Common Good

COMMON GOOD. – The concept of the c. g. is of fundamental importance in Catholic sociology, which recognizes in it the essential and immanent end of society and the supreme criterion serving to determine the scope 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 discussing the preliminary question of whether or not the social organism has a natural end, and then establishing its elements and the ultimate subject to whom 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 this end as the c. g.; 3) the elements constituting it; 4) the ultimate subject whose benefit it must serve.

I. EXISTENCE OF A NATURAL SOCIAL END

The fundamental importance of the question concerning the ends which public society is called upon to pursue was intuited by Jellinek, who writes: “without knowledge of these aims, a complete science of the State is impossible. A purely formal definition of the State, which entirely disregards its purpose, can never provide us with a perfect image of the State” (The General Theory of the State, p. 453). Nevertheless, the same author does not hesitate, a few pages earlier, to assert that the State has no intrinsic, natural, and objective purpose, and that a question concerning this would be pointless, since no answer could be given to it through empirical inquiry.

In excluding an objective purpose of the State, agreement is found both among theorists inspired by idealism, such as Jellinek, and among those who construct their theory upon materialist or mechanistic principles. In the idealist conception, it is impossible to determine an aim for the State, since it would be absurd to assign to the absolute—as the State appears to every idealist—a goal outside itself, toward which it would be obliged to strive. One must not confuse the State with civil society, Hegel warns, nor place “its determination in the security and protection of property and personal liberty,” assigning as its ultimate end the interest of the individual, since, being the State objective spirit, truth, and morality, it must not serve the individual; rather, the individual must serve the State (Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, p. 211).

Positivism and materialism arrive at the same conclusion. According to all the theories conforming to the principles affirmed by these two currents, social life would be nothing other than an effect of natural forces, operating with the necessity of cosmic elements, outside all teleology—which, even if it existed hypothetically, could not be an object of investigation for positive science, being foreign to every metaphysical question. “The problem,” Jellinek rightly observed, “whether an organism has any purpose whatsoever in relation to something outside it is, from the empirical-naturalistic point of view, inadmissible” (The General Theory of the State, p. 451). This opinion is shared by the theorists of absolutism: Machiavelli, Treitschke.

All the tendencies which, beginning in the eighteenth century, undertook to reformulate the doctrine of the State upon new foundations are then united in asserting 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, by then definitively set aside, and, on the other, would prove incomprehensible within the evolutionary historicism and radical relativism to which the modern mentality has surrendered. Ranelletti, one of the representatives of this mentality, asserts that no answer can be given to the question of what the purpose of the State is, since the State “in the strength of its power of command can include every human activity within the sphere of its action, and regulate and dominate the entire life of the people by its will. Its purposes may therefore vary from country to country, from time to time, according to the tasks which it believes it should undertake in each society, in relation to collective needs, during the historical period in question” (Institutions of Public Law, p. 31).

But a theory of the State which disregards every teleological element is impossible, as Jellinek himself observes; hence every form of empiricism ultimately encounters 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 of which might be called maximalist and the other minimalist. According to the former, to which belong idealism as well as historicism, biologism, and positivism in all their forms, the State would justify itself, possessing the ultimate reason for its existence in its own inner constitution; consequently, it could have no end other than itself—its power and its assertion and expansion—to which all aspects of social life should remain subordinate. The second, represented chiefly by the liberal conception, reduces the purpose of the State to a minimum, assigning public society the exclusive task of safeguarding the juridical order, in order to ensure the spontaneous interplay of conflicting liberties. This is the theory of Kant and of Lassalle’s police-state.

The Catholic conception stands at the opposite pole. The authoritative teaching of the recent Pontiffs reiterates the essential points of traditional doctrine, insisting upon the existence of a natural end of civil society and identifying this end with the b. c. of the col-

