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During the last presidential election cycle First Things published Robert P. George’s essay “Law and Moral Purpose.” Professor George is Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and the Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions.

You can read the whole thing on your own, but I thought it would be helpful to excerpt some of it, chopping it up like an interview format, adding italics and numbering to make it easier to skim. Since politics is on almost everyone’s mind these days, I thought it’d be helpful to repost this.

What are the obligations and purposes of law and government?

(1) To protect

(a) public health,

(b) safety, and

(c) morals, and

(2) to advance the general welfare—including, preeminently, protecting people’s fundamental rights and basic liberties.

Wouldn’t this require the granting of vast and sweeping powers to public authority?

No; the general welfare—the common good—requires that government be limited.

You distinguish between government’s primary and subsidiary roles. What are the government’s primary responsibilities?

Government’s responsibility is primary when the questions involve

(1) defending the nation from attack and subversion,

(2) protecting people from physical assaults and various other forms of depredation, and

(3) maintaining public order.

What are the subsidiary roles of the government?

Its subsidiary roles include:

to support the work of the families, religious communities, and other institutions of civil society that shoulder the primary burden of forming upright and decent citizens,

caring for those in need,

encouraging people to meet their responsibilities to one another while also

discouraging them from harming themselves or others.

You’ve said that political morality requires (1) governmental respect for individual freedom and (2) the autonomy of nongovernmental spheres of authority. Can you explain?

Government must not try to run people’s lives or usurp the roles and responsibilities of

(1) families,

(2) religious bodies, and

(3) other character- and culture-forming authoritative communities.

The usurpation of the just authority of families, religious communities, and other institutions is unjust in principle, often seriously so, and the record of big government in the twentieth century—even when it has not degenerated into vicious totalitarianism—shows that it does little good in the long run and frequently harms those it seeks to help.

What is the relationship between limited government and classic liberalism?

Limited government is a key tenet of classic liberalism—the liberalism of people like Madison and ­Tocqueville—although today it is regarded as a conservative ideal.

Does belief in limited government entail libertarianism?

No. The strict libertarian position, it seems to me, goes much too far in depriving government of even its subsidiary role.

(1) It underestimates the importance of maintaining a reasonably healthy moral ecology, especially for the rearing of children, and

(2) it misses the legitimate role of government in supporting the nongovernmental ­institutions that shoulder the main burden of assisting those in need.

What truths is libertarianism responding to?

Libertarianism responds to certain truths about big government, especially in government’s bureaucratic and managerial dimensions.

Economic freedom cannot guarantee (1) political liberty and (2) the just autonomy of the ­institutions of civil society, but, in the absence of ­economic liberty, other honorable personal and institutional freedoms are rarely secure.

Moreover, the ­concentration of economic power in the hands of ­government is something every true friend of civil ­liberties should, by now, have learned to fear.

What else does libertarianism respond to?

There is an even deeper truth—one going beyond economics—to which libertarianism responds: Law and government exist to protect human persons and secure their well-being. It is not the other way round, as communist and other forms of collectivist ideology suppose. Individuals are not cogs in a social wheel. Stringent norms of political justice forbid persons to be treated as mere servants or instrumentalities of the state. These norms equally exclude the sacrificing of the dignity and rights of persons for the sake of some supposed “greater overall good.”

How do you respond to those who want to severe the ideas of limited government and moral truth?

It is a profound mistake to suppose that the principle of limited government is (1) rooted in the denial of moral truth or (2) a putative requirement of governments to refrain from acting on the basis of judgments about moral truth.

Why?

Our commitment to limited government is itself the fruit of moral conviction—conviction ultimately founded on truths that our nation’s founders proclaimed as self-evident: namely “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What’s at the foundation of this proposition?

That each human being possesses a profound, inherent, and equal dignity simply by virtue of his nature as a rational creature—a creature possessing, albeit in limited measure (and in the case of some human beings merely in root or rudimentary form), the Godlike powers of reason and freedom—powers that make possible such human and humanizing phenomena as intellectual inquiry, aesthetic appreciation, respect for self and others, friendship, and love. This great truth of natural law, which is at the heart of our civilizational and civic order, has its theological expression in the biblical teaching that man, unlike the brute animals, is made in the image and likeness of the divine creator and ruler of the universe.

You can read the whole thing here.

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