John Locke On Slavery

society included man “disowning all claim and right to the land in the others possession” (§37, §45). With money, the farmer loses his right to claim land solely through his labor. The farmer is thus limited in what he can produce and sell and cannot access the prosperity of civil society. When, for example, the “exploiter” of a market leads “another man to starve,” he had no more right to do so than a conqueror does to cause the children of those who he has vanquished “to starve and perish”; in both cases, it is morally wrong for the perpetrator to entrench upon the ability for another to labor at his calling, the “exploiter” by forcing men out of jobs and the “conqueror” by not providing the conquered a means to live (Dunn 247; Locke §184).
He states “of the products of the earth useful to the life of man nine tenths are the effects of labour” (Locke §40). Greater value, or things more “useful to the life of man,” comes with increased labor. He explains how greater labor leads man to produce “bread, wine and cloth” rather than “acorns, water and leaves” (Locke §42). It is clear that the baker, the winemaker and the clothier serve the public good better in these vocations than they did as foragers from nature because they produce goods that are enjoyed more by human life than naturally occurring
Social inequality thus does not hinder each man’s ability to “labor for the common good.” Thus, in the case of Dunn’s hypothetical example of the “exploiter” of a market, Locke would say that such exploitation cannot happen because it values the “land” (the potential of production of the ground) greater than the labor expended in actually producing the resource. The “exploiter” would “starve himself” because of the lack of labor, or be condemned for slavery and not