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Unlimited Acquisition and Equality of Right: A Reply to Professor Lewis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

John W. Seaman
Affiliation:
McMaster University

Extract

In a recent article, “An Environmental Case Against Equality of Right,” Professor Lewis argues for no less than the complete rejection of those highly-prized liberal values upon which much of the institutional framework of Western societies has been built, the values of civil peace, unlimited acquisition, and equality of right. This radical recommendation is urged on the basis of the mundane and, until very recently, much-ignored problem of environmental destruction. Lewis’ environmental case is (1) that equality of right, which is recommended by Hobbes as the necessary condition of civil peace, “logically entails”—and this is clear, he contends, from Locke's use of the concept in the Second Treatise—the right of unlimited appropriation; (2) that unlimited appropriation destroys nature and ultimately man; and (3) that we must consequently rethink our allegiance to unlimited appropriation, to equality of right (because it logically entails unlimited appropriation), and to civil peace (whose necessary condition is equality of right), and be prepared to accept alternative theoretical foundations upon which to reconstruct our major social institutions. While this attack on unlimited acquisition will undoubtedly strike a responsive chord among many social critics, the concomitant rejection of the Hobbesian hope of civil peace and of equality of right will receive a much less hospitable welcome. But the catch in Lewis’ argument is that we cannot get rid of the former without jettisoning the latter two at the same time. If his analysis of this matter is correct, then the costs of preventing the further destruction of nature and the future demise of man are extremely high, much higher than most critics have yet been willing to recognize.

Type
Notes
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 See this Journal 8 (1975), 254–73Google Scholar.

2 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, in Locke, John, The Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Laslett, Peter (New York: New American Library, 1965)Google Scholar, sec. 4. The emphases are Locke's. See Lewis, “An Environmental Case,” 258–59.

3 Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 27; see Lewis, “An Environmental Case,” 259–60.

4 Ibid., 260; see Locke, Second Treatise, sees. 27, 31, 32, 33.

5 Lewis, “An Environmental Case,” 260–61; see Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 36.

6 Lewis, “An Environmental Case,” 261.

7 Ibid., 262.

8 Locke, Second Treatise, sees. 37, 47, see Lewis, “An Environmental Case,” 262.

10 Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 85.

11 Lewis. “An Environmental Case,” 263.

12 John Locke, The First Treatise of Government, in John Locke, The Two Treatises of Government, sec. 88.

13 Locke, Second Treatise, sec. 37.

14 Lewis, “An Environmental Case,” 264–66.

15 Ibid., 266–67.

16 Ibid., 267.

18 Ibid., 268.