Second Treatise of Government

Answers

• Q29PERSONHOOD

  Would creating an intelligent being give its maker the right to own it?

  Both. only the true maker owns; human begetters have duties, not ownership. Argues men are God's property because they are his workmanship, but that human parents do not own children they beget, since children are the workmanship of their maker, the Almighty.

  Sect. 55. Children, I confess, are not born in this full state of equality, though they are born to it. Their parents have a sort of rule and jurisdiction over them, when they come into the world, and for some time after; but it is but a temporary one. The bonds of this subjection are like the swaddling clothes they are wrapt up in, and supported by, in the weakness of their infancy: age and reason as they grow up, loosen them, till at length they drop quite off, and leave a man at his own free disposal. Sect. 56. Adam was created a perfect man, his body and mind in full possession of their strength and reason, and so was capable, from the first instant of his being to provide for his own support and preservation, and govern his actions according to the dictates of the law of reason which God had implanted in him. From him the world is peopled with his descendants, who are all born infants, weak and helpless, without knowledge or understanding: but to supply the defects of this imperfect state, till the improvement of growth and age hath removed them, Adam and Eve, and after them all parents were, by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish, and educate the children they had begotten; not as their own workmanship, but the workmanship of their own maker, the Almighty, to whom they were to be accountable for them.

  Chapter II, §6; Chapter VI, §56 · Gutenberg #7370; §6 and §56 read.