Are Patents and Copyrights Morally Justified? - Tom G. Palmer

No. 3] Are Patents and Copyrights MorallyJvs4fied? 883
Locke sees this right of self-ownership as necessary for liberty.
He explicitly rules out “voluntary slavery” (or absolutism
along Hobbesian lines) and takes care to argue that our selfownership
is inalienable. 58 Indeed, the preface of Two Treatises,
in which he states that he hopes that his words “are sufficient to
establish the Throne ofour Great Restorer, Our present King
William; to make good his Title, in the Consent of the People,
which being the only one of all lawful Governments, he has
more fully and clearly than any Prince in Christendom,” 59 indicates
that the arguments are intended to overthrow Stuart despotism
and usher in an era of liberty. (Remarkably, one of the
principal popular complaints against the Stuarts was their patent
policy.) 60
Ownership in ourselves is the foundation for ownership of
alienable objects because they become assimilated to our bodies.
6 ’ At a highly strategic point in his argument~Locke raises
the following problem:
He that is nourished by the Acorns he pickt up under an
Oak, or the Apples he gathered from the Trees in the Wood,
has certainly appropriated them to himself. No Body can
deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, When did they
begin to be his? When he digested? Or when he eat? Or
when he boiled? Or when he brought them home? Or when
he pickt them up? 62
Clearly, to force aman to disgorge his meal after he has eaten it
would be to infringe his rights to his own body. But at what
point does it become so intimately related to him, “so his, [that
is], a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to
it,” 63 that to take it from him would be an injustice? Locke setties
on the transformation of the object through labor as the
demarcation point: “And ‘tis plain, if the first gathering made
them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction
between them and common. That added something to them
more than Nature, the common Mother of all, had done; and so
Id. at 328.
58. Id. at 325.
59. Id. at 171.
60. See C. MACLEOD. INVENTING THE INDUSTRIAL REVOurrIoN: THE ENGLISH PArENr
SYSTEM, 1660.1800 (1988).
61. See Wheeler, Natural Property Rights as Body Rights, 14 Nous 171 (1980).
62. J. LOCKE, supra note 42, at 329-30.
63. Id. at 328.