Mary Kenny, writing the Catholic Herald, rightly points out that granting certain co-habiting couples rights comparable to those of married couples would undermine the contractual basis of property law. The powers that be couldn't care less how the "chavs" live, provided that it doesn't impact of them or theirs; but they would never stand for this attack on the law of property as based on contractual relationships.
I have never understood why people think that they are clever when they point out that marriage was invented to safegurad property. Of course it was! Something has to. Don't they believe in liberty, equality and fraternity?
Liberty, equality and fraternity are inseparable from nationhood, family and property, since liberty (the freedom to be virtuous, and to do anything not specifically proscribed) is inseparable from equality (the means to liberty, and never to be confused with mechanical uniformity), thus from fraternity (the means to equality), thus from nationhood (a space in which to be unselfish), thus from family (the nation in miniature, where unselfishness is first learnt), and thus from property (each family's safeguard both against over-mighty commercial interests and against an over-mighty State, and therefore requiring to be as widely diffused as possible), which is the guarantor of liberty as here defined.
Marxists, including neoconservatives, are correct that the family, private property and the State have a common origin, with each absolutely necessary in order to maintain the other two; but Marxists, including neoconservatives, are wrong to see this as a bad thing, and therefore to desire the withering away of the State, which they know would be the withering away of the family and of private property, and which they want precisely for that wicked reason.
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All hail the greatest living theorist of what was once the Labour Right, which controlled Labour in the days when it won elections on enormous turnouts and set the political agenda even when the Tories were in office.
ReplyDeleteSorry David but Liberty means the freedom to do unvirtuous things that don't hurt anyone else. The freedom to do virtuous things is no freedom at all as it is limited by whoever decides what 'virtuous' behaviour happens to be.
ReplyDeleteExactly. But that IS real freedom.
ReplyDeleteYour position does have a certain amount of support from figures read by academic philosophers and their students, but it is wholly alien to all three lived political traditions in this country, none of which would exist at all on your basis.