Are We the Workmanship of God or Do We Own Our Own Bodies and Selves? An Inconsistency in Locke and a Question of Natural Rights and Abortion

Our ownership of our bodies is a widely held right that most people talk about and assume is included in the right to life, liberty and property, the triple play of natural rights. The right to our bodies is assumed to be included in property itself (our bodies are our property), in the right to liberty too, and certainly a fence around the right to life. No one can harm me because that is a derivative protection against the right to life. This right to our bodies and ourselves is often assumed to underlie the woman's right to choose and to thus hold off the right to life of the fetus. It can also be used to justify a right to die, a la Kevorkian. Our selves, bodies and lives belong to us.

But few who are not deeply into the scholarship on John Locke know that this right to ourselves and our bodies is not self-evidently the basis of rights in the philosopher who is so often credited with the most important statement on natural rights and the foundation of American rights. I've talked elsewhere on this blog about how the Declaration of Independence is thought by some to be a Lockean document of rights and how natural rights thus provide the framework for interpreting the American Constitution, a position I find problematic.


But now I want to probe an ambiguity in the source of rights for those who look to natural rights and thus back to Locke. If Locke or natural rights is to provide the basis of "our rights" and a framework for interpreting the Constitution, then it would seem to matter what Locke meant. The only other alternative would be to ignore Locke altogether but then some other foundation of natural rights would have to be developed in which case there were be conflicting arguments about what natural rights actually mean and where they come from.

Locke in fact seems to make two sorts of claims with respect to our bodies and our lives that on the surface at least do not look compatible. This raises an interesting problem for interpreting Locke but it also raises an even more interesting problem about rights and the problem of abortion. Interestingly enough and not so surprisingly really a very detailed problem of interpretation in Locke is tied to a much broader issue of social policy -at least for those who want to build their case on Locke or natural rights of a Lockean sort. So what is this niggling problem of interpretation?


Early in his Second Treatise on Government Locke justifies the right to life, liberty and property as deriving from the fact that human beings are the workmanship of God. Because we are the workmanship of God, we are therefore God's property. Thus one person has no right to take the life of another or to harm that person. Since we each belong to God, taking the life of another person is to damage God's property.

Locke writes in one of his most famous passages on the state of liberty in nature(II, 6):

But though this be a state of liberty, yet it is not a state of license: though man in that state have an uncontroulable liberty to dispose of his person or possessions, yet he has not liberty to destroy himself ... The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty or possessions: for men being all the workmanship of one omnipotent, and infinitely wise maker; all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order, and about his business; they are his property, whose workmanship they are, made to last during his not another's pleasure: and being furnished with like faculities, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us, that may authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for one another's uses, as the inferior ranks of creatures are for our's. Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, and not to quit his station willfully, so by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of life, the liberty, health, limb or goods of another.

It is important to note that this argument-that we are the workmanship of God- is arguably a Lockean interpretation of Scripture and thus fits in with Locke's assumption that God can be shown to exist through reason and that natural law depends on the assumption of God's existence. And for Locke there is a complex interplay throughout his work between his reading of Scripture (Revelation) and his assumptions about what can be known through Reason.

The workmanship argument that humans are God's handiwork thus alludes back to Scriptures account of creation but does not exactly argue from the fact that man is made in God's image, which would be a different argument. Killing a person would be like defacing God, a plausible interpretation of what Scripture (at least Genesis 1) actually meant and a plausible understanding of the murder prohibition in Scripture. And Locke does talk about the "image of God" justification in his response to Filmer in the First Treatise on Government. But this is not exactly what Locke says here in the Second Treatise. He does not quote the "made in God's image" statement and instead says we are the workmanship of God.

Thus one source for the right to life according to Locke is the fact that we are God's property. No one can take our lives for that reason because they are harming God's property. What about harming us or enslaving us? Locke argues that those rights are derivative: because we can't be sure that a person who tries to harm us or who tries to enslave us won't take our lives, we are protected from harm and slavery too. These are fences around the right to life. This workmanship argument is thus one of Locke's arguments in the Second Treatise grounding the right to life, liberty and property. He presents it as both known by reason (an understanding of what creation means) but leaves the impression that it can provide an interpretation of Scripture too.

But there is another argument in Locke that on the surface that seems to be contradictory. Locke also argues that we have property in ourselves. This language seems to contradict the workmanship hypothesis. Locke writes in the beginning of chapter 5: "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has a Right to but himself." Now this statement sounds very much like the widely held assumption that the average person has about his or her own rights. I have a right to myself and my body. This right to myself is what grounds the right to choose (A woman has a right to her body over the claim of her unborn baby). This right also would ground the right to die-its my self and my body and I have a right to do with it what I please.


On the surface this later statement of Locke seems to conflict with the workmanship argument. As Michael Zuckert, a profound interpreter of Locke, puts it "This claim conflicts with the transcenent natural law in a particular manifest manner for that argument had held that huamn beings belong to God and not to themselves. Here Locke said the opposite." (Launching Liberalism, p. 193). Zuckert continues " We stand now at the most interesting and also the most elusive point in all of Locke's political philosophy. It is the most interesting, for its represents the core of his philosophy--the notion of human beigns as rights bearers by nature because they are self-owners. It is the most elusive, for Locke was not clear in presenting his reason or making this assertion."

