The Second Treatise on Civil Government

"I’m interested in the Second Treatise mainly because it is where we find Locke putting across the now very familiar idea about the relationship between labour and property. Basically his argument is that the way we establish a claim to an object of property is that we mix our labour with it. The classic example is the agricultural crop – if I planted it, weeded it and harvested it, then I have a claim to it, as I have laboured for it. This idea has influenced many people, including even Marx, with the idea that surplus value is seized wrongly by employers, because the labourers have mixed their labour with the product. But what has not been done yet is to apply Locke’s ideas to biotechnology and medical ethics. I have been engaged in linking the two for about 12 years now. I wrote a book back in 1997 called Property, Women and Politics in which I argue that the Lockean idea could be very important in the area of reproductive ethics. For example, it could be argued that women who put effort into donating their eggs have laboured, and therefore have a right to them. I have recently been looking at whether it is possible to develop a full spectrum for what rights a patient should have in the products of biotechnology, in things like cell lines or bio-banks, or tissue banks, or organs or whatever, on this same basis."