Common Good

COMMON GOOD. - The concept of the common good has a fundamental importance in Catholic sociology, which recognizes in it the essential and immanent end of society and the supreme criterion that serves to determine the extent of private and public duties and the limits of the power of the State. In order to develop this highly important point adequately, it is necessary to proceed in an orderly manner, first debating the preliminary question of whether or not the social organism has a natural end, and then establishing its elements and the ultimate subject to which it refers. Four different aspects of the problem must therefore be considered separately: 1) the existence of a natural social end; 2) the determination of that end in the common good; 3) the elements that constitute it; 4) the ultimate subject to whose benefit it must redound.

I. EXISTENCE OF A NATURAL SOCIAL END

The fundamental importance of the question concerning the ends that public society is called to pursue was intuited by Jellinek, who writes: "without knowledge of these purposes a complete science of the State is not possible. A purely formal definition of the State, one that prescinds entirely from its purpose, can never furnish us with a perfect image of the State" (La dottrina generale dello Stato, p. 453). Nevertheless, the same author does not hesitate, a few pages earlier, to affirm that there exists no intrinsic, natural and objective finality of the State, and that a question on this point would be idle, since no answer to it can be given through empirical investigation.

In excluding an objective end of the State, both the theorists inspired by idealism, such as Jellinek, and those who construct their theory on materialistic or mechanistic principles are in agreement. In the idealist conception it is not possible to determine a purpose for the State, since it would be absurd to assign to the absolute, as the State is configured for every idealist, a goal outside itself, toward which it would be obliged to tend. One must not confuse the State with civil society, warns Hegel, nor place "its determination in the security and protection of property and personal freedom," assigning to it as its ultimate end the interest of the individual, since, being the State objective spirit, truth and ethical life, it must not serve the individual, but the individual must serve the State (Lineamenti di filosofia del diritto, p. 211).

Positivism and materialism arrive at the same conclusion. For all theories that conform to the principles affirmed by these two currents, social life would be nothing other than an effect of natural forces, which would operate with the necessity of cosmic elements, outside of any finalism, which, even if it existed by hypothesis, could not be the object of investigation for positive science, alien as it is to every metaphysical question. "The problem," Jellinek rightly noted, "whether an organism has any purpose for something that stands outside it, from the empirical-naturalistic point of view, is inadmissible" (La dott. gen. dello Stato, p. 451). This opinion is shared by the theorists of absolutism: Machiavelli, Treitschke.

All the currents which, beginning in the 18th century, set about reworking the doctrine of the State on new foundations, are then found to agree in affirming that no natural, objective, universal end can be assigned to it, since such an admission would on the one hand revive the much-opposed natural law, now definitively set aside, and on the other would prove incomprehensible in the light of the evolutionary historicism and radical relativism to which modern mentality has abandoned itself. Ranelletti, one of the exponents of this mentality, affirms that to the question of what the purpose of the State is, no answer can be given, since the State "in the force of its sovereign power can comprehend within the sphere of its action every human activity; and regulate and dominate with its will the entire life of the people. Its purposes can therefore vary from country to country, from time to time, according to the tasks it believes it should assume in each society, in relation to collective needs, in the historical period in question" (Istituzioni di diritto pubblico, p. 31).

But a theory of the State that prescinds from every finalistic element is impossible, as Jellinek himself notes, and therefore every form of empiricism always ends up colliding with the necessity of establishing some point of reference toward which the activity of the social entity is directed.

This necessity has given rise to two currents, one that could be called maximalist and the other minimalist. According to the first, to which belong both idealism and historicism, biologism and positivism of every shade, the State would justify itself by itself, possessing the ultimate reason for its existence in its own intimate constitution, and therefore could have as its end nothing but itself, its power and its affirmation and expansion, to which all aspects of social life should remain subordinate. The second, principally represented by the liberal conception, restricts the end of the State to a minimum, assigning to public society the exclusive task of safeguarding the juridical order, in order to ensure the spontaneous play of conflicting freedoms. It is the theory of Kant and of Lassalle's gendarme State.

