The common good is an uncommon concept today, and the genuine article is often confused with counterfeits. It may, therefore, be helpful to set out clearly and simply some definitions and distinctions, to explain what ‘the common good’ means to the integralist, as opposed to what it means to the totalitarian, the utilitarian, or the liberal. These notes are mostly gathered from other Josias posts; follow the links and footnotes for more in-depth treatments.
A good is only common—in the fullest sense of the word—if it is shared entirely by all those to whom it is common. A cake, for instance, is not truly a common good, although all members of a particular group may each enjoy a piece. They do not share it entirely, rather each participant receives one piece of the whole. The piece which is good for one is not a good shared by another. In this way, all material goods “are always diminished by being shared,”[1] so no material good can be common. A truly common good therefore must be something immaterial, like the enjoyment of an opera by an audience, or the friendship shared mutually by two friends.
We can distinguish what we might call the intrinsic versus the extrinsic common good of a society. A society exists to help its citizens reach their fulfillment or happiness,[2] which can be understood as either their ultimate happiness (i.e. salvation, the beatific vision of God in heaven), or their temporal well-being. Temporal well-being itself is subordinate to our ultimate happiness. The extrinsic common good of society is ultimately God Who is Himself our highest good, and our common participation in the divine life which constitutes the life of heaven. The intrinsic common good of society is its proper order, or the peace which is the tranquillity of that order, which is ordered to the extrinsic common good, the ultimate good of man.
Over the last century, when treating the common good, the Magisterium of the Church has focused more on the intrinsic common good than the extrinsic. It has spoken often of the common good of society as the sum of the conditions of society which lead to our perfection.[3] But not even these very documents themselves restrict the meaning of the common good of society to the intrinsic, even if they focus on it.[4] The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “the Church is concerned with the temporal aspects of the common good because they are ordered to the sovereign Good, our ultimate end,” showing us that the intrinsic, temporal aspects of the common good are subordinate to the extrinsic.[5] Since the possession of a good is superior to the pursuit of that good (as having a wife is better than merely looking for one), it is clear that these conditions which conduce to human perfection presuppose the greater common good which is the actual possession of that perfection.
The true notion of the common good sometimes comes under suspicion because of the totalitarian misrepresentation of it. The totalitarian subordinates the private good of individuals to what he might call the common good. But what he calls the ‘common good’ is truly nothing of the sort. The totalitarian speaks of the community as something personified, at times even divinized to replace the true Divinity.[6] The good of the community as he sees it is not something shared by all, but is rather the private good of the Community or Nation in this personified sense, which usually means the private good of an oligarchy or tyrant. For the totalitarian, the good of the individual must be sacrificed to the good of the People seen as the ultimate end of society, forgetting the truth which Pius XI spoke when he said, “Society is for man and not vice versa.”[7]
Similarly, the utilitarian sacrifices the good of the individual to the good of the many. Utilitarianism makes this sacrifice of the individual for the sake of the many the basic principle of its moral system. The fundamental axiom of Jeremy Bentham’s theory was that “it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.”[8] In other words, the private good of the individual is subordinate to the private goods of the many.
Liberalism rejects common goods in favor of the private good of the individual. The liberal (in his left- or right-leaning iteration) sees any appeal to a common good as a threat to the license of the individual. It is the ‘liberty’ of the individual, understood as license to pursue his private good, which becomes the one principle of the liberal morality, and this licentiousness becomes the only good that can be shared by all. To the liberal’s confused mind, any apparently common good is really a private good, since my enjoyment of it is my own. The left-liberal sometimes inclines to utilitarianism, arguing for a restriction in the license of some in favor of the license of the many. Charles de Koninck rightly shows that it is in fact not liberty at all, but slavery to pursue only one’s private good, and Saint Thomas teaches that “the individual good is impossible without the common good of the family, state, or kingdom.”[9]
As opposed to the totalitarian, the utilitarian, and the liberal, the integralist subordinates the private good of the individual to the common good of the community, but the common good understood not in the ersatz version of the totalitarian or utilitarian. The subordination of the individual’s private good to the common good does no harm to the liberty or the good of the individual, since the common good properly understood is a personal good of the individual. The common good is a good shared by every member of the community personally, or as Nathaniel Gotcher puts it, the common good is nothing other than “the shared happiness of humans.”
Pater Edmund Waldstein writes that “the common good is not better” than the private good of the individual “merely as a sum of the private goods of many individuals,” as the utilitarian would hold. “Nor is it the good of their community considered as a quasi-individual,” as the totalitarian believes:
Rather a true common good is good for each of the persons who partake of it—a good to which they are ordered. This cannot be emphasized enough: the common good is a personal good. The subordination of persons to this good is thus not enslaving. They are not being ordered to someone else’s good (the good of ‘the nation’ or ‘humanity,’ considered abstractly), rather they are ordered to their own good, but this is a good that they can only have together in a community.[10]
[1] Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy, 25.
[2] Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, 29: “In the plan of the Creator, society is a natural means which man can and must use to reach his destined end.”
[3] Gaudium et Spes, 26, quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1906. Also Gaudium et Spes, 74.
[4] Gaudium et Spes itself says at paragraph 74 that the common good “embraces the sum of those conditions of the social life,” not that it may be reduced to them.
[5] Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2420.
[6] Cf. Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge, 8. Also Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, 52-3, quoted here
[7] Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, 29.
[8] A Fragment on Government, preface.
[9] Summa Theologiae, II-II, 47, 10 ad 2.
[10] Pater Edmund Waldstein, “The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good”, paragraph 28. https://thejosias.com/2015/02/03/the-good-the-highest-good-and-the-common-good/