Having explored the invalidity of Locke's attempt to justify private ownership, and having seen that his labor theory cannot be rescued through alternative rationales or grounds, we move finally to the consequences of his lack of success. Because the labor theory has foundered, and because there are no direct substitutes for that theory which might reaffirm its prescriptions, the most salient underlying axiom in the Lockean state of nature – the axiom of humanity's privilege and duty to seek the prospering of all human agents and the prospering of humankind as a whole – had to yield criteria that could fill the gap left yawning by the dissolution of the labor theory. Locke's central postulate had to provide not just an abstract basis for humankind's obtention of sustenance, but also the more specific precepts that would direct the apportioning of the sustenance.

The labor theory was here to stay

Yet, before we investigate the revamped elaboration of Locke's perspective, we ought to grapple briefly with a preliminary question. On the one hand, nothing in this book's arguments about the labor theory of property rests on the thesis that the rights of ownership amassed in the state of nature would continue to hold their force as rights after the transition from humanity's presocietal stages to societal intercourse and conventions. My critique of Locke can apply in full to his search for origins, irrespective of the obligatoriness or nonobligatoriness of natural proprietary rights within civil society.