Persons lacking reason can never be free and remain under others’ governance for life.
Evidence
But if, through defects that may happen out of the ordinary course of nature, any one comes not to such a degree of reason, wherein he might be supposed capable of knowing the law, and so living within the rules of it, he is never capable of being a free man, he is never let loose to the disposure of his own will (because he knows no bounds to it, has not understanding, its proper guide) but is continued under the tuition and government of others, all the time his own understanding is uncapable of that charge. And so lunatics and ideots are never set free from the government of their parents; children, who are not as yet come unto those years whereat they may have; and innocents which are excluded by a natural defect from ever having; thirdly, madmen, which for the present cannot possibly have the use of right reason to guide themselves, have for their guide, the reason that guideth other men which are tutors over them, to seek and procure their good for them, says Hooker, Eccl. — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 71
Categorization
- XREF: Establishes a capacity-based criterion of legal personhood and freedom; worth tracking how this premise surfaces in later guardianship, competency, and civil-commitment doctrine. — connects to: Children are born to equality but not in it, gaining freedom only with reason. — John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 66
- QUESTION: What happens to this premise when Enlightenment capacity theory encounters modern equal-protection scrutiny of status-based (race, gender) exclusions from freedom?