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In philosophy, ethics, and political science, the common good (also common wealth or common weal) is a philosophical term of art referring to either what is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community, or alternatively, what is achieved by citizenship, collective action, and active participation in the public realm of politics and public service. Concepts of the common good vary significantly among philosophical doctrines.

Definition
Most conceptions of the common good fall into one of two families: substantive and procedural. According to substantive conceptions, the common good is what is shared by and beneficial to all or most members of a given community: particular substantive conceptions will specify precisely what factors or values are beneficial and shared. According to the procedural formulation, by contrast, the common good consists in the outcome that is achieved through collective participation in the formation of a shared will.

In the History of Moral and Political Thought
Early conceptions of the common good were set out by Ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato. In the sixteenth century, the common good played an important role in Niccolò Machiavelli’s political philosophy.

Plato/Aristotle - politics aims at the [common] good

Machiavelli, Discourses

Rousseau -- “general will”

Mandeville -- private vices to public benefits

Smith -- “invisible hand”

Marx -- [under socialism], “the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”

In Mill's utilitarianism,

Rawls -- “veil of ignorance”

Habermas -– “generalizable interests”

In Political Economic Theory
In economics, the terms “public good” and “common good” have technical definitions. A public good is a good that is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. A common good is simply non-excludable. A simple typology illustrates the distinctions between various kinds of goods:

The field of welfare economics studies social well-being. The approach begins with the specification of a social welfare function. The choice of a social welfare function is rooted in an ethical theory. A utilitarian social welfare function weights the well-being of each individual equally, while a Rawlsian social welfare function only considers the welfare of the least well-off individual.

Neoclassical economic theory provides two conflicting lenses for thinking about the genesis of the common good, two distinct sets of microfoundations. On one view, the common good arises due to social gains from cooperation. Such a view might appeal to the Prisoner’s Dilemma to illustrate how cooperation can result in superior welfare outcomes. Moreover, a cooperative equilibrium is stable in an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Under these conditions, an individual does best by pursuing the course of action that is also optimal for society.

On the other hand, economic theory typically points to social gains from competition as a rationale for the use of markets. Thus, Smith described the “invisible hand,” whereby the mechanism of the market converts individuals’ self-interested activity into gains for society. However, economic theory also points to market failures, including the underprovision of public goods by markets and the failure of self-interested individuals to internalize externalities. Because of these factors, purely self-interested behavior often detracts from the common good.

Social Choice Theory
Social choice theory studies collective decision rules. Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, an important result in social choice theory, states that no aggregative mechanism of collective choice (restricted to ordinal inputs) can consistently transform individual preferences into a collective preference-ordering, across the universal domain of possible preference profiles, while also satisfying a set of minimal normative criteria of rationality and fairness. According to William Riker, ...

More recent work in social choice theory, however, has demonstrated that Arrow's impossibility result can be obviated at little or no normative cost.

Public Choice Theory
Public choice theory applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests inform political activities. Whereas welfare economics, in line with classical political economy, typically assumes a public-interest perspective on policymaking, public choice analysis adopts a private-interest perspective in order to identify how the objectives of policymakers affect policy outcomes. Public choice analysis thus diagnoses deviations from the common good resulting from activities such as rent-seeking.

In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson …

Anthony Downs Elinor Ostrom

In Democratic Theory
In deliberative democratic theory, …

CITE: Jon Elster, “The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory,” in Philosophy and Democracy, ed. T. Christiano, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Welfarism
Welfarism is the view that the only factors relevant to determining the common good are individual utilities.

Amartya Sen criticizes welfarism …

Aggregation
One philosophical tradition of thinking about the common good disputes whether it can be reduced to constituent individual goods.

