The Nature of Family, the Family of Nature: Prescient Insights from the Scottish Enlightenment

The traditional Western argument about marriage is that exclusive and monogamous marriages are the best way to ensure that children have parental certainty and receive joint paternal investment, that men and women are treated with equal dignity and respect, and that husbands and wives, parents and children provide each other with mutual support and protection. The positive law of the state must not only support such marriages, the argument continues; but must outlaw practices that violate the natural rights of spouses and children. This chapter -- dedicated to Professor Oliver O'Donovan in admiration and appreciation -- offers one little sample of this broader Western argument about the nature of sex, marriage and family, drawn from the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. Leading figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, I explain, defended traditional Western ideals of sex, marriage, and family life by drawing from natural law, common sense, practical reason, and social utility.