2) At the weekend, I wrote a long-read about the significance of rights to liberalism, for The Pursuit of Liberalism (the new Substack run by Henry Oliver and me). I mentioned John Locke quite a few times in that piece, and I often mention him here.

I don’t have a favourite philosopher, partly because I find that kind of thing cultish, but mostly because I’m much more interested in thinking about the strength of particular philosophical arguments than who it was who advanced them.

That said, many of my views — particularly within political philosophy but also in other philosophical domains — have been influenced by Locke. So because Locke’s writing hasn’t yet featured in any of these Top Things pieces, I thought I’d expand here on a Lockean topic I discussed in my long-read rights piece.

In that piece I argued that, at least on a Lockean account, “natural rights are moral rights that are held by people in the pre-political ‘state of nature’, as well as in all other places and times”. I went on to discuss natural rights further. But if you’re interested in Locke’s particular account of rights, then it’s also worth considering what I like to refer to as ‘state of nature rights’.

State of nature rights are rights that are held by individuals in the state of nature, as described by Locke in the Second Treatise . Now, I don’t mean by this that everyone in the Lockean state of nature holds all of these rights, or that all of these rights must be held by someone in the Lockean state of nature at all times. Rather, I simply mean that Locke tells us that these rights obtain in the state of nature.

One reason I think it’s useful to have this further category of rights is that, on Locke’s account, some of these rights do not obtain in political society. This means, therefore, that not all state of nature rights are natural rights!

Or at least, this is the case if you accept my definition above, because on my definition above, natural rights are moral rights that are held in all places and times. You can think of natural rights of the kind I’m describing, therefore, along the same lines as human rights, on the orthodox contemporary understanding of the term.

Anyway, because I’m aware I didn’t discuss many rights in particular in my long-read rights piece — instead I focused on what rights are and why liberals should take them seriously — I thought I’d include here a little list of Lockean state of nature rights. This list comes from an encyclopedia entry I wrote, a few years back, on the topic of Locke on Justice .

Therefore, alongside a “common right” to the Earth and its resources, Locke minimally contends that individuals in the state of nature hold the following general moral rights: to self-preservation, to preserve humankind, to subsistence, to punish, to seek reparations, to self-ownership, to labor-ownership, to self-determination, to inheritance, and to basic freedom and equality. It seems clear that there are other Lockean state-of-nature rights, too, deriving from some of the general rights listed above – such as the “power to kill” in certain circumstances. Moreover, individuals in the state of nature can also acquire particular rights to particular property, and presumably there are other “particular” rights that can be generated, too.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but I think it’s useful.

five top things i’ve been reading (fifty-first edition)