2. Natural Rights, Natural Law, and the State of Nature

Description
Cite

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we explore Locke’s conception of natural rights, natural law, and the state of nature, focusing in particular on: (i) Locke’s counter-arguments to Filmer’s defence of the divine rights of kings in ‘Patriarcha’; (ii) Locke’s understanding of positive law; (iii) Locke’s understanding of natural law; (iv) Locke’s conception of the state of nature as set out in his ‘Two Treatises’, and (v) Locke’s argument for the state of nature as a moral condition rather than a real historical period.

Course

This course explores the political philosophy of John Locke (1632-1704), oriented around the Liberalism section of the Government and Politics A-Level specification. We begin in the first module by outlining his life and works, before moving on to explore in the second module Locke’s conception of natural rights, natural law, and the state of nature. In the third module, we explore the importance of Locke’s formulation of consent in his political thought, focusing in particular on his notion of tacit consent and claim that the formation of a political society requires all to renounce their ‘executive power of the law of nature’. In the fourth module, we consider Locke’s ‘Letter Concerning Toleration’ of 1689, highlighting the centrality of Christian doctrines to Locke’s formulation of religious toleration, before moving on to consider in the fifth module Locke’s writings on – and involvement with – slavery, and the implications of this for his political thought more broadly.

Lecturer

Dr Jennifer Marušić specialises in the history of modern philosophy, and is especially interested in John Locke, David Hume and British Empiricism. She is senior lecturer in the University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, and is currently researching Hume and Locke’s views about the nature of judgment and issues connected to the problem of causation in Hume’s philosophy. She recently wrote on Hume and Berkeley for 'The Oxford Handbook of Berkeley'.