The Common Good

In ordinary political discourse, the “common good” refers to those facilities—whether

material, cultural or institutional—that the members of a community provide to all
members in order to fulfill a relational obligation they all have to care for certain interests
that they have in common. Some canonical examples of the common good in a modern
liberal democracy include: the road system; public parks; police protection and public
safety; courts and the judicial system; public schools; museums and cultural institutions;
public transportation; civil liberties, such as the freedom of speech and the freedom of
association; the system of property; clean air and clean water; and national defense. The
term itself may refer either to the interests that members have in common or to the facilities
that serve common interests. For example, people may say, “the new public library will
serve the common good” or “the public library is part of the common good”.

As a philosophical concept, the common good is best understood as part of an

encompassing model for practical reasoning among the members of a political community.
The model takes for granted that citizens stand in a “political” or “civic” relationship with
one another and that this relationship requires them to create and maintain certain facilities
on the grounds that these facilities serve certain common interests. The relevant facilities
and interests together constitute the common good and serve as a shared standpoint for
political deliberation.[1] When citizens face various questions about legislation, public
policy or social responsibility, they resolve these questions by appeal to a conception of the
relevant facilities and the relevant interests. That is, they argue about what facilities have a
special claim on their attention, how they should expand, contract or maintain existing
facilities, and what facilities they should design and build in the future.

The common good is an important concept in political philosophy because it plays a central
role in philosophical reflection about the public and private dimensions of social life. Let’s
say that “public life” in a political community consists of a shared effort among members to
maintain certain facilities for the sake of common interests. “Private life” consists of each
member’s pursuit of a distinct set of personal projects. As members of a political
community, we are each involved in our community’s public life and in our own private
lives, and this raises an array of questions about the nature and scope of each of these
enterprises. For example, when are we supposed to make decisions based on the common
good? Most of us would agree that we are required to do so when we act as legislators or
civil servants. But what about as journalists, corporate executives or consumers? More
fundamentally, why should we care about the common good? What would be wrong with a
community whose members withdraw from public life and focus exclusively on their own
private lives? These are some of the questions that motivate philosophical discussions of
the common good.

This article reviews the philosophical literature, covering various points of agreement
among traditional conceptions of the common good, such as those favored by Plato,
Aristotle, John Locke, J.J. Rousseau, Adam Smith, G.W.F. Hegel, John Rawls and Michael
Walzer. It also covers some important disagreements, especially the disagreement between
“communal” and “distributive” views. It concludes by considering three important topics in
the literature: democracy, communal sharing, and competitive markets. In order to
understand the issues, it is helpful to start by distinguishing the common good from various
notions of the good that play a prominent role in welfare economics and welfare
consequentialist accounts of political morality.

1. First Contrast: Welfare Consequentialism

The common good belongs to a family of concepts that relate to goodness rather than
rightness (Sidgwick 1874). What makes the common good different from other concepts in
this family is that it is a notion of the good that is understood to be internal to the
requirements of a social relationship. In any community, the common good consists of the
facilities and interests that members have a special obligation to care about in virtue of the
fact that they stand in a certain relationship with one another. In a family, for instance, the
family home is part of the common good because the familial bond requires members to
take care of the home as part of a shared effort to care for one another’s interests in shelter
and safety. In a university, the climate of academic freedom on campus is part of the
common good because the special relationship among members of the university
community requires them to care for this climate as part of a shared effort to care for one
another’s interests in teaching, learning and inquiring.

