Description


This article is from the Conservatism FAQ, by Jim Kalb kalb@aya.yale.edu with numerous contributions by others.

What are family values and what is so great about them?

They are habits and attitudes that maintain a society in which
people's most basic loyalties, and the relationships upon which they
rely most fundamentally, are relationships to particular persons
rather than to the state.

Family values are basic to moral life because it is primarily in
relationships with particular persons that are taken with the utmost
seriousness that we find the degree of concrete knowledge and mutual
responsibility that is necessary for our obligations to others to
become realities for us. In addition, the knowledge and habits
necessary for the good life mostly have to do with the day-to-day
activities of ordinary men. Such things lose coherence if everyday
personal relations are unstable and unreliable, as they will be if
law, habits and attitudes do not support stable and functional family
life.

Family values are rejected to the extent the necessity of practical
reliance on particular persons is viewed as something oppressive and
unequal that the state should remedy. Conservatives oppose that
rejection. They view tyranny as the likely outcome of weakening
family values, since reducing personal and local responsibilities is
likely to make state power unbalanced and overly predominant.