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Showing posts from September, 2018

Representing the New World: Locke and Slavery

Locke makes two opposing statements regarding the idea of slavery, it’s position and effectiveness in society. His first idea holds the position that slaves as property are immoral and unreasonable ethics to possess. He attacks slavery and deems it a direct violation to the right of natural freedom in his essay   John Locke Two Treatises of Government . However, he counters this argument in his Second Treatise, John Locke Two Treatises of Government , by approving the ideas of slavery specifically in positions such as result of war, therefore POW’s or prisoner of war are sought acceptable and moral reasons to posses’ slaves. It is important however to note that within this second treatise Locke does not initially refer to these pow’s as slaves rather servants or captives. Does then, the substitute for the noun slave, determine the ethical morality of the matter and shift the argument entirely?       Slavery is immoral. Reclaiming the identity and renaming it to sound more appealing

Law & Philosophy: John Locke and Human Understanding

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                                                     John Locke’s essay and theory on Concerning Human Understanding challenged the old way of learning by means of the Scholastic Model and instead proposed that all humanity is born with a blank slate and therefore hold no preconceptions of ideas or possess any preexisting knowledge at birth. Locke recalls a gathering with some of his friends discussing a matter without coming to any resolution on the matter that troubled them so. The unresolved issue is a direct inconsistency with the Scholastic model which implies that reasoning with the exchange of argument and counter argument along with the pursuit of a conclusion should be directed towards all questions or contradictions.   However, these men, who I can reasonably assume are intellects or scholars, could not come up with such resolution to their private matter. Locke’s theory submits that to understand you must understand understanding itself regarding its capacity and lim