The common good differs from the various notions of the good that play a foundational role
in welfare consequentialist accounts of political morality. Among the notions in the latter
category, we can include: the sum of pleasure over pain, total satisfaction of rational desire,
aggregate welfare adjusted for distributive considerations, welfare prioritarianism, equality
of welfare (in certain formulations), Pareto optimality, and so on. Unlike the common good,
these notions make no essential reference to the requirements of a social relationship. They
set out fully independent standards for the goodness of actions, motivations and states of
affairs, and the independent character of these standards allows them to serve as
foundational elements in a normative theory that has a consequentialist structure.[2]

According to classical utilitarianism, for example, the correct course of action is the
optimal course of action as judged from the standpoint of an impartial concern for the
pleasures and pains of all sentient creatures (Sidgwick 1874). Suppose that a relationship
consists of a set of requirements for how people who stand in the relationship should act
towards one another—e.g., parents should feed their children, parents should clothe their
children, children should defer to their parents’ judgment, etc. According to classical
utilitarianism, an agent should perform the action that satisfies the requirements of a
relationship only when her doing so would result in the greatest sum of pleasure over pain.
The notion of the good here—i.e., the sum of pleasure over pain—is defined independently
of the requirements of any relationship, so it sets out a criterion for goodness that can tell
us, among other things, when it would be good for people to comply with any particular
relational requirements.

Some welfare consequentialist notions of the good incorporate a distributive element—e.g.,

welfare prioritarianism—and this feature may make it more plausible to see these notions
as internal to the requirements of a relationship. For example, some may think that welfare
prioritarianism could be internal to the family relationship, where the relationship is
understood to require family members to perform the action that is optimal from the
standpoint of the worst off member of the group. But keep in mind that even more
distributionally sensitive notions of the good, such as welfare prioritarianism, retain other
features of a consequentialist understanding of goodness that make it difficult to see how
these notions could be internal to a relationship in the relevant sense.

Take agent neutrality. Insofar as welfare prioritarianism is a genuinely consequentialist

notion, it says that the correct course of action is the course of action that is optimal as
judged from a standpoint that does not change with the position of the agent or the
relationships that the agent happens to stand in (Williams 1973; Nagel 1986; cf. Sen 1993).
Understood in this way, welfare prioritarianism does not require an agent to perform the
action that is optimal from the standpoint of the worst off member of her own family.
Instead, it requires an agent to perform the action that is optimal from the agent neutral
standpoint of, say, the welfare of the worst off person in the world or the average welfare of
all those in the class of people who are worst off in their respective families. If people have
reason to pay special attention to the worst off member of their own families, on this view,
it is because a pattern of reasoning along these lines leads to the highest level of welfare for
the worst off person in the world or the highest average welfare for those in the relevant
class.

Because it is an agent neutral notion, welfare prioritarianism may require parents to harm
their own children if circumstances arise such that doing so would bring about the best
result from the standpoint of the welfare of the worst off person in the world or the average
welfare of those in the relevant class. A parent might be required to act this way, even when
lowering the welfare of her own child would lead to only a slightly higher level of welfare
for the other people affected. These implications are clearly at odds with our ordinary
understanding of the agent relative character of relational requirements.

The upshot is that welfare consequentialist accounts of political morality are not based, at
the most fundamental level, on conceptions of the common good. They are based instead on
notions of the good that are understood to be prior to and independent of any social
relationship. Nonetheless, it is worth stressing that a welfare consequentialist account of
political morality may incorporate a conception of the common good as part of a more
specific account of the ethical obligations of citizens in public life. After all, a certain
pattern of agent relative motivation among citizens may be the optimal pattern as judged
from the standpoint of aggregate welfare (or some other suitably agent neutral perspective).
John Stuart Mill sets out a theory along these lines in Considerations on Representative
Government (1862). On his view, citizens should take an active interest in the public affairs
of their community and social institutions should be designed to generate this pattern of
motivation among citizens. The reason for this is that an orientation among citizens towards
the common affairs of their community is part of the best political arrangement overall, as
judged from the standpoint of the principle of utility.[3]
2. Second Contrast: Public Goods

Another important contrast to draw is between the common good and a public good. In
economic theory, a public good is a particular type of good that members of a community
would not possess if they were each motivated only by their own self-interest.[4] Here is an
example. Imagine that the residents in a town could enjoy a mosquito free summer if most
every resident treats her lawn with a bug spray. The spray costs money, but every resident
would be better off having paid for the spray and enjoying life without mosquitoes. If most
every resident sprays her lawn, everyone in the town will enjoy the benefit, even those
residents who do not spray their lawns. But there is no feasible way to exclude the
nonsprayers from enjoying the benefit.

