"The promises and bargains for truck & c. between the two men in the desert island ... are binding to them, though they are perfectly in a state of nature, in reference to one another"
Why does Locke think this? Is he right?

Locke thinks that promises are binding in the state of nature because he believes that even in this state there are laws. "Though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of licence" [Locke §6, p9]. These laws are derived from God, and discovered through reason [AC3].

God, according to Locke, created the world and all things in it, including us. Therefore we exist at his pleasure, and we owe him allegiance. God created all men equal, thus no one man has authority over another. We may not use or abuse our fellows as they are not ours to abuse.

Is he right in this? The first obviously problematic point is the assumption of the existence of God - an assumption that is by no means universally accepted any more. However, he actually assumes rather more than this.

For one, he assumes that God created the world. However, we can allow this simply by expanding his assumption from "God exists" to "a creator god exists".

He next assumes that we owe this creator god any kind of allegiance, but fails to explain why. Is it simply because we are its creations? Does a pot owe the potter allegiance? Does a child owe his mother allegiance? Locke himself maintains that when the child becomes an adult, he is freed of obligations to his parents [Locke §59, p33]. Shouldn't adults therefore be free of obligations to god?

Finally, Locke assumes that God has not released us from our obligations. Just as a parent would wish their child to make their own way in the world, perhaps God is happy for us to exist independently of him? The absence of any certain proof for his existence could seem to suggest this.

The argument that our promises are binding because of natural laws derived from God rests on at least three premises that are very difficult to prove without resorting to religious doctrine. Does this mean Locke is wrong? Reformulating Locke's ideas without God is problematic, but perhaps not impossible [AC3].

Locke thinks that these natural laws can be derived through the use of reason [Wolff, p23]. If he's right, and we can deduce the natural laws, then we can say promises are binding in the state of nature without any recourse to God.

Unfortunately Locke himself does not do this. He explicitly states that promises are binding in the state of nature, but does not attempt to demonstrate why. Instead he considers it self-evident, but human reason being as notoriously subjective as it is, what for one person is self-evident may for another be an erroneous belief. If natural laws were self-evident, there would be no need for philosophers.

So, can we deduce for ourselves, through reason alone, a natural law that tells us that promises are binding even in a state of nature?

Ethical theories such as Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics rely on neither God nor society, so we could use these. We can reasonably state that honesty is a virtue. We can also reasonably state that if we all kept our promises we'd be happier than if we didn't. Therefore according to either of these theories, it is unethical to break a promise. However, a problem arises when we ask if we are bound by ethics in the state of nature? According to Thomas Hobbes we are not, and he uses reason to demonstrate this.

Hobbes maintains that in a state of nature, survival is the only consideration. If you can gain an advantage over your fellow man, by any means whatsoever, it is rational to do so. As he would presumably do the same to you, it would be irrational to put yourself at a disadvantage to him by entering into any sort of bargain of trust. Also, in the state of nature we have no obligations to anyone or anything. A promise is an exchange of obligations, but if we have no obligations we cannot exchange them. Thus Hobbes concludes that promises are not binding in the state of nature [Hobbes, chXIV §18,p84 - §24, p88].

So the argument that promises are binding because of natural laws derived from reason is also far from certain. Reason may tell us it is unethical to break a promise, but reason may also tell us that it is the right thing to do. Are we forced to conclude that Locke is not right?

Locke believes we have rights in the state of nature. For example, we all individually have the right to enforce the natural laws. "the execution of the law of nature is ... put into every man's hands" [Locke §7, p9]. Thus - if rights imply corresponding obligations - we are all individually obliged to adhere to them.

Locke's theory of property is one of natural rights. As the majority of promises and bargains involve the exchange of property, then perhaps we can use natural property rights to show that promises are binding in the state of nature?

Locke's theory of property starts from the view that every man is "proprietor of his own person, and the actions or labour of it" [Locke §44, p27]. We therefore have rights to objects that have been transformed from natural (unowned) objects through use of our labour. I own objects I labour on, and others are obliged to respect my right to them. If I give the object to another, I become obliged to honour their ownership of it. A promise is created through our actions, and is thus our property. When we give that promise to another, they then own it, and we are obliged to honour it.

Locke's theory of property is by no means universally accepted though. Waldron suggests that the idea of 'mixing' labour is illogical. Even if we accept it he goes on to suggest that mixing labour with an object destroys the labour rather than creating an ownership [Waldron; also Pike p155]. An additional objection might be to use Locke's claim that we cannot surrender our right to our own body, as our bodies belong to God. Surely therefore, just as we cannot give someone our arm, we cannot give them our labour? We may own items, but we cannot trade them.

We could attempt to create a theory of promises analogous to that of property. If rights of ownership derive from labour, perhaps promises derive from honour? As labour originates in our bodies, which we own, honour originates in our minds, which we also own. Of course, this theory would suffer most of the same problems as the theory of property.

Natural rights are a fraught topic. Do we have natural rights? If so, what are they? Writers on the subject tend to claim they are self-evident but, like laws of reason, if this was so we'd all agree on what they were. Where do they come from? We cannot observe them, so we can only ascertain what natural rights we have through reasoned deduction. Yet we have already seen that reason can lead to differing conclusions.

Locke thinks we have natural rights, and corresponding natural obligations, including obligations to our promises. He may well be right to think this, but natural rights are too uncertain to really be sure.

Consider one final question. Regardless of why Locke thinks promises are binding in the state of nature, is he right to think it at all? What if we are forced to conclude that he is not?

If promises are not binding in a state of nature, then government by consent can never occur. By this theory, a state is formed when the people enter into a compact to form a government, thus removing themselves from the state of nature [Locke, §95, p52]. But this necessarily implies that they were in the state of nature when they made the compact. If promises in the state of nature are not binding, then the government is invalid.

Another point to consider is that, as Locke himself points out, "all princes and rulers of independent governments ... are in a state of nature" [Locke §14, p13]. So are international treaties binding? Are nations obliged to respect international law? Recent actions by the United States suggest that they at least do not think so. If all nations came to the same conclusion, war would no doubt be the result.

Locke thinks promises are binding in the state of nature for a number of reasons, all of which can be questioned. Nonetheless I hope he is right, as the alternative may well be a Hobbesian state of anarchy.

Bibliography

• Locke 1980ed. Second Treatise of Government; Hackett Publishing
• Hobbes 1994ed. Leviathan; Hackett Publishing
• Pike et al, 2000. Reading Political Philosophy; Routledge
• Waldron, Two Worries About Mixing One's Labour; in Pike 2000
• Wolff 1996. An Introduction to Political Philosophy; Oxford University Press
• Audio Cassette 3 : John Pike interviews Jeremy Waldron