Abstract

By giving a unified account of what Locke says about appropriation in an Essay concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government, I generate a new account of Locke's theory of private property. I argue that Locke develops a coherent theory of private property, which includes both general and special rights. A right is special just in case it arises from one's involvement in some particular relationship or transaction; a right is general just in case it arises from the sort of being one is. ;According to Locke, a being has a general right to private property in virtue of its personhood. Because persons have significant moral value, others have a duty to preserve one as a person. Because one's preservation as a person requires that one have private property, one has a general right to private property. ;In my view, Locke's discussion in the Essay of how persons appropriate bodies and actions provides a model for understanding his discussion of how persons appropriate material objects in the Treatises. Persons, for Locke, are beings who can make bodies, actions and material objects parts of themselves by putting those things to use in service of their life plans. ;In Locke's theory of private property, special rights are acquired in a context in which all have general rights. Consequently, others' general rights place a limit on one's acquisition of special rights. Locke allows that an individual can accumulate vast amounts of private property, but not that individual accumulations can swell to the point that other persons lose whatever is necessary for their personhood. ;Because Locke allows that individuals might justly accumulate significantly different amounts of private property, Locke's theory of private property is not socialist in its implications. Nor is Locke's theory a defense of unlimited capitalist accumulation . Like Rawls, Locke steers between these alternatives, requiring that all have enough for personhood but otherwise allowing inequality in the distribution of goods