The problem posed by a public good is that the optimal course of action for each individual,
from the standpoint of her egoistic rationality, is for her not to contribute to the provision of
the good, even though everyone would be better off if they all did so (see Olson 1965).
Take any resident in the town I just described. From the standpoint of her own self-interest,
she should not spray her lawn: If the other residents spray their lawns, she would get the
benefit without paying the cost. And if the other residents do not spray their lawns, she
would save herself the cost of spraying her lawn. It follows that as long as residents are
moved only by their own self-interest, they will not produce the good of a mosquito free
summer.

In both academic and nonacademic discussions, people often confuse the common good
with a public good or a set of public goods. But it is important to keep the two ideas
distinct. The facilities that make up the common good resemble public goods because they
are often facilities that are supposed to be open and available to everyone (e.g., a public
library). This means that it is not possible to exclude those who do not contribute from
enjoying the benefits. Nonetheless, the facilities that make up the common good are
conceptually different from public goods because these facilities may not be a net benefit
for each member of the community. The facilities that make up the common good serve a
special class of interests that all citizens have in common, i.e., the interests that are the
object of the civic relationship. But each citizen will have various private interests in
addition to these common interests, so for any particular citizen, the private interests
affected by some facility may be more important from the standpoint of her egoistic
rationality than the interests that belong to the special class of common interests. As such,
the facility may not be a net benefit to her.

Consider the case of a public library. Suppose that a certain library is part of the common
good in a political community because it serves an interest in the privileged class of
common interests. Suppose the relevant interest is an interest in guaranteed access to the
storehouse of human knowledge. Some individual X owns a bakery. Her bakery is
profitable, but it would be even more profitable if people were not able to read certain
cookbooks at the library and so could not make her carrot muffins at home. X has an
interest in guaranteed access to the storehouse of human knowledge, but she also has an
interest in her bakery’s profitability. If her private interest in a muffin monopoly is more
important from her egoistic perspective than her interest in guaranteed access to the
storehouse of human knowledge, then she is actually worse off because of the public
library.[5] In this case, the public library is part of the common good, but it is not a public
good because there is someone in the community who is worse off in virtue of the library’s
existence.

Before moving on, note that people sometimes use “the public good” to refer to something
other than the technical notion of a public good in economic theory. In academic and
nonacademic discussions, people sometimes use “the public good” in a way that is more or
less synonymous with “the common good”. This use of the term was especially prevalent
among political philosophers, roughly from the 16th century to the 19th century. For
example, in the Second Treatise of Government (1698), John Locke defines political power
as the right to make binding laws and the right to mobilize the community in defense of
these laws, where both of these powers are

to be directed to no other end, but the Peace, Safety, and publick good of the People. (1698
[1988: 353]).

Here Locke uses the term “public good” to refer to interests that are common to all
members of a political community (e.g., the interest in bodily security and property), where
members have a relational obligation to care for these common interests. The “public good”
in this sense basically refers to the common good, though philosophers who use the term
“public good” typically favor a thinner conception of the political relationship and a more
limited view of the powers of government.

3. Why Does Political Philosophy Need This Concept? Defects in a “Private Society”

Why does political philosophy need the concept of the common good? What’s the rationale
for having this concept in addition to other concepts, such as welfare, justice, or human
rights? To understand the importance of the common good, it is helpful to think about the
moral defects in a private society.