Existence of the Common Good
William Riker distinguishes between “liberal” and “populist” conceptions of democracy. According to Riker, a “populist” or “Rousseauistic” conception of democracy identifies the realization of the common good as the criterion of democracy. Riker argues that Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem “forces us to doubt that the content of 'social welfare' or the 'public interest' can ever be discovered by amalgamating individual value judgments. It even leads us to suspect that no such thing as the 'public interest' exists, aside from the subjective (and hence dubious) claims of self-proclaimed saviors.” Thus, Riker defends a “liberal” conception of democracy, which centers on the role of constitutional checks on government. Public choice theorists have tended to share this approach. Buchanan and Tullock pursued this program in developing the field of "constitutional political economy" in their book The Calculus of Consent.

While the common good often functions as a regulative ideal in critical theory, critical theorists generally focus on the subversion of the common good due to various mechanisms of domination. One such vehicle is ideology.

Catholic social teaching
One of the earliest references in Christian literature to the concept of the common good is found in the Epistle of Barnabas: "Do not live entirely isolated, having retreated into yourselves, as if you were already [fully] justified, but gather instead to seek together the common good."

The concept is strongly present in Augustine of Hippo's magnum opus City of God. Book XIX of this, the main locus of Augustine's normative political thought, is focused on the question, 'Is the good life social?' In other words, 'Is human wellbeing found in the good of the whole society, the common good?' Chapters 5-17 of Book XIX address this question. Augustine's emphatic answer is yes (see start of chap. 5).

Augustine's understanding was taken up and, under the influence of Aristotle, developed by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas's conception of the common good became standard in Roman Catholic moral theology.

Against that background, the common good became a central concept in the modern tradition of Catholic social teaching, beginning with the foundational document, Rerum novarum, a papal encyclical by Pope Leo XIII, issued in 1891. This addressed the crisis of the conditions of industrial workers in Europe and argued for a position different from both laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. In this letter, Pope Leo guarantees the right to private property while insisting on the role of the state to require a living wage.

Contemporary Catholic social teaching on the common good is summarised in the 2004 Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, chapter 4, part II. Quoting the Second Vatican Council document, Gaudium et spes (1965), this says, "According to its primary and broadly accepted sense, the common good indicates 'the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily'" (#164, quoting Gaudium et spes, #26; italics original).

The Compendium later gives statements that communicate what can be seen as a partly different sense of the concept - as not only "social conditions" that enable persons to reach fulfilment, but as the end of goal of human life. "[T]he common good [is] the good of all people and of the whole person… The human person cannot find fulfilment in himself, that is, apart from the fact that he exists “with” others and “for” others" (#165; italics original). "The goal of life in society is in fact the historically attainable common good" (#168).

The Roman Catholic International Theological Commission drew attention to these two partly different understandings of the common good in its 2009 publication, In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law. It referred to them as "two levels" of the common good.

Another relevant document is Veritatis Splendor, a papal encyclical by Pope John Paul II, issued in 1993 to combat the relaxation of moral norms and the political corruption (see Paragraph 98) that affects millions of persons. In this letter, Pope John Paul describes the characteristics and virtues that political leadership should require, which are truthfullness, honesty, fairness, temperance and solidarity (as described in paragraph 98 to 100), given that truth extends from honesty, good faith, and sincerity in general, to agreement with fact or reality in particular.

Contemporary American usage
As regards contemporary American politics, the language of the common good (sometimes referred to as "public wealth") is increasingly being adopted by political actors of the progressive left to describe their values. Jonathan Dolhenty argues that one should distinguish between the common good, which may "be shared wholly by each individual in the family without its becoming a private good for any individual family member", and the collective good, which, "though possessed by all as a group, is not really participated in by the members of a group. It is actually divided up into several private goods when apportioned to the different individual members." First described by Michael Tomasky in The American Prospect magazine and John Halpin at the Center for American Progress, the political understanding of the common good has grown. The Take Back America Conference, the liberal magazine The Nation, and the Rockridge Institute have identified the common good as a salient political message for progressive candidates. More recently, the common good rhetoric is being used by political actors in an explicitly religious context, such as Kansans for Faithful Citizenship. In addition, non-partisan advocacy groups like Common Good, are also championing reform efforts to support the common good.