What is the common good?

[fakename]

Morally the common good is probably simple justice (respecting property rights, maintaining the poor at a socially standard level of survival, respecting the rights of lower social orders/classes, national defense, and maintaining the church, ending abortion/euthanasia/murder). But is there more to the common good? Does the common good include outlawing lying, masturbation -is it at least potentially more strict or was my previous list an essentially exhaustive account?

 

[MACHIU]

Can’t explain more than what CCC states (para 1906):

By common good is to be understood “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”

It is not just a simple justice, but concerns with the life of each and all…

God Bless

 

[John21652]

Morally the common good is probably simple justice (respecting property rights, maintaining the poor at a socially standard level of survival, respecting the rights of lower social orders/classes, national defense, and maintaining the church, ending abortion/euthanasia/murder). But is there more to the common good? Does the common good include outlawing lying, masturbation -is it at least potentially more strict or was my previous list an essentially exhaustive account?

The Common Good can mean a whole lot of different things. If it is defined literally the common good is whatever it takes to make everyone in a given society as happy as they can be. That’s a fairly meaningless definition and is probably as Utilitarian a definition as one could ask for. Most often we like to include a moral dimension to what the common good means and we seek to make life as certain as possible for each and everyone of us by penalising things like lying, broken promises and offences against the person and property. Those things are fairly basic requirements if individuals are to live their lives free from the risk of harm from others. Being free from the risk of harm from others is important to an individual’s personal feelings of well being and security, for without that freedom, we are not able to trust one another and so there is no commonality.

Most of us think of the common good in terms of the free societies we live in, but not all societies offer the individual freedoms that we might take for granted and there have been governments, dictators and rulers who have defined the common good as they see fit. It worries me today when we hear politicians making pronouncements about the “public interest” which seems to suggest they know what is good for the common people better than anyone else. In free societies, the individual has been largely allowed to define his or her own ‘good’. Other societies have had their common good defined for them. Free societies have been constrained by personal and social ethics which have defined the parameters of behaviour and allowed the society as a whole to share a common ethic which makes living in that society fairly predictable.

Western civilisations, such as the United States, The United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, Canada and a few others have enjoyed a degree of personal freedom that has been enshrined in Law and supported by Law according to the religious and social ethics that have developed over many centuries. As the shared ethical beliefs are challenged and altered, they seem to require support from man made positive laws which then define the common good as it is decreed by those who state what is in ‘society’s best interests’. The unfortunate aspect of this trend is that it gives licence to elected leaders to change what is the common good. This licence to define the common good is made stronger when a society begins to turn its back on a shared morality. A shared morality is what truly defines the common good and is the glue that holds a society together. We lose it and we rely more upon the whim of the official, elected or otherwise. So, properly defined, the ‘common good’ involves a shared morality which gives licence to a society to define the parameters within which the individuals behave towards one another.