The Catholic conception stands at the opposite pole. The authoritative teaching of the recent Pontiffs traces the essential points of the traditional doctrine, insisting on the existence of a natural end of civil society and assigning that end in the common good of the collectivity. Pius XII, in the Christmas message of 1942, expresses himself thus: "Reason, illuminated by faith, assigns to individual persons and particular societies within the social organization a worthy and noble place; and it knows, to speak only of the most important, that all the activity of the State, political and economic, serves the lasting realization of the common good, that is, of those external conditions which are necessary to the whole of the citizens for the development of their qualities and their offices, of their material, intellectual and religious life." According to Leo XIII, in the encyclical Immortale Dei, it is the specific task of the State to procure for man "all that is perfectly sufficient for life," since "the ultimate reason of the power of those who govern is the protection of the common good." Pius XI insisted on the same concept even more extensively. In Divini Redemptoris he teaches: "God has at the same time ordained man also to civil society, required by his very nature. In the plan of the Creator, society is a natural means, which man can and must use for the attainment of his end, since human society exists for man, and not vice versa." And in Mit brennender Sorge: "Society is willed by the Creator as a means for the full development of the individual and social faculties, which man must use, now giving, now receiving, for his own good and that of others." The same thought returns in Pius XII's Summi Pontificatus, where it is said that "civil sovereignty was willed by the Creator, so that it might regulate social life, render easier for the human person, in the temporal order, the attainment of physical, intellectual and moral perfection, and help him to reach his supernatural end."

The propositions in which Catholic doctrine is condensed are easy to demonstrate. No one today doubts that social life is an effect of natural forces inherent in the rational being. The differences found among the various schools do not concern this principle, which is admitted by all without distinction, after the definitive decline of contractualism. Now such forces cannot be either physical or biological, nor exclusively environmental, and they cannot press upon man in a deterministic manner, since the rational entity, which constitutes the matter to be reduced to political unity, is a spiritual being, which does not move to action except through the prior exercise of its higher faculties. The social entity is, therefore, a natural effect that proceeds from the spiritual activity of its components. Once this principle is posited, which only a vulgar materialism can deny, the existence of an immanent and essential end follows as a logical and necessary consequence.

First of all, nature in all its works manifests an inner rationality, which all beings obey either instinctively or reflectively, each acting according to its own principles toward the attainment of an end. But if nature obeys an immanent finality in all its operations and manifestations, and on the other hand the social entity is an effect of its forces, it follows that society too will have an essential end, which will be natural and objective. This consequence acquires greater prominence if it is placed in relation to the subject who, following the inclination of nature, must give rise to social life. This subject is man, who does not move to action unless the intellect has first known and weighed an end, as object and term of the will. The instinct of sociability, therefore, could exert no influence on man, unless it were raised to the plane of the spirit, becoming impulse and motion, of whose ultimate term he has full awareness, and it would remain without effect, if the light of its intrinsic finality did not project itself onto the field of action, where the free will of the human subject must intervene. It must, therefore, be concluded that, just as every natural entity has an end of its own, so too does civil society.

This end is essential inasmuch as it springs from the intimate constitution of social reality, of which it is a constitutive element, as a necessary part of its adequate concept, and a specific note that distinguishes it from any other necessary or free human association. For this very reason it is also universal, that is, proper to any political aggregate. It is furthermore intrinsic or immanent, inasmuch as it is designated by the laws of being, as a principle of action which, through the voice of nature, necessarily and obligatorily determines the supreme directives of social activity.

II. THE SOCIAL PURPOSE CONSISTS IN THE COMMON GOOD

This is the traditional doctrine of Catholic thought, concordantly reaffirmed, as already indicated, by the most recent pontifical documents of Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII.

Going back beyond the centuries of rationalism and positivism, the same doctrine is dominant among philosophers and professional jurists. The democratic conception of power, which prevailed until the appearance of modern statist theories, carries within itself the implicit idea that public life is at the service of the human person and therefore of the common good. Even in the concept of sovereignty, elaborated in the age of royal absolutism, for example by Bodin, the soul of traditional thought reveals itself in the subordination of power to natural law. What is said of Bodin holds for the vast majority of theorists, with the exception of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

In the Catholic field, Suárez, at the height of the 16th century, assigns to the legislative power as its purpose "the natural happiness of the perfect human community, of which it has care, and of individual men, insofar as they are members of such a community" (De Legibus, III, ch. 2, no. 7). And St. Thomas, touching on the same subject, affirms that law primo et principaliter concerns the order directed to the common good, and that it belongs to its nature and essence to be ordered to that same good (Sum. Theol., 1ᵃ-2ᵃ, q. 90, a. 3). Thus one traces back, through the Angelic Doctor, to the social doctrine already upheld in antiquity by Aristotle (v.).

