Continuing to meddle in a controversy to which I was not invited, I give you something new from Will Wilkinson:

The ultimate reason to endorse liberal principles is that adherence to them produces conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).

That’s interesting, since I am equally confident that rejecting liberal (and I do mean liberal in a broad sense) principles and organising social and political life according to the principle of good order and in defense of the Permanent Things are vital to providing the conditions under which human beings are most likely to thrive (decidedly not according to the broadest variety of different conceptions of thriving).  Plainly, freedom is not the moral baseline.  Freedom presupposes a moral order that entails other, prior obligations between kin and between fellow citizens.  Within a polity, fellow citizens have more obligations to one another than they have to non-citizens.  Even if the net benefits of a policy accrue to many citizens and non-citizens, but come at the expense of fellow citizens, it is very likely unjust and contrary to the obligations that members of a polity have towards one another.  For the success of any polity in providing for the welfare of its members, there must be a certain degree of solidarity, and it is those things leading towards social fragmentation and disunity that need to be justified.  Incidentally, on this point Christian social thought has much to say and has ample room for a solidaristic, patriotic nationalism.

Not only are concrete freedoms inconceivable without such a moral order, but without the fulfillment of these obligations such freedom is about as meaningful as paint on a tomb.  Besides, what does it profit a man to gain cheap commodities and inexpensive servants if he loses his country?