What is it? What does it mean? I don’t understand the wikipedia article at *all*, please help
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John Locke was a political philosopher who wrote about moral behavior. One of his most popular ideas was that private property is just; and that private property comes about when an individual exerts labor on natural resources. So, by picking an apple from a tree, you have converted the apple from public property into private property in a way which is morally okay.
This is extrapolated to say that claiming *land* as your own private property is morally okay, because you are exploiting the natural resources of the land via your labor. However, the **Lockean Proviso** is where Locke goes on to say that it is *only* okay so long as there is enough good land for others to claim themselves.
So to loop it back to our apple tree: It’s fine for you to pick an apple off a wild, un-owned tree for yourself. It’s even okay for you to pick several apples and sell them to others, because by putting in the labor to pick them, you have converted that public property into private property. But the Lockean Proviso says that it’s *not* okay for you to pick every single apple off that public tree, because you are robbing others of the right to private property by claiming it all for yourself.
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