Before we study Locke's reflections on equality and his labor theory of ownership, two discussions will help to avert confusion by sharpening this book's principal terminology. The first discussion presents an analytical framework of entitlements, a framework that supports the drawing of key distinctions within the subsequent critiques of Locke's theories. The second and shorter discussion clarifies the words “individualism” and “communitarianism” by staking off their political meanings from their nonpolitical or nonnormative meanings.

Hohfeldian preparation

All legal and moral philosophers should be grateful to Wesley Hohfeld, an American jurist, for his attempts to bestow precision on the language and concepts that suffuse normative inquiries. Hohfeld managed to sift four senses that had become attached to the word “right.” In regard to each of the four entitlements that he traced, he defined as well a correlative position; he grasped that each entitlement must always entail a posture in relation to which it has its effect. Thus, Hohfeld's work is of the greatest importance for our aims, both because it marks essential divergences among concepts and because it underscores the reciprocality of secureness and prohibitions.

Hohfeld devised his theory of entitlements with a largely jurisprudential hue for application to contexts where institutions of governance have emerged as the means of bringing disciplinary force to bear against anyone who flouts a right. But his approach can easily be extended to cover moral problems and discourses in which the punitive workings of the law do not figure saliently or directly.