{"id":3295,"date":"2026-07-20T10:40:52","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:40:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=3295"},"modified":"2026-07-20T10:40:52","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T10:40:52","slug":"is-there-really-a-common-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=3295","title":{"rendered":"Is There Really a Common Good?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The new Democratic Socialists in America refer to the common good, or communist good, all the time.<\/p>

Read more Islam and America Are Incompatible<\/a><\/p>\n

Is there such a thing as \u201cthe common good\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0What is government\u2019s role in providing it?<\/p>\n

It seems that many arguments are made assuming such or referring to some broad abstract concept naming such.\u00a0\u00a0Often it appears to be the last defense of various forms of collectivism.<\/p>\n

What should we make of competing notions of the common good?\u00a0\u00a0Do we need one, or would it be better to just drop it from parlance and debate?\u00a0\u00a0Is it ideologically dependent or a self-evident truth?\u00a0\u00a0Or is it perhaps a myth?<\/p>\n

The answer differs significantly depending on which philosophical or political tradition you belong to, and which writings carry the most weight for you.\u00a0\u00a0The communist and socialist arguments of Marx and myriad latter day neo-Marxists depend on the vanguard of the proletariat and the stated goal of equality of outcomes.\u00a0\u00a0Most liberals think in terms of welfare and the benefits of progressive taxation to bring about various forms of social welfare.\u00a0\u00a0Utilitarians and pragmatists are less sanguine about the term and tend to shy away from it in favor of obtaining happiness or some kind of maximum efficiency.<\/p>\n

There are four historically distinct and major ways of thinking about the question.<\/p>\n

Classical tradition\u00a0<\/h1>\n

(associated with\u00a0Aristotle\u00a0and\u00a0Thomas Aquinas)<\/p>\n

In this ancient tradition, the common good is not merely the sum of individual interests.\u00a0\u00a0It consists of the social conditions that enable people to flourish together \u2014 justice, peace, trustworthy institutions, and shared moral norms.\u00a0\u00a0Individuals achieve their own good partly through participating in the larger political community.\u00a0\u00a0Catholic Social Teaching, based in Catholicism and papal encyclicals, is a large progenitor of this concept of common good, but it is denied by Protestants, who rebelled against Catholic hierarchy and corruption, creating their own Reformed tradition.<\/p>\n

Liberal tradition\u00a0<\/h1>\n

(associated with\u00a0John Locke\u00a0and later thinkers)<\/p>\n

Liberals have been skeptical that there is one substantive common good everyone shares.\u00a0\u00a0They think the state\u2019s role is primarily to protect individual rights and property and allow people to pursue their own conceptions of the good.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe common good\u201d often means maintaining fair rules rather than promoting some particular vision or normative program of human flourishing.<\/p>\n

Utilitarian tradition\u00a0<\/h1>\n

(associated with\u00a0Jeremy Bentham\u00a0and\u00a0John Stuart Mill)<\/p>\n

Here the common good is identified with maximizing overall welfare or human happiness.\u00a0\u00a0This can mean the sacrifice of the interests of minorities if doing so increases total welfare.\u00a0\u00a0A calculus is performed to decide what to do and what to avoid.<\/p>\n

Public Choice and Libertarian critiques<\/h1>\n

These advocates argue that appeals to the common good often mask the interests of particular groups.\u00a0\u00a0Politicians and bureaucrats may invoke the common good while pursuing power or serving well organized and narrow constituencies.\u00a0\u00a0This view is associated with thinkers such as\u00a0James Buchanan.<\/p>\n

In practice, truthfully, there are some things that almost everyone treats as common needs because they are difficult to provide individually or because everyone benefits from them.\u00a0\u00a0Examples include national defense, public safety, clean air and water, certain basic public health measures, the rule of law, and reliable infrastructure.\u00a0\u00a0The deeper disagreement is whether these examples point to a moral reality or are simply areas where individual interests happen to overlap or are agreed to be essential.<\/p>\n

So the question \u201cIs there really any such thing as the common good?\u201d has two answers.<\/p>