A private society is a society whose members care only about their lives as private
individuals (Tocqueville 1835–1840; Hegel 1821; Rawls 1971; see also Dewey 1927).
Members are not necessarily rational egoists—they may care about their family and friends.
What is central is that their motivational horizons do not extend beyond the people and
projects that are the focus of their personal lives.[6] As an individual in a private society, I
might be interested in acquiring a better home for my family or improving the local school
for my children and the other children in my neighborhood. I might even vote in national
elections insofar as the results could affect my home or my local school. But I take no
interest in national elections insofar as the results affect citizens I don’t know, those in
other states or provinces. And I take no interest in national elections insofar as the results
affect the basic fairness of my society’s laws and institutions. Having withdrawn into
private life, I care about the common affairs of the community only insofar as these touch
my private world.
Many philosophers believe that there is something morally defective about a private
society. One type of defect bears especially on the case of a private society that consists of
rational egoists. As I noted in the last section, a community of rational egoists will not
perform the actions necessary to generate public goods. Since these goods are desirable, the
absence of public goods may be suboptimal, both from the standpoint of aggregate welfare
and from the standpoint of each member’s egoistic rationality.[7] So there are good
instrumental reasons for people to create a public agency—i.e., a state—that can use taxes,
subsidies and coercive threats to draw people into mutually beneficial patterns of
cooperation.[8]

The common good, however, points to a different kind of defect in a private society. The
defect in this case extends to all forms of private society, not just to a society of rational
egoists, and the defect is noninstrumental. The defect in this case is that the members of a
political community have a relational obligation to care about their common affairs, so the
fact that they are exclusively concerned with their private lives is itself a moral defect in the
community, whether or not this pattern of concern leads to a suboptimal outcome.

To appreciate the point, think about the various public roles that people may occupy in a
liberal democracy (see Hegel 1821; Dewey 1927; J. Cohen 2010: 54–58). Most obviously,
citizens act in a public capacity when they occupy positions as legislators, civil servants,
judges, prosecutors, jurors, police officers, soldiers, school teachers, and so on. They also
act in a public capacity when they participate in the political process, voting in elections
and taking part in policy discussions in the public sphere (Habermas 1992; Mill 1862;
Rawls 1993 [2005]). And many philosophers argue that citizens act in a public capacity—
or at least in a partly public capacity—when they act as executives in large business
enterprises (McMahon 2013; Christiano 2010); as high-ranking officials in colleges and
universities (Scanlon 2003); as journalists, lawyers, and academics (Habermas 1992, e.g.,
[1996: 373–9]); as protesters engaged in civil disobedience (Rawls 1971); and as socially
conscious consumers (Hussain 2012).

When citizens occupy public roles, political morality requires them to think and act
differently than they would if they were acting as private individuals. If you are a judge in a
criminal trial, you might stand to benefit personally if the defendant were found guilty. But
political morality does not allow you to decide cases as if you were a private individual,
looking to advance your own private objectives. As a judge, you are required to make
decisions based on the evidence presented at trial and the standards set out in the law.
These legal standards themselves are supposed to answer to common interests. So, in effect,
political morality directs you to think and act from the standpoint of a shared concern for
common interests.

Citizens who occupy public roles may also be required to make personal sacrifices.
Consider an historical example. During the Watergate scandal, President Richard Nixon
ordered the Attorney General of the United States, Elliot Richardson, to fire the Watergate
special prosecutor in order to stop an investigation into Nixon’s abuses of power. Rather
than carry out Nixon’s order, Richardson resigned his position. Many would argue that
Richardson did the right thing, and that, in fact, he had an obligation to refuse Nixon’s
order, even if this resulted in a significant setback to his career. As Attorney General,
Richardson had an obligation to uphold the rule of law in the United States, a practice that
serves common interests, even if this meant significant sacrifices in terms of his career
aspirations.

Now consider the following possibility. Imagine that we are living in a liberal democracy
with a full array of social roles in which people act in a public capacity. But imagine that
our society is a private society: citizens care only about their own private affairs. In order to
ensure that various public roles are filled, our institutions create private incentives for
people to take on these responsibilities. High salaries draw people into positions as judges
and legislators, and mutual surveillance gives these people private incentives to carry out
their duties. Suppose that our institutions are well structured and private incentives are
adequate to fill all of the important public positions. Is there anything missing in our
society? Does our society suffer from a moral defect of some kind?

