Several took exception to my contention that there is no cause greater than a person; that a soldier, for example, does not give his life for a cause that is greater than he is. Four objections were raised. I will state them as I have understood them; please correct me if I have not caught the force of the arguments:
(1) If there is no cause greater than the individual person, then the result will be nihilism. If we can state the argument more formally: Proper order in society demands that individuals subordinate themselves to some cause or purpose that is greater than themselves.
(2) Colloquially understood, the statement "they have died for a cause greater than they are" means that immediate self-interest has been sacrificed for the sake of the common good. The common good is held to be greater than the self-interest of the individual. Note, however, that in this case the President's reference was to those who gave their lives for liberty. Might we therefore put the objection in this way: liberty is a common good that is of greater dignity than the life of an individual person.
(3) There is a cause greater than the individual person, which is the good of the many: the good of the many is a cause that is greater than the good of the individual person.
(4) The fourth objection might be stated thus: if there is no cause greater than the individual person, then there is no reason for sacrifice for the sake of another; the best that we can achieve is self-interest. Yet it would appear that people do sacrifice for the sake of others (e.g. soldiers in WWII). Therefore, we should say that there is a cause or purpose greater than the individual person.
Certainly, the tradition of the West (not just the Catholic tradition) asserts that there is a common good, and that the purpose of the political community is to advance the common good. Does this not mean, therefore, that the common good is a greater good than that of the individual person? I hold that it does not, and that the answer to each of the objections lies in what we understand by “common.”
If something is “common” it means that it applies first to all and then and therefore of necessity to each, and in essentially the same way. So, for example, to breathe is truly common to people: it applies to all of us insofar as we are human, and therefore and necessarily to each of us, and in the same way. (True, athletes will have trained themselves to breathe more effectively, but they nonetheless are participating in the same activity.) Similarly, everyone would acknowledge certain fundamental necessities for life - water, food, shelter and the like. These things are truly common.
Common in predication only. See the account given by Mike Augros. (This is developed at length by Charles De Koninck in his book on the primacy of the common good.)
There has also, in the past, been a broad consensus concerning goods that are not merely physical requirements for human life but that are also common. Rather than being necessary for sustaining our physical life, they are things that conduce to happiness, or to the flourishing of the person. So, every person requires an education, a measure of freedom, insofar as we have real agency in our relationships to others, recognition as a subject of relationship, and not merely an object, and so on. The particular manner in which these goods are expressed differs from person to person and from culture to culture, but the goods are common, in that they are first true of all and, necessarily therefore, of each.
What is the measure, then, of these common goods? Clearly, it is the human person. What constitutes something as “good?” Simply, that it is sought as conducive to the life or the happiness of the person. The person is the measure of the common good.This assertion - which is founded upon reason, and was taught by the pagan philosophers of the ancient world– is confirmed and amplified in the Catholic tradition:…There is a growing awareness of the sublime dignity of the human person, who stands above all things and whose rights and duties are universal and inviolable. …The social order and its development must constantly yield to the good of the person, since the order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around…. (Vatican Council II, Gaudium et Spes, 26)
The common good for society is therefore described as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (Gaudium et Spes, 26.) The person is the measure of the social order, and there is no such thing as a cause that is greater than a person.
The goods listed above are still common by predication, but not by causation. Fr. Sweeney then jumps to the definition of the common good given in GS and adopted in contemporary CST. What is the common good for De Koninck, St. Thomas, and Aristotle? The end which all members of a political community pursue, the good of the community as a whole. This is the "holistic" common good, as distinguished from the "aggregate" common good of Mark Murphy and the "instrumental" common good of John Finnis (and apparently of contemporary CST as well). The classical or traditional common good is the members of a community living together well. (De Koninck discusses at length how this good is both proper to the individual and yet a shared good.) The instrumental common good is arguably common by predication, as all benefit from that set of social conditions, but is it also common by causation? Do all seek to establish and preserve those social conditions necessary for the flourishing of individuals? It depends on what these social conditions are, but my guess is that if we come up with a complete list that it will be difficult to say that all are aiming to bring all of these conditions about.
