Theos Think Tank: Is the 'common good' a meaningful political objective?

Interesting paper by Chris Bickley from Theos Think Tank:

In summary, common good language crops up not infrequently in political discourse. I have said that it should not be pressed too hard for philosophical coherence, nor is it easy to detect a philosophical genealogy. However, I do not say that it is empty rhetoric – rather, it is used to critique politics as missing a vital common dimension, though the blame is laid in different places. Finally, I have argued that the language is nonetheless useful in helping us think constructively and practically about political challenges and goods – it is not justice alone, but it can’t be less than that. It requires substantially addressing how ordinary people can achieve a greater degree of agency in different forms of public life – not less, but certainly more, than politics as we have come to know it. It is surely no accident that some of those who have most convincingly advocated ‘common good’ politics have emerged not from the sphere of political theory, nor in fact from party politics, but from the practices of community organising. The common good is not something to be endlessly theorised, it has to be done.

Full article here.

'The common good' is (as Bickley points out) a phrase that is often bandied around primarily for rhetorical purposes, not only in the political circles he refers to but also in more narrowly Catholic circles. An aspect he underplays is that the common good arises from the existence of various societies (and not just the state) in which individuals participate: a family has a common good apart from the goods of the individuals; a club or other association of civil society has a common good apart from its individual members.

“Common good” is very often a safer translation of bonum commune than “the common good”. For there is the common good of a team, but equally the common good of a university class, of a university, of a family, of a neighborhood, of a city, of a state, of a church and of human kind throughout the world. The difference in each case between the group's common good and an aggregate of the wellbeing of each of its members can be understood by considering how, in a real friendship, A wills B's wellbeing for B's sake, while B wills A's wellbeing for A's sake, and each therefore has reason to will his or her own wellbeing for the other's sake, with the result that neither envisages his or her own wellbeing as the source (the object) of the friendship's value, and each has in view a truly common good, not reducible to the good of either taken separately or merely summed. Inasmuch as there is possible and appropriate a kind of friendship between the members of each of the kinds of group listed (non-exhaustively) above, each such group has its own common good.

(From the article, 'Aquinas' moral, political and legal philosophy' in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy here. My emphasis.]

A necessary condition of the existence of common goods is that the existence of these 'little platoons' is acknowledged and supported by the state. Perhaps most importantly, the functions of these smaller societies should not be undermined by the state (or indeed by other entities such as business). There are undoubtedly benign meanings that could be attached to Bickley's following claim:

It is surely no accident that some of those who have most convincingly advocated ‘common good’ politics have emerged not from the sphere of political theory, nor in fact from party politics, but from the practices of community organising. The common good is not something to be endlessly theorised, it has to be done.

But a worry would be that the practice of 'community organising' which might be appropriate for some communities would not be appropriate for others. (An interesting thought experiment here would be to imagine the practice of 'community organising' as realised within a family or a playgroup.) A danger here is that the specific nature of some of the communities human beings need to flourish and of the practices needed to sustain those communities are being forced into a model of community activism. While Bickley notes the dangers of a (party) political model of the common good, he does not attend to the dangers of  a model of community activism that might equally distort their character. The state is not civil society and civil society is not the family. The various associations of civil society are not interchangeable. And none of these communities are the Church.

No expression of social life — from the family to intermediate social groups, associations, enterprises of an economic nature, cities, regions, States, up to the community of peoples and nations — can escape the issue of its own common good, in that this is a constitutive element of its significance and the authentic reason for its very existence.

[Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, section 165 here]

[Details of image here]