lectivity. Pius XII, in his Christmas message of 1942, expressed himself as follows: “Reason, enlightened 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 matter, that all the activity of the State, political and economic, serves the lasting realization of the b. c., that is, of those external conditions which are necessary for the body of citizens for the development of their qualities and functions, and 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 “everything that is perfectly sufficient for life,” since “the ultimate reason for the power of those who govern is the protection of the b. c.” Pius XI insisted even more extensively upon the same concept. In Divini Redemptoris he teaches: “God has at the same time ordained man for civil society, which is demanded by his very nature. In the Creator’s plan, society is a natural means of which man can and must avail himself 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 employ, now giving and now receiving, for his own good and that of others.” The same thought recurs in Pius XII’s Summi Pontificatus, where it is stated that “civil sovereignty was willed by the Creator so that it might regulate social life, make it easier for the human person, in the temporal order, to attain 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 all admit without distinction after the definitive decline of contractualism. Now these forces can be neither physical nor biological, nor exclusively environmental; nor can they exert deterministic pressure upon man, since the rational entity which constitutes the matter to be reduced to political unity is a spiritual being, which does not proceed to action except through the prior exercise of its higher faculties. The social entity is therefore a natural effect proceeding from the spiritual activity of its members. Once this principle is established—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 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 if, 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 significance when related to the subject who, by following the inclination of nature, must initiate social life. This subject is man, who does not set himself to action unless the intellect has first known and weighed an end as the object and terminus of the will. The instinct of sociability, therefore, could exercise no influence whatever on man unless it were elevated to the plane of the spirit, becoming an impulse and movement whose ultimate term is fully conscious, and it would remain without effect if the light of its intrinsic finality were not projected 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 its own end, so too does civil society.

This end is essential insofar as it springs from the intimate constitution of social reality, of which it is a constituent element, as a necessary part of its adequate concept and a specific characteristic distinguishing it from any other necessary or voluntary human association. For this very reason it is also universal, that is, proper to every political aggregate. It is moreover intrinsic or immanent, insofar 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 END CONSISTS IN THE COMMON GOOD

This is the traditional doctrine of Catholic thought, unanimously reaffirmed, as already indicated, by the latest pontifical documents of Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Pius XII.
Looking back beyond the centuries of rationalism and positivism, the same doctrine was predominant among professional philosophers and jurists. The democratic conception of power, which held sway until the emergence of modern statist theories, implicitly contains the 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 at the time of royal absolutism, for example by Bodin, the spirit of traditional thought is revealed in the subordination of power to natural law. What is said of Bodin applies to the vast majority of theorists, with the exception of Machiavelli and Guicciardini.

In the Catholic sphere, Suárez, in the full sixteenth century, assigns to legislative power as its purpose “the natural happiness of the perfect human community, of which it has charge, and of individual human beings, insofar as they are members of such a community” (De Legibus, III, chap. 2, no. 7). And St. Thomas, addressing the same subject, affirms that the law primo et principaliter concerns the order directed toward 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, through Aquinas, one traces the doctrine back to the social teaching Aristotle (v.).

The Catholic conception rests upon certain objective facts of undisputed probative value. First of all, inquiry into human nature reveals that the rational being, unlike other living creatures, is born in need of assistance, which must continue for a long period before he reaches full physical, intellectual, and moral maturity. To remedy this deficiency, nature first organizes domestic society and, second, public society, in order to complete and strengthen him.

This need for completion is not adequately met by family society. Neither the individual nor the family is capable of organizing a moderately human existence, since man does not merely wish to live, but also wishes to perfect himself, progress, extend his dominion over the earth, and improve his living conditions. This is what induces both the individual and the family to emerge from isolation and enter into the social aggregate. At the foundation of every social movement lies the desire to provide for one’s needs, to find conditions of greater well-being, and to facilitate the path toward perfection. These objective facts, supplied by inquiry into human nature and its fundamental aspirations, suggest the

inevitable conclusion that social life tends toward nothing other than the completion of man, by providing him with the means necessary for his full development; which is equivalent to saying that society has the common good as its essential end.

Having demonstrated the rationality of the theory that locates the end of the State in the common good, it is appropriate to determine its concept more precisely. For this purpose, it suffices to turn to the motivating cause of the instinct of solidarity and deduce its consequences. Its analysis shows, first, that the common good is a universal good in a twofold sense: in the sense that it must be equitably distributed among all the members of the political body, in proportion appropriate to their contribution toward bringing it about, without privileges of caste, party, factions, or the like; and also in the sense that it embraces all particular goods, useful and necessary for creating that complete sufficiency of life which enables man to attain his own perfection. The impulse toward solidarity is in fact stimulated by the pressing needs of human life, which each person seeks to satisfy by contributing his share to the creation of the conditions favorable to this end. The good that results is a collective effect, and belongs to every individual member, who possesses the inalienable right to feel it flow back upon himself in the measure in which he has contributed to creating II.
Moreover, social life is destined to complete man in his natural deficiencies, reaching through its providence and action where individual and family action cannot reach. Society must therefore possess all the means necessary for fulfilling this function.

Secondly, the same analysis reveals the common good as an integrative good. Its function is to assist the subjects of the social unity in what they cannot achieve through private activity, making up for their inability only within the sphere in which it manifests itself and no further. As has been said, nature produces the social being because only through cooperation 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 strengthens both without paralyzing them; consequently, it remains confined to the sphere in which neither family nor individual is sufficient.

