The classic example of a public good in modern economics is the lighthouse. Its beam sweeps the harbor and is seen by every ship at at sail or at anchor. No ship’s use of the light leaves less for another. It is a good that is not diminished when shared.
That last phrase should sound familiar to anyone who followed the debate over the “common good” raged across X this past week. It was offered up, nearly verbatim, as a definition of the common good itself. But a definition that cannot distinguish the common good from a lighthouse has mistaken a part for the whole and ignored more than two millennia of philosophical and theological reflection in the Christian West.
That conviction is at the heart of my essay published Sunday in The Dispatch‘s Dispatch Faith newsletter, “The New Right Is Wrong About the ‘Common Good.’”
The Catholic Church has engaged in a rich, sustained reflection on the common good for some 2,000 years. The Catechism, quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et spes, defines it as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.” And it names three essential elements: respect for the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person, the social well-being and development of the group, and the stability and security of a just order.
Note what comes first. Any honest grappling with the common good must include a serious commitment to the rights of the human person as a part of and not an obstacle to its realization. This is why the “zero-sum dispute” between the common good and individual liberty, so confidently framed by voices on the new right, dissolves under examination. As Lord Acton observed, the Catholic notion of liberty “denies that general interests can supersede individual rights.” When postliberals celebrate Franco’s regime or argue for the military occupation of American cities, they do not defend the common good. They discredit it.
After the essay published, I had a thought-provoking exchange on X with Ken Craycraft, professor of moral theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Cincinnati, who shared with me his own recent column in The Boston Pilot, “What is the ‘common good,’ anyway?”
Readers of both pieces will find a lot of convergence. Craycraft and I draw from the same wells: Gaudium et spes, the Catechism, and the four permanent principles of Catholic social doctrine: human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. He rightly insists that the common good cannot be reduced to a calculation or spreadsheet, and his list of policies incompatible with human flourishing includes restrictions on freedom of religion, assembly, and travel.
Where we differ is in diagnosis and emphasis. Craycraft sees the recent debate as driven by classical liberals and libertarians who equate the common good with totalitarian collectivism. My concern runs in the other direction: not that the common good is invoked too often, but that it is invoked too thinly and even cynically.
Read the full essay at The Dispatch, and Kenneth Craycraft’s column at The Boston Pilot.
Thanks so much for this, Dan. Very well argued. Not surprisingly. I do think there's room for a common good argument, but it has to be rooted in Cicero and Aquinas.