Philosophers in the common good tradition believe that the answer is yes: there is
something morally significant that is missing from our society. What is missing is a
genuine concern for the common good. No one in our society actually cares about shared
facilities, such as the rule of law, or the common interests that these facilities serve.
Citizens fill various public roles simply for the sake of the private benefits that they get
from doing so. According to a common good conception of political morality, this lack of
concern for the common good is itself a moral defect in a political community, even if
private incentives lead people to fill all of the relevant positions.

A central challenge for theorists in the common good tradition is to explain why a genuine
commitment to the common good matters. Why should it matter whether citizens actually
care about the common good? Some philosophers in the tradition cite a practical problem.
Even in a well-designed arrangement, circumstances are likely to arise where social
institutions do not provide people with an adequate private incentive to act in a publicly
oriented way. For example, political morality may require public officials to stand up for
the rule of law, even in situations where this will damage their careers. Or political morality
may require citizens to protest against an unjust law, even if this means a private risk of
being jailed or blacklisted. Political morality may even require citizens to run the risk of
losing their lives in order to defend the constitutional order against a foreign threat (see
Walzer 1970; Rousseau 1762b [1997: 63–4]). In each of these cases, no matter how well
designed institutions are, citizens may not have an adequate private incentive to do what
political morality requires, so a genuine concern for the common good may be essential.

A different explanation—perhaps the most important one in the common good tradition—
stresses the idea of a social relationship. Think of the relationship between parents and their
children. This relationship requires not only that the people involved act in certain ways
towards one another, but also that they care about one another in certain ways. For
instance, parents are required not only to feed and clothe their children, perhaps to avoid
getting fined by the Department of Child and Family Services. Parents are also required to
care about their children: they must give their children’s interests a certain status in their
practical reasoning. Many philosophers argue that our relation to our fellow citizens has
similar features. The political bond requires not only that we act in certain ways, but also
that we give the interests of our fellow citizens a certain status in our practical reasoning. It
would be unacceptable, on this view, for citizens to fulfill certain public roles purely for the
sake of private incentives. A Supreme Court justice, for example, must care about the rule
of law and the common interests that this practice serves. If she were making consistent
rulings just to cash her paycheck every two weeks, she would not be responding in the right
way to her fellow citizens, who act for the sake of common interests in doing things such as
voting, following the law, and standing ready to defend the constitutional order.[9]

Many philosophers believe that there is something morally defective about a private
society, even one in which private incentives move people to fill all of the important public
roles. A conception of the common good provides us with an account of what is missing
from the practical reasoning of citizens in a private society, and it connects this with a
wider view about the relational obligations that require citizens to reason in these ways.

4. Central Features of the Common Good

According to a common good conception of political morality, members of a political

community stand in a social relationship with one another. This relationship is not as
intimate as the relationship among family members or the members of a church. But it is a
genuine social relationship nonetheless, and it requires members not only to act in certain
ways, but also to give one another’s interests a certain status in their practical reasoning.
This basic outlook leads most conceptions of the common good to share certain features.

4.1 A Shared Standpoint for Practical Reasoning

The first feature that most conceptions share is that they describe a pattern of practical
reasoning that is meant to be realized in the actual thought processes of the members of a
political community. A conception of the common good is not just a criterion for correct
action, such that citizens would satisfy the conception so long as they performed the correct
action, regardless of their subjective reasons for doing so. The point of a conception of the
common good is to define a pattern of practical reasoning, a way of thinking and acting that
constitutes the appropriate form of mutual concern among members. In order to satisfy the
conception, the activities of the members of the community must be organized, at some
level, by thought processes that embody the relevant pattern.[10]

4.2 A Set of Common Facilities

Most conceptions of the common good identify a set of facilities that citizens have a special
obligation to maintain in virtue of the fact that these facilities serve certain common
interests. The relevant facilities may be part of the natural environment (e.g., the
atmosphere, a freshwater aquifer, etc.) or human artifacts (e.g., hospitals, schools, etc.). But
the most important facilities in the literature are social institutions and practices. For
example, a scheme of private property exists when members of a community conform to
rules that assign individuals certain forms of authority over external objects. Private
property, as a social institution, serves a common interest of citizens in being able to assert
private control over their physical environment, and so many conceptions include this
institution as part of the common good.
4.3 A Privileged Class of Common Interests