A third characteristic of the common good, deduced from the same source, consists in its being temporal and external, insofar as it is confined exclusively to the present life, to man’s earthly happiness and material prosperity. The transcendent end is the work of the free will of each individual, who is the direct architect of his hereafter and of his inner perfection in the supernatural order; in acquiring this perfection, he is assisted by forces other than those that are purely human. Social activity can influence this sphere only indirectly, by removing obstacles, defending moral principles and religious conceptions, but never directly as the creator of such transcendent values.

Finally, the common good is a good subordinated to morality, whose supreme directives it must follow. Through social life, nature does not intend to overturn the order of values; rather, it aims to uphold it, facilitating for each individual the acquisition of those moral habits that will make the fulfillment of his duties easier. Nor, in becoming part of the political organization, does man intend that his dignity be diminished, a dignity affirmed above all in acting according to the dictates of reason and the principles of moral conscience. Just as morality constitutes the distinctive mark of every human good, so it is an integral note of the concept of the common good, which must remain subordinate to it in all its aspects and implementations for the benefit of the person and the community.
III. ELEMENTS OF THE B. C. — The b. c. manifests itself as composed of very diverse elements which, interweaving, overlapping, and supplementing one another, combine to form that prosperity, well-being, and earthly happiness whose attainment induces man to accept the burdens of collaboration within the political entity. It will suffice merely to mention the most important of them, namely, those without which, under any circumstances, social life could not attain the ends assigned to it by the order of nature.

A first factor of the b. c. is the internal order of civil coexistence, since social life, and consequently its well-being, do not result from a casual and mechanical, temporary and accidental association of certain individuals, but from a spiritual, permanent, and necessary union. Without this inner unity, without this spiritual cohesion, there is no social being, and still less can there be a perfection that extends throughout the entire organism. In the social entity, a twofold perfection must be distinguished: in being and in activity. The former consists in the concord of the members, so that the more internally unified the social organism is, the greater its entitative perfection and the more effective it will prove in realizing the b. c. It is evident, then, that in order to possess such unity, and to preserve and strengthen it, order is necessary—order resulting from the harmonious distribution of functions, from the fulfillment of duty by each person, from the contribution of all to the common end, and, negatively, from the absence of civil discord and rivalries that disturb the regular course of social life.

A second factor of the b. c. is truth and moral goodness. The social order is an essentially human order and consequently cannot be formed and maintained without the influence of truth and goodness upon man’s higher faculties. A political community will enjoy all the greater prosperity and tranquility in the conduct of its life the more its members possess truth and have a clear and precise knowledge of the norms of morality, by which their private and public lives must constantly be governed and directed. One of the principal ends of the State is therefore the dissemination of culture—not just any culture, but one informed and illumined by the radiant light of the great principles of truth, which may serve to elevate the masses of citizens intellectually and morally, giving them knowledge of the ends of civil life and awareness of their duties.

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

To these elements of a spiritual nature, another must still be added, no less important than those preceding it: the juridical order, endowed with coercive sanction. This order has the delicate task of directing private activity, safeguarding the rights of individuals and of the community, compelling the recalcitrant to fulfill their duty, and restoring justice. The necessity of a juridical order for the well-being of society has been denied only by anarchist tendencies. Although unanimously admitted, outside the Catholic tradition this necessity has nevertheless been treated excessively in one direction, through an overvaluation of this special function of the State, and deficiently in another, on the part of liberalism, which has sought to assign to social life as its sole end the determination of law and its protection.

But although it must be denied that the b. c. can result from the mere protection of rights, because of the narrowness of such a conception, one cannot fail to accept the element of truth that it contains. Indeed, the relations that men establish within the collective entity are relations between equal subjects, who render services and receive compensation for them according to a well-known balancing law called justice. A juridical order that determines, imposes, and safeguards this right is therefore essential to the b. c. Moreover, man bears intimately bound up with his being as a person certain inborn rights which he neither intends nor is able to alienate upon becoming part of a social community, but wishes to preserve and, indeed, to see protected in their possession and exercise. Otherwise, social life would not be a desirable good for him, but an evil to be avoided. The b. c. therefore cannot exist if these fundamental rights are not recognized, preserved, and suitably protected; hence the necessity of a juridical order endowed with coercive force.

Among the subjective rights that the juridical order must protect, the most important and fundamental is liberty, since without liberty all other rights become meaningless, for they cannot be exercised by the subject who possesses them. Moreover, liberty and its exercise within the limits of the moral law render human life worthy; without them, it would not deserve, in human terms, to be lived.