The Catholic conception rests upon certain objective data of undisputed probative value. First of all, the investigation of human nature reveals how the rational being, unlike other living creatures, is born in need of assistance, which must be prolonged for a long period before he reaches full physical, intellectual, and moral maturity. To supply this deficiency, nature organizes first the domestic society and secondly the public society, in order to integrate and empower him.

This necessity of integration is not adequately met by the family society. Neither the single individual nor the family is capable of organizing a moderately human existence, since man does not wish merely to live, but also wishes to perfect himself, to progress, to expand his dominion over the earth, to improve his own conditions of life. This is the reason that induces both the individual and the family to leave their isolation and to insert themselves into the social aggregate. At the bottom of every social movement lies the desire to provide for one's own needs, to find conditions of greater well-being, to ease the path toward the attainment of perfection. These objective data, furnished by the investigation of human nature and its fundamental aspirations, suggest the inevitable conclusion that social life tends to nothing other than to integrate man, procuring for him the means necessary for his full development, which is equivalent to saying that society has as its essential end the common good.

Having demonstrated the rationality of the theory that places the end of the State in the common good, it is appropriate to determine its concept more precisely. For this it suffices to turn to the motive cause of the instinct of solidarity and to deduce its consequences. From its analysis it results, in the first place, that the common good is a universal good in a double sense: in the sense that it must be equitably distributed among all the members of the body politic, in a proportion adequate to their contribution toward realizing it, without privileges of caste, of party, of factions, and the like; and further in the sense that it embraces all particular goods, useful and necessary to create that perfect sufficiency of life which allows man to attain his own perfection. The impulse of solidarity is in fact stimulated by the pressing needs of human life, which each person intends to satisfy, collaborating on his part in the creation of the conditions favorable to this. The good that results is a collective effect, and belongs to every single member, who possesses the inalienable right to feel it flow back upon himself to the extent that he has contributed to creating it.

Moreover, social life is destined to integrate man in his natural deficiencies, reaching with its providence and its action there where individual and family action cannot reach. Society must therefore possess all the means necessary for the fulfillment of this office.

In the second place, the same analysis reveals the common good as an integrative good. Its office is to help the subjects of the social unity in that which they cannot attain through private activity, supplying their impotence only within the radius in which this manifests itself and not beyond. As has been said, nature produces the social being because only through collaboration is it possible to obtain certain particular goods necessary for man's full development. The common good, therefore, is not sought as a substitute for individual and family action, but as a supplementary element that reinforces the one and the other without paralyzing it, and consequently remains circumscribed within the sector where neither the family nor the individual is sufficient.

A third characteristic of the common good, which is deduced from the same source, consists in this, that such a good is temporal and external, insofar as it remains solely confined to the present life, to man's earthly happiness and material prosperity. The transcendent end is the work of the free will of each single individual, who is the direct builder of his own otherworldly future and of his interior perfection in the supernatural order, in the acquisition of which he is aided by forces other than purely human ones. Social activity can only influence this sector indirectly, removing obstacles, defending moral principles and religious conceptions, never directly as a creator of such transcendent values.

Finally, the common good is a good subordinate to morality, to whose supreme directives it must conform. Through social life nature does not intend to subvert the order of values; it aims rather to sustain it, facilitating for each individual the acquisition of those moral habits that will make the fulfillment of his own duties easier for him. Nor does man, in entering into the political organization, intend that his dignity be diminished, a dignity that is affirmed principally in acting according to the dictates of reason and the principles of the moral conscience. As morality constitutes the characteristic mark of every human good, so it is an integral mark of the concept of the common good, which must remain subordinate to it in all its aspects and realizations on behalf of the person and the collectivity.

