Locke the Declaration of Independence and Today's Government Research Paper

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John LockeLocke believed in the law of liberty and held that an ethical system for society should strive to maintain the law of liberty. He wrote in his Second Treatise that a society had a right to overthrow a government if that government did not serve the cause of liberty: “For liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be, where there is no law” (p. 57). Indeed, the government of the US made liberty the cornerstone of its foundation in the Declaration of Independence (1776): “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The US government was essentially built on the ideas of Enlightenment philosophy, which is where Locke’s views came from: like Rousseau in The Social Contract, Locke emphasized that government’s main concern should be the protection of individual freedom. The problem seen today is that the US took the idea of Locke to justify the American Revolution and then immediately turned on that same idea and convened a centralized government that would usurp authority from individuals, effectively putting restrictions on individual liberty. Today, the situation is such that most people look around and see Orwell’s Big Brother asserting totalitarian control over individual lives via lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, travel restrictions, and so on. Locke argued for liberty in terms of self-government, as Sharon (2022) points out. Yet for fear of conflict and desire for control, most societies of today have done away with Locke’s view of life and liberty in favor of a centralized authority. Why did this happen? This paper will argue that it happened because there is a fundamental flaw in Locke’s theory, which is this: ultimately, Locke promotes self-interest, and in an ethical system wherein self-interest is the ideal, the only outcome is Ethical Egoism and the law that might makes right.Locke argued that self-preservation is a natural right and as such every person has the natural right to pursue his own self-interest. Locke wrote: “Everyone is obliged to preserve himself and not opt out of life willfully, so for the same reason everyone ought, when his own survival isn’t at stake, to do as much as he can to preserve the rest of mankind; and except when it’s a matter of punishing an offender, no-one may take away or damage anything that contributes to the preservation of someone else’s life, liberty, health, limb, or goods” (p. 4). In other words, every person has the right to self-interest.

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It is perhaps a utopian idea to believe…

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…been put in place.Today, the system of government cares little about individual rights and more about making sure everyone obeys the law—i.e., whatever legislators in the pockets of specials interests (or pharmaceutical companies) say the law should be. But what would Locke have said about the great debates today: does one have the right to not wear a mask or refuse a vaccination if one does not want to wear it or get it? Or is the law of the government the ultimate decider? Locke himself had no real answer for this because inherently he presented a system of ethics that was little more than Ethical Egoism, and in a system of Ethical Egoism the final outcome is always that whoever has the most power is going to be the one to say what the rules should be. Whoever has the most power is going to be the one to determine whose interests are going to be served by which laws and systems of government. Just like the Founding Fathers paid lip service to the idea of Lockean liberty while upholding slavery, today’s leaders pay lip service to the idea of liberty but then want anyone who violates politically correct norms to be canceled or anyone who refuses to go along with the Covid narrative to be fired from his job. Inherent in Locke’s….....

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