Natural Law, the Common Good, and Limited Government: Friends, Not Foes
Traditional conservatives and others committed to the principles of limited government have nothing to fear from natural law-based accounts of the political common good. In fact, natural law accounts offer the strongest principled basis for defending liberty and limited government by showing how such values are themselves core aspects of the common good.
Many conservative intellectuals fear that robust accounts of the political common good rooted in natural law are inimical to freedom and limited government. Kim Holmes’s recent essay in The New Criterion is a case in point. Holmes believes that so-called “common-good conservatives,” including “philosophers who wish to resurrect the moral organizing principles of natural law” are “questioning traditional American conservatism’s commitment to limited government,” and “talking up the virtues of the common good in ways that call into question their commitments to liberty and freedom.” Yet do those committed to principles of limited government (regardless of whether or not they call themselves conservatives) actually have anything to fear from contemporary natural law accounts of the political common good?
The answer depends in part on whose account of natural law and the common good one is talking about. The “integralist” view of the political common good defended by a handful of Catholic authors like Adrian Vermeule and Thomas Pink is indeed a threat to limited government, but that view is an outlier that is difficult to square with the broader natural law tradition and especially with the Catholic Church’s strong stance on religious freedom in Dignitatis Humanae. On the other hand, according to more mainstream natural law accounts of the political common good—accounts like those provided by Ryan Anderson in his response to Holmes—the principles of natural law actually protect limited government, rather than threatening them. Here I offer a deeper explanation of why that is the case, arguing that natural law principles—rooted in the Thomistic tradition, and developed by contemporary scholars like John Finnis and Robert George—provide our best defense of liberty and limited government.
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