The "Natural" Right to Housing (Part 3): Locke

(this post is in draft form, it is going to take a lot more work and my head hurts)
The next stop in considering a natural right to housing is John Locke, author of Two Treatises of Government. This book, written at the end of the 17th Century, provided a foundation for private property rights and challenged the concept of monarchies.

Locke describes a State of Nature that has the following properties:

1. all persons are free to behave and use their possessions as they see fit
2. all persons are equal with no one having more power than another
3. the State of Nature is governed by the "law of nature", or reason
4. no person should harm another person's life, health, liberty, or possessions
5. all persons have the power of execution of all laws and of using reason and no person can appeal to a judge or arbitrator

Locke sees three weaknesses in the State of Nature:

1. lack of settled law (i.e. common consent to right and wrong)
2. lack of an indifferent judge of law
3. lack of a power to execute and enforce the law

Similar to Hobbes, Locke expressed a "fundamental law of nature" regarding self-preservation. This Fundamental Law of Nature comes about when a State of War exists such that one person tries to subject another to his/her will. Society is formed when people, desiring to avoid the State of War, are willing to quit the State of Nature and join into community for the mutual preservation of their lives, liberties, and estates (i.e. property). Even though people may consent to be governed by the majority in community, no person gives up (or can give up) the Fundamental Law of Nature (i.e. the preservation of mankind).

Similar to Hobbes, Locke believes that people have a right to property that they apply their labor to and can use (i.e. property necessary to preserve and enrich one's own life). By use, Locke means "not wasted or perishing unused" so that "used for trading something else that is then used" is reasonable and within the right of property. In fact, the combination of natural resources and labor is the basis of Locke's definition of property. Locke sees all mankind as benefiting from this type of property because the application of man's labor increases the common stock of all mankind.

In this way, Locke defines and confines property to things that are "not wasted" as opposed to things that are traded or stored up (e.g. the use of money as a holder of value from one time period to the next). When people increase, and introduce money as a store of value, land becomes scarce. And so, communities settle the boundaries of their territories and use law to regulate private property among their members.

What then would Locke say of our current situation where some have 20,000 square foot houses, some have 2,000 square foot houses, and some have none at all? Locke's ideas about property were bounded by a combination of "use" (meaning not wasted) and "labor" (meaning effort on the part of people). In this sense, I believe Locke would have found that a society containing unused houses (or portions of houses) to be a violation of the State of Nature, but that no person by right deserves to be housed if they do not apply their own effort to being so.

Next stop, Rousseau...