Yet, in order to have the entire panorama over which the b. c. extends before our eyes, its scope must be broadened further. One must not forget, in fact, that one of its principal characteristics consists in being an integrative good of the human person. Precisely because of this characteristic, it cannot be restricted, as has been noted, to the protection of rights, but extends to many other goods necessary for the complete development of the human person.

These goods may be condensed into a comprehensive formula by saying that the b. c. consists in public prosperity, sufficiency of life, and temporal happiness, for whose realization social life must be able to provide the necessary means. This well-being, prosperity, and relative temporal happiness are in turn the effect of various particular elements, the description of which, even if incomplete, would be lengthy and superfluous to attempt. Among other things, it will be the task of the State to assist private initiative, provide for the soundness of the public economy, improve the country’s sanitary conditions, offer greater opportunities for gainful employment and facilitate the use of labor, construct roads, bridges, and canals, reclaim uncultivated lands, establish public shelters for beggars and hospices for the afflicted—in short, to strive so that the standard of living of the people may attain a degree of well-being corresponding to the general progress of civilization.

Understood in the sense described thus far, the b. c. is not that abstract concept against which empiricist and relativist theories habitually inveigh, but a decidedly concrete reality, multiform in its aspects and nevertheless capable of directing the action of society, to which it assigns the immediate aims toward which that action must be directed, together with the precise limits of its influence, so that it may prove beneficial to the community.
IV. SUBJECT OF THE B. C. — The subject for whose benefit the b. c. must redound is the human person, who, just as he stands at the beginning of social life, of which he is the conscious and free cause, likewise stands at the ultimate end of its activity. Modern theories do not hold this view; having hypostatized public society and conceived it as an autonomous entity-person existing in itself, they have subsequently denied the intrinsic and transcendent value of the person, converting him into an instrument or means at the service of the ends of the collectivity. In such conceptions, extraordinarily varied in their systematic structure but united in the hypertrophic swelling of the State and its power, the good which society ought to provide would be merely the egoistic interest of the State, for which nothing would preclude the individual, and even entire generations, from being sacrificed, without any justification other than the good of the abstract entity called the State, nation, or class.

The gross error lurking in such ideologies is laid bare as soon as the mind turns back to human reality and draws the proper consequences from II. For if one considers real, full, and normal life, then, as a subjective disposition, it wills and seeks in the b. c. the fulfillment of private good. When man feels himself drawn toward society, he first and instinctively regards it from the aspect that touches and interests him most closely, seeing an intimate correlation between the social good and his own self, whereby the good of society is above all his own good, and for this reason he seeks II.
Man therefore begins to love and desire society, initially because of the good he expects from it, because of the increase in the means he can obtain through it, and because of the greater ease with which he can attain perfection and happiness; only in a second phase does this self-interested love rise to a higher plane, becoming disinterested love and pursuit of the b. c. for its own sake. Now this natural desire of man to feel himself completed by the social body would be vain if the b. c. were not destined to flow back upon him, satisfying the innate aspirations that spontaneously lead him to social life. Therefore, when it is said that the individual exists for the b. c. of society, the formula must immediately be completed by adding that the b. c. exists for the human person.

The b. c. cannot therefore be an abstract good of an abstract entity, nor the egoistic good of the social entity arbitrarily detached from its members; it cannot consist in the realization of ends wholly foreign to individuals, nor can it ever culminate in their total sacrifice. Rather, it is and must be a concrete good that extends throughout the entire social organism, giving each cell oxygen and nourishment and stimulating its life and activity. This becomes even clearer, if possible, upon reflecting briefly that, in the final analysis, the agents of the b. c. are all members of the collectivity: intelligent beings gathered in a communion of aims and a fusion of wills, directed toward the same goal, 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 b. c., it seems entirely obvious that it must return to its productive cause, in proportion to the extent to which that cause has cooperated in its production. The b. c., at least in predominant part, is destined to flow back into the generation that produces it and collaborates in II.
At all times the individual and the social, human needs and the demands of society, must be reconciled and harmonized at a proper point of equilibrium. This consists in the pre-eminent value of the person who, as part of an organic whole, is required to render his services for the creation and progressive increase of public prosperity, but who, as a rational being with an end transcending the limits of time, subordinates the b. c. to himself and to this end. Thus the social circle is closed: man, who is the immediate source, the artificer, and the ingenious and tireless builder of the b. c., is also its proximate end, its noble, spiritual, and immortal subject, upon whom it pours itself out in order to crown his aspirations and satisfy the needs that have driven him toward the ideal of social life.