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Unlimited Acquisition and Equality of Right: A Rejoinder to Professor Seaman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Thomas J. Lewis
Thomas J. Lewis
Affiliation:
McMaster University
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Extract

Professor Seaman contends that I am mistaken in asserting a logical connection between equality of right and unlimited acquisition. I argued that equality of right as employed by Locke in the Second Treatise logically entails the right of unlimited acquisition, and a consequent danger of environmental destruction, resulting from the necessary commitment of political structures to unlimited acquisition.

Type
Notes
Information
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 1978 , pp. 635 - 638
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1978

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References

1 “Unlimited Acquisition and Equality of Right: A Reply to Professor Lewis,” this Journal 11 (1978), 401–08Google Scholar.

2 “An Environmental Case against Equality of Right,” this Journal 8 (1975), 254–73Google Scholar.

3 Seaman, “Unlimited Acquisition,” 404.

4 Ibid., 405.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid., 405–06.

7 Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 25.

8 Seaman, “Unlimited Acquisition,” 406.

9 Much more should be said about the adequacy of compensation for the alienated right to nature. However, to grasp the basic line of argument one can, perhaps, do no better than examine Thomas Paine's advice to the French Republic on this matter in 1897. See his “Agrarian Justice” in Foner, Philip S. (ed.), The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 606–23Google Scholar.