John Lockes Theory about Rights over Property - Essay Example

This brief essay will outline and discuss a particular situation that took place with regards to three individuals all cleaning property rights to a winning lottery ticket valued at $1 million. As a means of understanding the way in which Locke might respond to such a particular understanding, the analysis will reference several of his theories with regards to the property and seek to gain a level of understanding with respect to whom he might denote is the rightful owner of the winning ticket.

The issue of the lottery winnings is explained to a more full and complete degree. Ultimately, as the introduction noted, there are three individuals who claim rights to the lottery winnings. The first individual is the one that found the winning ticket within the trashcan and as was her habit, entered all of the numbers from the other discarded tickets into a web application that allowed her and her husband to gain lottery points; even from non-winning tickets. Similarly, the second individual the rights of the claim to this particular winning ticket is necessarily the owner of the store; putting forward the claim that due to the fact that the trashcan was her property, any and all contents within that trashcan were necessarily her property as well. Finally, the individual whose ticket was discarded claims that the ticket rightfully belongs to her.

Regardless of all of these claimants, if one analyzes John Locke’s determinants of ownership, there is only one reasonable and rightful owner; that of the woman who found the discarded ticket in the trashcan expended her labor in order to enter it into a system with no hope of any gain outside the motive of garnering lottery points. Within such a definition, the reader can evidently notice that the work and labor that this individual has placed into the lottery ticket far exceeds that within which the other two claimants have engaged. Although it is arguable and true that the work and effort that the owner of the store put into building and maintaining it, this was done without any expectation of being rewarded in such a fashion. Similarly, with regards to the expectation of winning, the individual the discarded the ticket had already performed their work and decided that such a nature was not worth any further effort and thus merely relegated it to the trashcan (Locke 81).

Likewise, in such a way, the reader can only come to the reasonable expectation that the individual who found the winning lottery ticket within the trash should be the rightful owner due to the fact that they not only possess it but expended the necessary work to determine its true value one-sided been discarded by each and every other individual. Although it is at least worth mentioning that the individual owner of the store has something of a right to perhaps part of the proceeds, expecting that items within a trashcan necessarily maintain the ownership of the proprietor indefinitely within all circumstances is something of both an impossibility and unreasonable to be expected.

Therefore, from an understanding of Locke’s particular understanding of property and rights to the aforementioned property, the reader can and should expect that the individual who has the greatest level of rights to the winning lottery ticket is the one who was initially awarded the winnings. Indeed, even the lottery commission, oftentimes hesitant to make any statements with regards to ownership, has indicated that it is this individual and her husband who is the most logical and reasonable to share in any of the winnings that were derived (Ng 1). Although it is oftentimes difficult to force theoretical and philosophical understandings into each and every varied situation, John Locke can be effectively understood within this particular situation due to the fact that both energy, labor, and expectation can all be defined and attributed to a particular individual. Within such an understanding, even complex and ethically curious situations such as the one which is been defined can effectively be understood and solved under such a rubric.