A conception of the common good will define a privileged class of abstract interests.
Citizens are understood to have a relational obligation to create and maintain certain
facilities because these facilities serve the relevant interests. The interests in the privileged
class are “common” in the sense that every citizen is understood to have these interests to a
similar degree.[11] The interests are “abstract” in the sense that they may be served by a
variety of material, cultural or institutional facilities. A wide variety of interests figure
prominently in the literature, including: the interest in taking part in the most choiceworthy
way of life (Aristotle Pol. 1323a14–1325b31); the interest in bodily security and property
(e.g., Locke 1698; Rousseau 1762b); the interest in living a responsible and industrious
private life (Smith 1776); the interest in a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties
(Rawls 1971 and 1993); the interest in a fair opportunity to reach the more attractive
positions in society (Rawls 1971); and the interest in security and welfare, where these
interests are understood as socially recognized needs that are subject to ongoing political
determination (Walzer 1983).

4.4 A Solidaristic Concern

Most conceptions of the common good define a form of practical reasoning that fits the
model of solidarity. Many social relationships require a form of solidarity among those who
stand in the relationship. Solidarity here basically involves one person giving a certain
subset of the interests of another person a status in her reasoning that is analogous to the
status that she gives to her own interests in her reasoning (see, e.g., Aristotle NE 1166a1–
33). For example, if my friend needs a place to sleep tonight, friendship requires that I
should offer him my couch. I have to do this because friendship requires that I reason about
events that affect my friend’s basic interests as if these events were affecting my own basic
interests in a similar way. A conception of the common good typically requires citizens to
maintain certain facilities because these facilities serve certain common interests. So when
citizens reason as the conception requires, they effectively give the interests of their fellow
citizens a status in their reasoning that is analogous to the status that they give to their own
interests in their reasoning.

An example will make the idea more intuitive. According to Rousseau, a properly ordered
political community is “a form of association that will defend and protect the person and
goods of each associate with the full common force” (1762b [1997: 49]). Citizens in this
community are united by a solidaristic form of mutual concern that is focused on (among
other things) their common interests in physical security and property. This form of mutual
concern requires each citizen to respond to an attack on the body or property of a fellow
citizen as if this were an attack on her own body and property. When extended over all
members, this form of mutual concern requires the whole community to respond to an
attack on any individual member as if this were an attack on every member. In this sense,
“the full common force” stands behind each person’s physical security and property. Or, as
Rousseau sometimes puts it, “one cannot injure one of the members without attacking the
body, and still less can one injure the body without the members being affected” (1762b
[1997: 52]).[12]
4.5 A Nonaggregative Concern

A closely related feature is that most conceptions of the common good do not take an
aggregative view of individual interests. The aggregative view treats the satisfaction of
individuals’ interests as commensurable values, and it directs citizens to maximize the sum
of these values. Because it focuses on the aggregate, the aggregative view may require
citizens to impose a debilitating condition on some of their fellow citizens when this would
generate sufficient gains for others.

Solidarity rules out the aggregative view. Starting with an appropriate view of her own
interests, solidarity requires each citizen to give certain interests of her fellow citizens a
status in her reasoning that is similar to the status that she gives to her own interests. This
way of thinking does not allow citizens to abandon the interests of any of their fellow
citizens for the sake of aggregate gains. For instance, solidarity would not allow citizens to
subject some of their fellow citizens to slavery, even if this might produce substantial
benefits for others, because enslavement would involve a failure on the part of each citizen
to give the interests of each of her enslaved comrades the right status in her reasoning.

5. Common Interests (i): Joint Activity

Let’s turn now to some of the ways that conceptions of the common good differ from each
other. One way has to do with how they define the privileged class of common interests
that are the object of the political relationship. We can divide the important views in the
literature into two main categories: (a) joint activity conceptions and (b) private
individuality conceptions.

