A liberal government restores rights through retaliatory or preventive force, applied within the bounds of objectively defined law, deriving from what Locke called "natural law." Thus freedom is maintained through the administration of justice, and the concepts of freedom and justice are therefore intimately related, like two sides of the same coin. Freedom is obtained precisely through the administration of justice, and vice versa. This political application of the concept justice, it should be noted, is a special case of the ethical concept of justice developed in pp. 3.10:19-34, which requires that we deal with each individual in the manner merited by his or her actions.

In the Lockean view, as we have seen, a proper government is founded by an implied "social contract" (p. 5.2:18). Like any other legitimate contract, the social contract operates for the interests of all parties. All parties to the contract benefit, since the preservation of freedom is in the common interest of everyone in society, as we saw in pp. 3.12:5-12. In a precise sense, a liberal government serves a "common good," where the term "common" implies an intersection of interests. In contrast to the undefinable and untenable notion of "public good" or "public interest," (pp. 4.8:29-30), the idea of "common good" here does not require any pseudoscientific attempt to compare benefits and detriments to different individuals or to compute their "sum." Rather, it denotes a specific interest that coincides among all and that does not entail the sacrifice of any individual's life or property.