III. ELEMENTS OF THE COMMON GOOD

The common good is shown to be composed of very varied elements, which, interweaving, overlapping and integrating with one another, combine to form that prosperity, well-being and earthly happiness whose attainment induces man to accept the burdens of collaboration in the political entity. It will suffice merely to mention the most important ones, that is, those without which, in no case, social life could attain the ends assigned to it by the order of nature.

A first factor of the common good is the internal order of civil coexistence, since social life, and consequently its well-being, does not result from a casual and mechanical, temporary and accidental coming together of certain subjects, but from a spiritual, permanent and necessary union. Without this interior unity, without this spiritual cohesion, there is no social being, and still less can there be a perfection that spreads throughout the whole organism. In the social entity one must distinguish a twofold perfection, in being and in acting. The first consists in the concord of the members, so that the more internally one the social organism is, the more entitative perfection it possesses and the more effective it will prove in realizing the common good. Now it is evident that, in order to have such a unity, to preserve it and strengthen it, order is necessary, an order resulting from the harmonious distribution of tasks, from the fulfillment of duty by each one, from the contribution of all to the common end and, negatively, from the absence of discords and civil conflicts that disturb the regular development of social life.

A second factor of the common good is truth and moral good. The social order is an essentially human order, which consequently cannot be formed and maintained without the influence of the true and the good upon man's higher faculties. The more prosperity and tranquility a political aggregate will enjoy in the development of its life, the more its members will possess of truth and will have a clear and distinct knowledge of the norms of morality, by which their private and public life must be constantly governed and directed. One of the principal ends of the State is, therefore, the diffusion of culture — not of any culture, but of that which, informed and illuminated by the radiant light of the great principles of truth, serves to elevate mentally and morally the mass of citizens, giving them knowledge of the ends of civil life and awareness of their duties.

This is required by the moral essence of the common good, which, being a human good, that is, a good of the rational creature, who in all the conscious manifestations of his life, private and public, is subject to the supreme laws of morality, must necessarily rest upon those same laws and contain that measure of moral good which serves to satisfy his aspirations toward perfection.

To these elements of a spiritual nature must still be added another of no less importance than the preceding ones, and this consists in the juridical order, furnished with coercive sanction, to which belongs the delicate office of directing private activity, protecting the rights of individuals and of the collectivity, compelling the unruly to fulfill their duty and restoring justice. The necessity of a juridical order for the well-being of society has been denied only by anarchical tendencies. Admitted unanimously, outside the Catholic tradition it has nevertheless erred by excess, overvaluing this special function of the State, and by defect, on the part of liberalism, which claimed to assign to social life as its sole end the determination of law and its protection.

But if one must deny that the common good can result from the mere protection of law, because of the narrowness of the conception, one cannot fail to accept the part of truth that it contains. In fact, the relations that men weave within the collective entity are relations between equal subjects, who render services and receive reciprocation for them, according to a well-known equilibrating law called justice. Essential therefore to the common good is a juridical order that determines, imposes and protects this law. Moreover, man carries intimately connected with his being as a person certain innate rights, which he neither intends nor can alienate upon entering a social aggregate, but wishes to preserve and indeed to see protected in their possession and use. Otherwise social life would not be for him a desirable good, but an evil to be fled. Therefore the common good cannot exist if these fundamental rights are not recognized, preserved and suitably protected, whence the necessity of a juridical order furnished with coercive power.

Among the subjective rights that the juridical order must protect, the most important and fundamental is that of liberty, since without liberty all the other rights become meaningless, being unable to be exercised by the subject who possesses them. Liberty moreover, and its exercise within the limits of the moral law, makes man's life worthy, a life which without it would not humanly deserve to be lived.

Nevertheless, in order to have fully before one's eyes the panorama over which the common good extends, it is necessary to broaden its scope still further. For one must not forget that one of its principal notes consists in being a good integrative of the human person. Precisely because of this characteristic of its own, it cannot be restricted, as has been noted, to the protection of law, but extends to so many other goods necessary for the complete development of the human person.

