Understanding the Common Good
- Understanding the Common Good
The principal object of this article is to explain the centrality and transcendence of the common good. To correctly address the nature of the common good of political society, one must first understand that, (1) before it is a political or social principle, the “common good” is an intrinsic constitutive principle of the moral, metaphysical, and theological orders, (2) it is a political principle on the condition of being first moral, metaphysical, and theological, and (3) it is an essentially teleological principle, an end. My aim is to focus on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas, which articulates a teaching found throughout the Catholic tradition and normative for it.
I will first refer to the common reading of the account of the common good in the Second Vatican Counilc’s Gaudium et Spes and attempt to clarify the strategic difference between this common reading and the stronger understanding to be found in the Catholic tradition. Second, I will offer an initial account of the transcendence of the common good as a central analogical principle within Catholic thought. Third, I will offer a few words about the common good of political society and the virtue of legal justice. Fourth, I will address the essentially teleological and theonomic character of the common good and its defining role for both natural and divine law as participations of the eternal law, especially in their normative relation to political and social order.1 [End Page 1135]
Contemporary Ecclesial Formulation
Gaudium et Spes §26 articulates the nature of the common good in this way:
Every day human interdependence grows more tightly drawn and spreads by degrees over the whole world. As a result the common good, that is, the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment, today takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspiration of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family.2
This definition draws attention to the wider order of which one is a part, an order that is required in defining the rectitude of the part with respect to the whole. Yet “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment” may suggest that the common good is being viewed here as what we might identify as a “common utility” in economic language, a utility that finally reduces to the good of individuals qua individuals. Viewed in this way, the role of communio, of solidarity in good, and of noble higher good would be excluded from the account of common good. Were this reading to be construed as the most formal account, then the common good [End Page 1136] would be understood in a purely instrumental manner and the truth that certain common orderings of individuals in society are requisite to the good of individuals would exhaust the formal character of the common good.
Gaudium et Spes does not seem to be intended formally to address the question of whether the good of the individual itself is merely an “individual good.” It does not overtly address the foundational issue of whether good is reducible to private and incommensurable goods of individuals. It merely identifies that a common ordering is requisite to the good of individuals, whatever “good” may mean, leaving aside the issue of whether all goods of individuals are individual, private goods. Thus, Gaudium et Spes often is read as treating the common good materially and instrumentally. It appears to treat it materially in two ways. First, whatever the good for the human person is, there are aspects of the ordering of society that are requisite to, and instrumental for, this good—the good is treated not formally and in its nature, but merely materially as something to which other things must generally be ordained if it is to be achieved by individuals. Second, it is treated materially in that “the...
