John Locke Tacit Consent Analysis

Imagine a Haitian family, who has risked their lives to cross the expanse of ocean over seven hundred miles long in order to pursue a better life once they reach the shores of Florida. They desire refugee status and one day, citizenship. Upon reaching the end of their perilous journey, they are allowed to stay in the United States, but are immediately issued fines that they cannot possibly afford to pay, simply for indecent exposure and disturbing the peace. Though most people would consider this to be an undesirable outcome, in his work “Second Treatise of Government” published in 1689, John Locke suggests that in order to enjoy the advantages one receives from living under a government’s control, one must consent to the laws of that government. In this paper I shall discuss Locke’s idea of tacit consent, and consider its weaknesses as well as possible strengths if one were examine Locke’s “tacit consent” with a fairly generous interpretation of his intended meaning; Locke’s argument will then be compared to the views of the twentieth century philosophers Martin Luther King Jr and Martha Nussbaum. Tacit, meaning implied or generally understood, is how Locke considers people arriving in a common-wealth or even current residents that are not subjects to …show more content…
There are many possible situations where the idea of tacit consent is not the most ideal arrangement in practice , but even though Locke has a somewhat overly ideal view of how strong his argument is, if loosely interpreted as hypothetical consent, the argument can be made more sturdy. Analyzing Locke’s idea of tacit consent using the perspective of more contemporary philosophers like Martin Luther King Jr and Martha Nussbaum, it can be seen that the argument of tacit consent has its limits, but is not too weak to still be