Why Modern Ethics Rejects the Common Good: Some Suggestions

Abstract

We frequently hear that the concept of the common good has fallen out of favor in modern moral and political thinking in the West. It is a notion that has seemed to many to carry with it the teleological conception of nature and of the human person characteristic of the classical philosophy in which it finds its origin. Since the rejection of such teleological conceptions is among the deepest commitments of modern science, any political theory resting on these beliefs must also be rejected. Not only, however, is the common good tainted by its association with teleology, but it also has seemed to many to carry in its wake a theological taint associated with its prominent role in the political thought of the high Middle Ages, especially the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The modern liberal state is widely believed to have dispensed with the necessity for recourse to the common good. The citizens of a modern liberal state look for protection and for inspiration, not to some shared conception of the common good, identified and pursued by political leaders, but rather to a system of rights and liberties rooted more directly in the rationality and autonomy of individual citizens. The doctrines of (1) the priority of the right to the good and (2) neutrality with regard to the good (firmly anchored as they are at the heart of contemporary political theory) seem to leave little or no room for a rich notion of the common good. In addition, the widely held belief that “the fact of reasonable pluralism” is a central truth about social life under conditions of late modernity seems to call into question any sufficiently “common” feature of conceptions of the good to ground a robust notion of the common good.