The fact that Locke seems inconsistent on this point is troubling and raises complicated issues in Lockean interpretation. As I noted, these could be simply obscure problems in the history of political science or philosophy were it not for the fact that Locke had such an influence on the conception of natural rights in the modern world and in America and for the fact that most people routinely assume that we own ourselves, which is not in fact the only basis for rights in the natural rights tradition.

It is beyond the scope here to investigate completely the possible solution to the inconsistency in Locke. At issue in fact is not only this particularl inconsistency here but the very question of whether Locke was a consistent thinker and whether consistency should be assumed for him. Michael Zuckert has done a superb job in Launching Liberalism of reviewing the debate between those who think that Locke may have used inconsistencies intentionally to point to a deeper esoteric meaning that he felt he could not say explicitly. Others think that he was not a consistent thinker and that the Second Treatise was in fact a different kind of book perhaps that didn't have the rigors of his philosophy. This issue of consistency incidentally is not just a problem in Locke. It is arguably a critical question in all interpretation. Anthropologists for a long time have argued in a debate over "rationality" (see Bryan Wilson's edited volume, for example) whether to assume "natives" used the same type of consistency and logic that "we do." The question about Locke here is the same sort of problem. How do interpreters know when to attribute consistency to others and thus resolve the inconsistency or when to simply leave the inconsistency in place.

Zuckert offers a way of reading Locke that sees significant meaning in this apparent inconsistency. He argues that Locke essentially recognized that self-ownership was the foundation of rights. But he based this notion of self-ownership on the discovery of the "self." Locke realized that the human self was a different kind of self than other animate selves because it realizes that the "I" persists over time and is the basis for the "temporality" of the human being: "the human self is a temporal entity as no other is." (Launching Liberalism p. 195). In linking rights to this self, Locke breaks from prior tradition in not linking natural rights to natural law. "With the discovery of the 'I' self, Locke thus founded ego psychology as the study of the constitution of the 'I.'" I cannot do justice to the complexity of Zuckert's argument in this short context. Zuckert is one of the most interesting interpreters of Locke, paying attention to the complexity of Locke's thought and anyone interested in natural rights and Locke should treat Zuckert's works as a must read.

There is another interpretation of Locke possible, however, besides Zuckert's. It is possible that the contradiction between the workmanship hypothesis and the "self-ownership" argument in Locke is only apparent and not real. When Locke writes that "every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has a Right to but himself" The question is what does such a right mean to Locke. Does Locke mean a person has a property in his body and life the way he has a property in creatures? Perhaps. But another possibility is that Locke means a person has a right in his own person to his own labor. In other words, a person's property is not over the body and life but in the output or labor over which a person does have control. Indeed, immediately after Locke says that a person has a right in his person he gives his famous labor justification for property. He writes:

Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature has provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

Here Locke explicitly says that "his labour" is "his own. An alternative reading of Locke, then, is that Locke never thought that a person had self-ownership over his or her own body or self. Instead, what Locke thinks is that people have a right only to their own labour. Their bodies belong to God but their labor which is the output of their own selves belongs to themselves. Because their labor belongs to themselves, they can alienate it and "mix it" to make something their own. This labor theory of property of course raises all sorts of interesting questions that have been debated in their own right. But for the present purposes this gives an account of Locke that resolves the apparent contradiction. It also creates a kind of parallel between Locke's claim about God's rights in people (we are the workmanship of God, the result of God's labor and hence his property) and a Person's right to the output of their labor. Labor is what gives property rights, both of God in humans and of humans in the output of their labor. This interpretation would also make sense of the fact that though people are God's slaves (property) their output and effort belong to themselves. This would differ from a human slave whose output would be owned by the human owner. But in the case of humans, Locke says that they were created with the expectation that they would procreate and multiple and expend their labor to sustain themselves. So though humans are God's property, God gave them a purpose and entitled them to own the output of their labor.

The pluses and minuses of these various interpretations could be debated in much more detail than is possible here and I hope to come back to the question in more detail in another context. For at issue, as we see, is not not a thorny problem in Locke. That interpretive problem in Locke goes to the heart of a central claim in natural rights theory and assumptions of everyday holders of American rights: do we have rights to our bodies and ourselves? On my reading, Locke never intended to attribute self-ownership to individuals, the way Zuckert reads him. On Zucker's reading, that was Locke's innovation over Acquinas and Hobbes and represent a significant innovation. But though I disagree with Zuckert, that does not mean that I therefore adopt the view that we belong to God. If I am right that that is what Locke meant, that does not mean that that should be the foundation of rights in America. But of course that question starts another whole discussion of whether natural rights should be the foundation of American rights that I have begun to address elsewhere in my discussion of Scott Gerber's To Secure These Rights.