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In 1704, the year of John Locke's death, his intimate Damaris Masham wrote that Locke considered civility a much more important moral duty than was generally thought.1 By "civility" she understood, as did Locke himself,2 an active sense of social benevolence. In his own life, she reports, the apostle of private property rights was solicitous of the deserving poor of his neighborhood, believing that the old and infirm were entitled not merely to subsistence but "comfort."3 Even among his contemporaries, it appears, the friends of John Locke felt compelled to defend him against charges that his individualistic philosophy left him cold to the plight of others. His philosophy, and the philosophy of liberalism generally, has been contending with that charge ever since.
Classical liberalism was forged in the seventeenth century, by Locke and others, partially in opposition to the philosophies of classical antiquity and Christian Scholasticism. Those philosophies placed social duties at the center of political morality; liberalism elevated individual rights. This made it easy to secure private property rights and the liberty and economic development that flowed from them. Suddenly less secure, however, were duties to society and to others, including the duty of charity to those in need. According to a stereotypical view, classical liberalism exhorts us to accumulate as much property as possible, while relieving us of any duty to share.
The question of charity4 is emblematic of a wider issue in Locke, and in liberalism. Does a philosophy that gives individual rights priority over social duties inevitably attenuate those duties to the vanishing point? Is Locke's such a philosophy? To what extent can a rights philosophy such as liberalism accommodate charitable duties to others, that is, duties that go beyond the simple duty not to steal from or otherwise harm others? There is a vast literature in contemporary liberal theory that grapples with this issue, but it is worth revisiting Locke on the question as well. On behalf of Lady Masham and others, the following reading of Locke on property and charity will argue that Locke's theory of property, and of individual right, is not hostile to social duties. In fact, I believe a close reading of Locke finds that...