Who is primarily responsible for ensuring these social conditions? The government. The citizenry may contribute money and follow the laws to bring these conditions about, but do they do so for all of the conditions? And do they seek to bring these conditions about at all times and places? Temporal discontinuity and a lack of complete attribution seem to invalidate the claim that the instrumental common good is common by causation. [In the order of final causality.]
Fr. Sweeney continues:
With this in mind, let us address each of the objections:
(1) Society is ordered to the common good, which is the good of the person. To say that this good is “common” means that, to the degree that one pursues one’s own good -- his or her own genuine fulfillment as a person -- one will simultaneously seek a society that is ordered to the good of all. What orders society is not some cause that is greater than the person, but the genuine good of the person.
The instrumental common good, taken from CST. Without a reference to others (and the virtues that govern one's behavior towards others), such a belief, that "to the degree that one pursues one's own good -- his or her own genuine fulfillment as a person -- one will simultaneously seek a society that is ordered to the good of all" echoes liberalism. As such, this response is not fully developed. Hence Fr. Sweeney adds:
(2) Certainly, one can pursue apparent (rather than genuine) goods to the detriment of others, and to seek what is truly good requires sacrificing such immediate self-interests for the sake of the common good. I think, however, that we must be careful about how we speak about this. Subordination of immediate self-gratification to the common good does not imply a cause greater than oneself, but the seeking of goods that are more proper to one’s own fulfillment. Freedom, for example, is either an attribute of a person (demonstrated, as Chesterton has it, by the mystical ability to get off a bus one stop early) or a social condition in which one is at liberty to pursue genuine personal fulfillment. No one should surrender one’s freedom, for to do so is contrary to one of the goods that we all hold in common. The soldier who dies in the cause of freedom is dying in the cause of the person, and should be honored for that reason.
[The soldier who dies in the cause of freedom is not dying for his own good, if we understand that narrowly to mean his physical life, which is a private good. Even a private act of virtue (for the sake of honor, etc.) would still be a private good. But the good as intended as an act of love, or an act for the benefit of others or the community? That would be different.]
(3) The good of the many cannot be greater than the good of each one, in that the good of the many is common, and is therefore the good also of each one.
(4) The common good, because common, is indeed the good of each one, and therefore might be correctly termed a matter of self interest: to pursue the common good is, perforce, to pursue one’s own good. However, such a pursuit does not obviate sacrifice for the sake of others, in fact quite the contrary. When a person or a regime (e.g. Hitler or Nazi Germany) acts to enslave whole peoples, the good of all is placed in peril. When my father fought overseas in WWII he was acting to protect the life and liberty of those he loved, and risked his life to do so, precisely because he had is heart set upon the common good.
It is not greater numerically, but we may use "greater" equivocally, as a synonym of "higher" -- that is to say, the political common good is prior to the private good of the individual in importance.
(3) and (4) could also be said by someone like De Koninck (setting aside what Fr. Sweeney says about World War II and the "Good Cause") -- the common good is both the good of all and also the good of the individual member. The difference between De Koninck and Sweeney lies, then, in what they identify as being the proper good.
Even if it is said that the instrumental common good is for the sake of the individuals, the good of these individuals is not attained through living in isolation from one another. Even having a family life is not sufficient. Rather, the good is attained if they live well with one another. So one could say that the instrumental common good is ordered to the members of a community living well with one another, but that is the common good of which the Thomistic tradition speaks -- a virtuous life in community, and this is the common good which should be emphasized in an age of individualism and social atomization. Perhaps Fr. Sweeney would assent to this; it is a necessary addition that is missing from his admittedly brief exposition of the common good.
[If there is no true community, does this common good really exist?]
It appears to me that Fr. Sweeney has attempted to combine the words of the Thomistic tradition with contemporary CST and perhaps other strands, but his account of the common good will be problematic in so far as contemporary CST is influenced by "systems of thought" other than "the perennial philosophy" in its explication of politics. But I will have to take a look at the Compendium before I write some more about contemporary CST and liberalism.
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