"That all men are created equal."

When John Locke wrote his Second Treatises: Of Civil Government and Thomas Hobbes wrote The Leviathan, intellects were still trying to unpack everything the sovereign individual idea had to offer. It was generally accepted by both Locke and Hobbes that all men were equal (Even though "man" was a pretty exclusive group, but it was more progress than ever before), but they were equal in different ways.

John Locke

Locke believed that men were all equally good and needed very little authority to govern them. According to Man's "State of Nature," no one has power over another and all are equally free to do as they please so long as they don't infringe on other's freedom. Locke had a relatively optimistic outlook on human nature.

Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes, on the other hand, thought that man needed a parent authority to create "good laws" that he could abide by. He determined that because people were continually in competition for honor and dignity, they tended toward envy and hatred. Hobbes also generally believed that people were equal despite their differences because no matter how weak, the "weak" person could still use strategy to have a "strong" person killed.

The Hybrid

Over the weekend I attended a lecture by a well-known psychology professor from the University of Toronto. He analyzed the line from the declaration of independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." We know that all men are not "created equal" socially or economically, and the founding fathers who owned slaves obviously didn't think so. So what did they mean?

At the lecture, Dr. Peterson said that the self-evident truth is not that all people have equal opportunity when they come into the world, but that they all have equal capacity for good and evil. This could be thought of as a hybrid of the thoughts of Hobbes and Locke. He explained because all people have equal capacity for good and evil, they have an equal responsibility to the collective not to pursue evil and to seek out good. Because the state is made up of sovereign individuals in a free society, whether or not the state is inherently good depends on the individual.