George on the three pillars of a healthy society

Any healthy society, any decent society, will rest on three pillars. The first of these is the respect for individual human beings and their dignity. A society that does not respect the person will generally treat human beings as cogs in a larger social wheel - their dignity and well-being may legitimately be sacrificed for the sake of the collectivity. A healthy liberal ethos supports the dignity of the human person by giving witness to fundamental human rights and civil liberties, and, where a healthy religious life flourishes, faith provides a grounding for the dignity and inviolability of the human person.

The second pillar of any decent society is the institution of the family: the original and best department of health, education, and welfare. No institution surpasses the healthy family in its capacity to transmit to each new generation the understandings and traits of character on which the success of every other institution of society depends. Where families fail to form, or too many break down, the effective transmission of the virtues of honesty, civility, self-restraint, concern for the welfare of others, justice compassion, and personal responsibility is imperiled. Without these virtues, respect for the dignity of the human person, the first pillar of a decent society, will be undermined and sooner or later lost, for even the most laudable formal institutions cannot uphold respect for human dignity where people do not have the virtues that make that respect a reality and give it vitality in actual social practices.

The third pillar of any decent society is a fair and effective system of law and government. This is necessary because none of us is virtuous all the time, and some people will be deterred from wrongdoing only by the threat of punishment. Contemporary philosophers of law tell us that law coordinates human behavior for the sake of achieving common goals - especially in dealing with the complexities of modern life. even if all of us were virtuous all the time, we would still need a system of laws (considered as a scheme of authoritatively stipulated coordination norms) to accomplish many of our common ends - safely crossing the streets, for example.

- Robert P. George, First Things, "Making Business Moral"