Invoking the concept of the common good as an organizing principle of a society is one thing; trying to define it, though, is a major challenge. Like the Odyssey, setting out for the common good is a journey full of temptations that can throw you off course, full of risks of making wrong choices, full of adversaries that want to stymie you from ever reaching Ithaca. Since I raised the concept of the common good in my last blogpost, it’s now time to say a bit more about it.
From early on, the common good has been discussed through two different lenses. One is that of the individual, the other is that of society. The first approach defines the common good as the sum total of individual interests. This is the way the common good is attained through the invisible hand of Adam Smith. Self-interest and ambition checked and balanced in the marketplace produce the greatest good for society. Adherence to unfettered markets, however, threatens attainment of the common good not because Adam Smith advocated that self-interest should come free of morality (actually the opposite) but because, as we know, markets can fail, and when they do, they serve neither the individual nor the common good.
One hundred years after Adam Smith’s The Wealth of the Nations appeared, another brilliant Scot, Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Based on a false interpretation of Darwinian evolution, HerbertSpencer coined the unfortunate expression “survival of the fittest.” This became the premise for a very charged individualistic approach to defining the common good. A good society is one whose members are strong enough to meet the challenges of social survival. Society should weed out weak and free-loading individuals. Resistance against social safety nets and welfare programs are modern echoes of the Spencerian principle.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have the top-down approach that prescribes a common good for all in the interest of achieving salvation or state supremacy. These are the conceptualizations of the common good by religious zealots or authoritarian political movements.
It is between extreme individualism and top-down authoritarianism where the search for the common good becomes most challenging because it requires that optimal balance that can be so elusive. In this tradition, the common good is realized in societies and states where there is a mutual interdependence between the interests of the individual and those of society. For Aristotle* (considered to be the father of the concept of common good) the good society is one that enables its members to realize their full potential. The common good is attainable only through the society and yet it is individually shared by its members. Each person should take ownership in the attainment of the common good and contribute to its enjoyment by fellow citizens since enabling everyone to realize his/her potential is the essence of the common good.
This conceptualization of the common good makes it the shared responsibility of the citizens and the state. Realizing one’s potential depends on the means and opportunities to which one has access, and, hence, how a society is organized. It is here that a modern philosopher, John Rawls, has made an intriguing proposition. Rawls invites each one of us to go behind a veil of ignorance and forget who we are, male or female, privileged or not, well-connected or not, physically or mentally gifted or not, and then choose the social organization within which we would like to live. That would determine then how a good society ought to be organized so that even its least fortunate and weakest members have a fair shot at realizing their potential and share in the happiness of life. It is the value of potential self-actualization and preservation of dignity even for the weakest of us that elevate education, health and avoidance of poverty to legitimate rights and part of the common good.
Attainment of the common good comes with the surrender of some private benefit or freedom of choice from each one of us. Therefore, it is important to show that attaining the common good is worth this loss. It is easy, for example, to see how a common defense or public roads system provides private benefits. It may not be as easy though to understand that public financing of education generates private gains for all. Only when the desire to attain the common good becomes part of the cultural fabric of a society, individuals count it as a source of satisfaction besides their own private accomplishments.
Charity and morality have been used for millennia to motivate people to subscribe to the idea of common good. But practical wisdom also needs science to draw the circle of common interests and how to manage them. It is the science of evolution that has shown us how sociality has enabled humans to survive and become a more resilient species. It is science that is alerting us to the risks of climate change. It is science that exposes the harmful effects of poverty on the cognitive and psychological growth of children.
The unflattering fact in the search for the common good is that it takes a common threat or an unbearable indignity to make us coalesce and form a more socio-centric worldview. In the last century, it took two devastating world wars and an economic catastrophe with their respective fears of death and hunger for people to become more aware of their common destiny. It took the indignity of racial discrimination in America to enact laws to protect the civic and voting rights of Black Americans and other groups in the sixties.
But it took only twenty years to fall back to the individualistic conceptualization of the common good here in America. Allowing the rise of stark inequalities in economic outcomes, health care, educational attainment, child care, as well as our divisions in handling the risks of the pandemic and understanding the climate challenge are witnesses of how far we have veered from the sense of the common good.
The common good is more than individual freedom and civil rights. Actually they are both in peril without a social compact that gives citizens the basic means and opportunities so that they come to accept certain interests as common and worth striving for.
*Aristotle’s common good comes with the caveat that it was not all-inclusive. It was only in reference to the interests of free male citizens at the exclusion of women and slaves.
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