke's conception of rights. In Locke's State of Nature, we are all slaves, all another being's property. What distinguishes a free man from a slave is just the free man's privilege to serve as his own over-seer.

This it seems to me is a conclusion of some considerable philosophical interest and importance - which leads me to the further conclusion that the distinction between questions of historical and of philosophical interest is not always clear-cut. Ignorance and misunderstanding of the historical context in which a philosopher worked is liable to have the effect of limiting our imagination of what that philosopher could possibly be saying to us, what ideas he or she could possibly be offering seriously. We risk becoming insufficiently sensitive to the sometimes enormous gulf between our own and an earlier philosopher's thinking and thus liable to serious errors of critical judgment. While some questions about past philosophers are of merely historical interest, we should consider how certain we can be in advance that we know which those questions are.

Received: July, 1993 Revised: March, 1994




Documents

Locke on Slavery and Inalienable Rights