Such goods can be condensed into a comprehensive formula, saying that the common good consists in public prosperity, sufficiency of life and temporal happiness, for whose realization social life must be capable of furnishing the necessary means. This well-being moreover, prosperity and the relative temporal happiness, is the effect of various particular elements, of which it would be lengthy and superfluous to attempt even an incomplete description. It will be, among other things, the task of the State to aid private initiative, to provide for the health of the public economy, to improve the sanitary conditions of the country, to offer greater possibilities of profitable work and to facilitate the employment of labor, to build roads, bridges, canals, to reclaim uncultivated lands, to erect public shelters for beggary and refuges for sorrow, in short to strive so that the standard of life of the people may reach a degree of well-being in conformity with the general progress of civilization.

Understood in the sense described thus far, the common good is not that abstract concept against which empiricist and relativist theories are wont to hurl themselves, but a very concrete reality, multiform in its aspects and yet such as to direct the action of society, to which it assigns the immediate ends to which it must be directed, and at the same time the exact boundaries of its influence, so that it may prove profitable to the collectivity.

IV. SUBJECT OF THE COMMON GOOD

The subject for whose benefit the common good must redound is the human person, who, just as she stands at the beginning of social life, of which she is the conscious and free cause, so too stands at the ultimate end of its activity. Modern theories do not hold this view; having hypostatized public society, conceiving it as a self-standing entity-person, they have then denied the intrinsic and transcendent value of the person, converting her into an instrument or means at the service of the ends of the collectivity. In such conceptions — exceedingly varied in their systematic texture, yet in agreement in the hypertrophic swelling of the State and its power — the good to which society ought to attend would be merely the egoistic interest of the State, for which nothing would forbid that the individual and even entire generations be sacrificed, with no other justification than the good of the abstract entity called State, nation or class.

The gross error that lurks in such ideologies is laid bare as soon as the mind turns back upon human reality and deduces from it the consequences that follow. For if one regards real life, full and normal, it, as a subjective disposition, wills and seeks in the common good the fulfillment of private good. Man, in feeling himself drawn toward society, regards it first and instinctively from the side that touches him most closely and interests him, seeing between the social good and his own self an intimate correlation, whereby the good of society is first of all his own, and for this reason he seeks it.

Man, then, begins to love and desire society, at first for the good he expects from it, for the increase of the means he can obtain from it, for the greater ease of attaining perfection and happiness; and only in a second phase does this interested love rise to a higher plane, converting itself into a disinterested love and pursuit of the common good for its own sake. Now this natural desire of man to feel himself completed by the social body would be vain, if the common good were not destined to flow back upon him, to satisfy his innate aspirations, which spontaneously lead him to social life. When therefore it is said that the individual is for the common good of society, the formula must immediately be completed by adding that the common good is for the human person.

The common good cannot therefore be an abstract good of an abstract entity, nor the egoistic good of the social entity arbitrarily torn from its members; it cannot consist in the realization of ends wholly extraneous to individuals, nor can it ever issue in their total sacrifice; but it is and must be a concrete good, which expands throughout the whole social organism, giving to each cell oxygen and nourishment and stimulating its life and activity. And this shines, if possible, with greater light, if one reflects for a moment how, in the last analysis, the agents of the common good are all members of the collectivity, intelligent beings gathered in communion of intent and fusion of will, straining toward the same goal and setting in motion the physical and spiritual energies of the subjects, who pour their contribution into the common treasury. If the person is the true creator of the common good, it seems altogether obvious that it must return to its productive cause, to the extent that this has cooperated in its production. The common good, at least in its preponderant part, is destined to flow back into the generation that produces it and collaborates in it.

In every age the individual and the social, the needs of man and the demands of society, must be tempered and harmonized at a just point of equilibrium, which consists in the preeminent value of the person who, if as part of an organic whole she is bound to render her services for the creation of public prosperity and its progressive increase, as a rational entity, with an end that transcends the limits of time, subordinates to herself and to this end the common good. In this way the social circle closes: man, who is the immediate source, the artificer and the ingenious and indefatigable builder of the common good, is still its proximate term, the noble, spiritual and immortal subject upon which it flows back, to crown his aspirations and satisfy the needs that have impelled him toward the ideal of social life.

Antonio Messinco