As Good and Enough: A Reconstruction of Property Rights

John Locke's theory of property rests upon three claims: that property arises through labour, that appropriation is legitimate only where enough and as good is left for others, and that no one may take more than they can use before it spoils. Contemporary discussions often retain the first claim while neglecting the second and third. This paper argues that the provisos are not historical curiosities but the central conditions of property's legitimacy. Drawing upon the Noura framework, I reinterpret labour as participation in cooperative productive activity, reinterpret the "enough and as good" proviso as requiring that institutions preserve fair access to the requisites of flourishing, and reinterpret the spoilage proviso as prohibiting the hoarding of capital outside productive circulation. Because productive activity depends upon socially generated capacities, shared knowledge, infrastructure, care, and ecological systems, property rights cannot be understood as absolute individual entitlements. They are conditional claims arising within cooperative systems whose legitimacy depends upon maintaining the conditions under which all persons can participate as informed agents. The paper extends this reconstruction to inheritance, ecological sustainability, intellectual property, and the global commonwealth, showing that the Bancor system's prohibition on hoarding is a global instantiation of the spoilage proviso, and that the same principle applies at the individual level. The result is a reconstruction of property rights that remains recognisably Lockean while providing a contemporary account of justice, cooperation, and flourishing.