Read more More Evidence for Trump\u2019s \u2018Debunked\u2019 2020 Election Fraud Claims<\/a><\/p>\n

Empirically, yes.\u00a0\u00a0Every society seemingly depends on some, even if limited, shared goods and institutions that individuals cannot create or sustain alone.<\/p>\n

Philosophically, the idea remains contested.\u00a0\u00a0Some believe that the common good is an objective feature of political life; others think it is mainly a shorthand for overlapping private interests or a rhetorical concept that can be and is often misused.<\/p>\n

Whether the common good is \u201creal\u201d ultimately depends on whether you believe that human beings are fundamentally atomistic individuals who cooperate for mutual advantage or seen as members of larger communities whose flourishing is intrinsically interconnected.\u00a0\u00a0That difference in starting assumptions explains the enduring debate.<\/p>\n

The free-market economy is a key link between the technological project and the logic of modernity, especially the civil institutions of limited government and personal autonomy.\u00a0\u00a0That is because these civil institutions \u2014 and therefore the meaning of \u201cliberalism\u201d in the Anglo-American world, especially in the U.S. \u2014 is significantly different from its meaning in most of Western Europe (France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium \u2014 all formerly Catholic \u2014 and Germany).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

To begin with, most Europeans eschew what they call \u201csocial atomism\u201d in favor of a democratically arrived-at common good (indistinguishable in practice from a Rousseauian collective good or \u201cGeneral Will\u201d \u2014 thereby confusing it with what Rousseau meant by the \u201cmajority will\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0There is a deep-seated anti-clericalism (originally directed against the Church) and opposition to one-person or autocratic rule (Fascism, Nazism).\u00a0<\/p>\n

They understand a free-market economy, which they insist on describing by using the French expression\u00a0laissez-faire<\/em>, to be only one way to meet the economic needs of society, and it could or should, conceivably, be replaced by something better under certain circumstances.\u00a0\u00a0Continental liberalism is seemingly therefore compatible with socialism.<\/p>\n

In this regard, most Europeans are close to Bentham\u2019s implicit (yet confused) presumption of the compatibility with, if not reducibility of the individual good to a holistic social good.\u00a0\u00a0Continental academics, politicians, and bureaucrats believe that \u201centrepreneurship\u201d is a form of information that can be taught or forced.\u00a0\u00a0And Europeans generally mistrust the market and the entrepreneurs it produces.\u00a0\u00a0They want to confiscate wealth.<\/p>\n

However, a distrust of free-market economies is accompanied in Europe by lower achievements in technology, a more activist and interventionist government with its implicit socialism, a formalistic rule of law that subordinates law to politics under the notion of a collective good (enterprise association) as opposed to the primacy of individual autonomy (civil association), and the reduction of religious institutions to at best a branch of the welfare system.\u00a0\u00a0It has resulted in weaker economies, lack of growth, little charity, and a large role for the State.<\/p>\n

This is why the many notions of the common good are both incompatible and fallacious.\u00a0\u00a0We should be on guard and wary every time we hear its use and what it implies, since there isn\u2019t even agreement on what the good itself entails.<\/p>\n

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch, scholar-diplomat-strategist, was a professor at Yale and Oxford and is the author of twenty books, including <\/em>Common Sense Business.\u00a0\u00a0His academic work revolves around business virtues and corporate governance.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>

Read more Does the Filibuster Still Serve a Purpose?<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"Free<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Image via Pixabay.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new Democratic Socialists in America refer to the common good, or communist good, all the time. Read more Islam and America Are Incompatible Is there such a thing as \u201cthe common good\u201d?\u00a0\u00a0What is government\u2019s role in providing it? It seems that many arguments are made assuming such or referring to some broad abstract concept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics","category-economy"],"yoast_head":"\nIs There Really a Common Good? - Interstate Logistics Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=3295\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Is There Really a Common Good? - Interstate Logistics Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The new Democratic Socialists in America refer to the common good, or communist good, all the time. 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