A joint activity conception defines the privileged class of common interests as interests that
members have in taking part in a complex activity that involves all or most members of the
community. Among those who endorse this kind of view are ancient philosophers, such as
Plato (Republic) and Aristotle (Politics), secular natural law theorists such as John Finnis
(1980), and most natural law theorists in the Catholic tradition. Aspects of the joint activity
view are also important in the work of communitarian thinkers such as Charles Taylor
(1984) and, to a lesser extent, Michael Sandel (2009). The most important and influential
view is Aristotle’s.

Aristotle holds that members of a political community are not just involved in a military
alliance or an especially dense network of contractual agreements (Pol. 1280b29–33).
Members are also involved in a relationship that he describes as a form of friendship (NE
1159b25–35). This friendship consists in citizens wishing one another well, their being
aware of the fact that their fellow citizens wish them well, and their taking part in a shared
life that answers to this mutual concern (Pol. 1280b29–1281a3). In caring about one
another and wishing one another well, what citizens care about in particular is that they and
their fellow citizens live well, that is, live the most choiceworthy life.[13]

The most choiceworthy life, on Aristotle’s view, is a pattern of activity that fully engages
and expresses the rational parts of human nature. This pattern of activity is a pattern of joint
activity because, like a play, it has various interdependent parts that can only be realized by
the members of a group together. The pattern is centered on an array of leisured activities
that are valuable in themselves, including philosophy, mathematics, art and music. But the
pattern also includes the activity of coordinating the social effort to engage in leisured
activities (i.e., statesmanship) and various supporting activities, such as the education of
citizens and the management of resources.

On Aristotle’s view, a properly ordered society will have an array of material, cultural and
institutional facilities that answer to the common interest of citizens in living the most
choiceworthy life. These facilities form an environment in which citizens can engage in
leisured activities and in which they can perform the various coordinating and supporting
activities. Some facilities that figure into Aristotle’s account include: common mess halls
and communal meals, which provide occasions for leisured activities (Pol. 1330a1–10;
1331a19–25); a communal system of education (Pol. 1337a20–30); common land (Pol.
1330a9–14); commonly owned slaves to work the land (Pol. 1330a30–3); a shared set of
political offices (Pol. 1276a40–3; 1321b12–a10) and administrative buildings (Pol.
1331b5–11); shared weapons and fortifications (Pol. 1328b6–11; 1331a9–18); and an
official system priests, temples and public sacrifices (Pol. 1322b17–28).

Aristotle’s account may seem distant from modern sensibilities, but a good analogy for
what he has in mind is the form of community that we associate today with certain
universities. Think of a college like Princeton or Harvard. Members of the university
community are bound together in a social relationship marked by a certain form of mutual
concern: members care that they and their fellow members live well, where living well is
understood in terms of taking part in a flourishing university life. This way of life is
organized around intellectual, cultural and athletic activities, such as physics, art history,
lacrosse, and so on. Members work together to maintain an array of facilities that serve
their common interest in taking part in this joint activity (e.g., libraries, computer labs,
dorm rooms, football fields, etc.). And we can think of public life in the university
community in terms of a form of shared practical reasoning that most members engage in,
which focuses on maintaining common facilities for the sake of their common interest.[14]

6. Common Interests (ii): Private Individuality

Private individuality conceptions offer a different account of the privileged class of

