The Common Good | PDF | Common Good | John Rawls

The Common Good | PDF | Common Good | John Rawls

 

The Common Good

 

In ordinary political discourse, the “common good” refers to those facilities— 

whethermaterial, cultural or institutional

 — 

that the members of a community provide to allmembers in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain intereststhat they have in common. Some canonical examples of the common good in a modernliberal democracy include: the road system; public parks; police protection and publicsafety; courts and the judicial system; public schools; museums and cultural institutions; public transportation; civil liberties, such as the freedom of speech and the freedom ofassociation; the system of property; clean air and clean water; and national defense. Theterm itself may refer either to the interests that members have in common or to the facilities

that serve common interests. For example, people may say, “the new public library willserve the common good” or “the public library is part of the common good”.

 As a philosophical concept, the common good is best understood as part of anencompassing model for practical reasoning among the members of a political community.

The model takes for granted that citizens stand in a “political” or “civic” relationship with

one another and that this relationship requires them to create and maintain certain facilitieson the grounds that these facilities serve certain common interests. The relevant facilitiesand interests together constitute the common good and serve as a shared standpoint for political deliberation.

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 When citizens face various questions about legislation, public policy or social responsibility, they resolve these questions by appeal to a conception of therelevant facilities and the relevant interests. That is, they argue about what facilities have aspecial claim on their attention, how they should expand, contract or maintain existingfacilities, and what facilities they should design and build in the future.The common good is an important concept in political philosophy because it plays a central

role in philosophical reflection about the public and private dimensions of social life. Let’ssay that “public life” in a political community consists of a shared effort

 among members to

maintain certain facilities for the sake of common interests. “Private life” consists of eachmember’s pursuit of a distinct set of personal projects. As members of a politicalcommunity, we are each involved in our community’s public lif 

e and in our own privatelives, and this raises an array of questions about the nature and scope of each of theseenterprises. For example, when are we supposed to make decisions based on the commongood? Most of us would agree that we are required to do so when we act as legislators orcivil servants. But what about as journalists, corporate executives or consumers? Morefundamentally, why should we care about the common good? What would be wrong with acommunity whose members withdraw from public life and focus exclusively on their own private lives? These are some of the questions that motivate philosophical discussions ofthe common good.This article reviews the philosophical literature, covering various points of agreementamong traditional conceptions of the common good, such as those favored by Plato,Aristotle, John Locke, J.J. Rousseau, Adam Smith, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls and MichaelWalzer. It also covers some important disagreements, especially the disagreement between

“communal” and “distributive” views. It concludes by considering three important topics in