Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [115]
By mixing his own labor (along with fifty-five cans of beans, ginger, nine prunes, three figs, parsley, cinnamon, and a clove) with the eggs he has found, Hooper has made them his to enjoy. But when exactly did the eggs become his? When he ate them? When he cooked them? When he raced away with them on his Jill-ikka-Jast? Or when he first picked them up? Locke has an answer, although he speaks of acorns and apples, but his principle applies as well to eggs. “[I]t is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right.”4 So it seems that as soon as Peter picked up one of those eggs, it became his property.
But Mayzie seems still to have some kind of claim on the egg before Horton comes along and mixes his labor with it. To sort this out, we may first need to look at some important limitations that Locke places on his labor-mixing theory of property.
How much may I have of this wonderful stuff?
As long as you leave just as good, and enough.
One of these limits Locke mentions is that no one may take more than his fair share. He explains, “[F]or this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”5 Peter T. Hooper cannot lay claim to every single egg in the world, even if he were to go to all the trouble to collect them. He must leave enough for others. And he cannot simply take the world’s sweetest Kweet eggs and leave only the eggs of the Twiddler Owl (which taste “sort of like dust from inside a bass fiddle” [Scrambled]), for everyone else. He must leave not only enough eggs for everyone else but also enough eggs that are as good as what he takes for himself.
The Lorax makes this point quite clear. When the Once-ler chops down one lone Truffula Tree, the Lorax simply wants to know what’s going to be done with it, but when the Once-ler starts chopping down four trees at a time, the Lorax explains that the Once-ler’s rate of labor mixing has gotten out of hand.
He snapped, “I’m the Lorax who speaks for the trees
which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please.
But I’m also in charge of the Brown Bar-ba-loots
who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits
and happily lived, eating Truffula Fruits.
NOW . . . thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground,
there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ’round.
And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies
Because they have gas and no food in their tummies!” (Lorax)
By taking so many trees that the Bar-ba-loots have to go without, the Once-ler has reached the limits of his permissible labor mixing.
By claiming that he speaks for the trees as well as for the Bar-ba-loots, the Lorax also raises another issue. Can nature itself have property rights? If this were so, then it would seem that even resources in their natural state are not considered “in common” to take as we please, since they would be the property of nature itself. Were this true, then no amount of labor that Horton mixes with the egg can make it his. The ecologist Garrett Hardin argues that this notion of nature as “the commons” inevitably leads to there not being “enough and as good for others.”
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. . . . [T]he rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit