This paper highlights the fundamental importance of the family as a pre-political institution for moral education and a signaling mechanism for cooperation in Locke’s state of nature. Conjugal societies moderate children by teaching them to follow the law of nature. They also serve as signaling mechanisms that enable moderate individuals to trust others and collectively enforce the law of nature. The family, as a pre-political moderating institution, underpins the fragile peace in Locke’s state of nature. Contrary to common beliefs, I argue that the family makes Locke’s depiction of the state of nature more credible than Hobbes’s. This has significant implications: exegetically, it explains why individuals in Locke’s state of nature (imperfectly) follow the law of nature; normatively, it provides reasons to prefer Locke’s liberalism over Hobbes’s authoritarianism; and speculatively, it invites social contract theorists to seriously consider the extent to which liberal political institutions rely on informal institutions.

This paper reevaluates the importance of John Taurek’s article “Should the Numbers Count?” putting his arguments in the context of work on the role of love in ethics. We can fruitfully read Taurek as attempting to ground a duty of beneficence in love. Taurek’s article should be read as having three distinct strands of thought. It articulates beneficence as responding to a value that is non-aggregative, criticizes the aggregation of human value as such, and assumes that beneficence has a very wide scope – from ordinary helping actions to disaster cases. What critics overlook is that even if there is some aggregative account of human value, Taurek gives powerful reasons for thinking that it is patently not the value typically taken to underlie our duty of beneficence. This leaves us, however, with difficult questions about the scope and limits of the duty of beneficence – and so of love – in ethics.