Recently I was asked to give a lecture on the topic, “Freedom to Serve the Common Good: Faith in the Public Square and Public Office.” The best I could do was to explain why this is a difficult—if not impossible—task in the contemporary American political context. This is because the regnant definition of “freedom” precludes the possibility of achieving “common good.”
Put in its most basic form, Catholicism understands the full sense of freedom to be achieved through properly ordered moral choices, not merely by the ability to make the choice. To be sure, the ability to choose between contrary options is necessary to call a human action a moral one. Without choice an action is not, properly speaking, a moral action. We only ascribe morality to actions that are chosen free of constraint or compulsion. This is the necessary condition for moral action. But freedom to make the choice among opposite options is not the sufficient condition for a good moral action. Or as St. Augustine puts it, “Free choice is sufficient for evil, but hardly for good.” Rather, because good precedes choice, authentic human liberty is accomplished only when the good is freely chosen. As Pope St. John Paul II put it in a 1985 homily in Baltimore: “Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”
Now contrast this with the typical liberal (sometimes called “libertarian”) definition of moral action that dominates the full spectrum of American politics. In this view, the right to choose among opposites is both the necessary and sufficient condition of morality. Indeed, any notion of a good that precedes (and therefore determines the propriety of) the choice is an inhibition of freedom, not freedom’s fulfilment. Under this notion, “good” does not precede freedom, but is, rather, defined by freedom.
This definition of freedom is summarized by the most fundamental and all-encompassing moral term in American moral and political discourse, subjective individual rights. These are rights that have no natural limiting principle. Indeed, any notion of a natural limiting principle is already a denial of the fundamental nature of modern rights language. The only limiting principle is the conventional (read: fictional) agreement to limit the scope of the exercise of our rights for mutual consideration. In this view, individual rights of self-determination are not merely the foundation of morality, but its sum and substance.
Perhaps the paradigmatic example of how this notion has shaped American legal and moral discourse is this famous passage by U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Anthony Kennedy, in the 1992 case, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey:
Our law affords constitutional protection to personal decisions relating to marriage, procreation, contraception, family relationships, child rearing, and education. Our cases recognize the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child. Our precedents have respected the private realm of family life which the state cannot enter. These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Simply put, if Justice Kennedy is correct that these choices are central to constitutional liberty, it is not merely difficult to talk about common good, it is impossible. Such a theory of rights and liberty is not only incompatible with any interesting notion of common good, but also hostile to and corrosive of such a notion. Kennedy’s notion of rights-based liberty necessarily rejects any notion of the proper end of common moral life. Indeed, the whole point of the theory is that there is no such thing as a common good. Thus, each individual rights-bearing person is free to pursue his private view of the good. To the extent that the term “common good” still has any use in such a scheme, it is nothing more than the accumulation of individual goods attained by autonomous rights-bearers as they not only seek their own good, but define it in the act of seeking.
A proper notion of a common good (in contrast to one of disparate common goods), necessarily implies some given end toward which the good society is directed in common for the good end of the human person. As “good” it has the nature of a “telos”—an end that properly orders human action and defines both proper and improper human action. Even though we might define common good in terms of a set of conditions, the set of conditions is for the purpose of achieving the true substantive end of the human person.
So, for example, the Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes Gaudium et Spes, defining common good as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups of as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily.” (CCC 1906). As such, it consists of three elements: 1. Respect for the person; 2. The social development and well-being of the group itself; and 3. Peace, defined as “the stability and security of a just order.” One problem of citing this definition, is that it already includes more basic definitions of “person,” “well-being,” and “just order.” As the only creatures created in the image and likeness of God, humans are ordered toward God as our ultimate good. That foundation serves to define these other terms.
Moreover, in the Catholic tradition the worship of God is rooted in fundamental justice. Justice is classically defined as giving to another his or her due. God, and God alone, is due our worship. Thus, we act justly, both individually and corporately, when we worship God. When our worship is other-directed, we commit an act of injustice toward God. Thus, the good that orders our lives is not the freedom to be able to worship God, but the actual worship of God. Thus, common good is the sum of the conditions that make that not only possible, but facilitate it—to reach it “more fully and easily.” In summary, the common good is a particular, substantive set of conditions that facilitate the worship of God.
This is not merely the “good” of clearing the public square so that competing visions of the good may compete with one another in a moral game of survival of the fittest. Such a notion of “good” is simply a restatement of libertarian freedom. And, of course, it is not “common.” Rather than a common good, this is the articulation of clearing space for the proliferation of self-created individual goods through Justice Kennedy’s “right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”
So long as this is the broadly accepted definition of freedom in the modern American mind, any hope of a common definition of “common good” will remain elusive.
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