common interests. According to these views, members of a political community have a
relational obligation to care about their common interest in being able to lead lives as
private individuals. Citizens each have an interest in being able to shape their lives through
their own private choices about what activities to pursue and what associations to form.
Choices are “private” in the relevant sense when citizens are not required to consult with
anyone in making these choices and they are not required to reach a decision through any
form of shared deliberation.[15] Among the philosophers who endorse this kind of view are
many important thinkers in the liberal tradition, including John Locke (1698), J.J. Rousseau
(1762b), Adam Smith (1776), and G.W.F. Hegel (1821). More recent figures who endorse
this kind of view include John Rawls (1971) and Michael Walzer (1983).
A sophisticated example of a private individuality conception is Rawls’s. On Rawls’s view,
members of a political community have a relational obligation to care for the interests
attached to the “position of equal citizenship” which all citizens share (1971 [1999: 82–
83]). These interests are (a) the interest in a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties
and (b) the interest in a fair opportunity to reach the more attractive positions in society.
Rawls uses the term “the common good” to refer to the sum total of social conditions that
answer to the interests attached to the position of equal citizenship (1971 [1999: 217]).
Understood in this way, the common good consists, inter alia, of: a legal order that
provides citizens with the liberty of expression, the liberty of conscience and the other
liberal freedoms; a democratic system of government that provides citizens with political
liberties, such as the liberty to vote, hold office and participate in collective rule-making; a
system of courts to enforce the rule of law; as well as police protection and national defense
to protect the basic liberties. The common good also consists of legal protections for free
choice of occupation; mass media mechanisms that gather and disperse information about
job possibilities; a transportation system to give people access to work; and a system of
education (whether public or private) that ensures conditions in which people with similar
talents and motivations have similar prospects, regardless of their class or family
background.

Rawls’s conception has the core features of a private individuality view. The facilities that
answer to the common interest in equal liberty and fair opportunity put citizens in a
position to join or withdraw from various activities and associations as private persons who
can make their own independent choices. For example, the liberty of conscience gives
citizens the legal right to join or leave a religious association based on their own private
beliefs. They need not consult with other citizens about these choices or make these choices
as part of a wider deliberative process that involves other citizens.

Rawls’s view takes the common good to consist partly in a system of bodily security,
private property and civil liberty. In this way, his view resembles Rousseau’s, which also
focuses on these common interests. Where Rawls’s view differs from Rousseau’s is that it
extends the privileged class of common interests to include an interest in a wider set of
basic liberties and an interest in a fair opportunity to reach the more attractive positions in
society. These interests involve a more extensive array of institutions and social conditions,
especially when it comes to education, communication, and economic redistribution. But it
is worth emphasizing that neither Rawls nor Rousseau incorporates a full account of
distributive justice into their conceptions of the common good.[16] I will say more about this
in the next section.

7. The Common Good Perspective: Communal or Distributive?

One of the most important differences among different conceptions of the common good
has to do with how they take private and sectional interests to factor into determining the
relational obligations of citizens. Here we can distinguish two main types of views: (a)
communal conceptions of the common good and (b) distributive conceptions of the
common good.
Members of a political community have a relational obligation to care for certain interests
that they have in common. A “communal” conception of the common good takes these
interests to be interests that citizens have as citizens, where the status of being a citizen and
the interests attached to this status are both understood to be prior to the various statuses
and interests that make up each member’s identity as a private individual. When citizens
engage in social deliberation about their laws and institutions, a communal conception
typically directs them to abstract away from their private interests and the sectional
interests they may have as members of one subgroup or another and to focus instead on
their common interests as citizens.

For example, imagine that citizens are considering changes to trade rules in their society.
They may be inclined to assess proposals in terms of how attractive these are from the
standpoint of their sectional interests as members of a certain profession or participants in a
certain industry. But a communal conception of the common good directs citizens to set
these interests aside and assess proposals in terms of how well they answer to common
civic interests, such as the interest in national security or the interest in a productive
economy.[17]

A “distributive” conception of the common good differs from a “communal” conception in

that it does not direct citizens to abstract away from their private and sectional interests in
the same way. A distributive conception starts with the idea that citizens belong to various
groups with distinct sectional interests. These interests make partly competing claims on
the material, cultural and institutional facilities in a community. The distributive conception
incorporates a distributive principle that determines how social facilities should answer to
these sectional interests, and the conception says that members have a relational obligation
to maintain a set of facilities that answers to everyone’s sectional interests in the way that
the distributive principle prescribes.

As an example of a distributive view, consider the view held by many philosophers, which
defines the common good in terms of Rawls’s difference principle (see, e.g., J. Cohen 1996
[2009: 169–170]; see also section 8 below). According to this view, we can think of
citizens as belonging to various subgroups, each consisting of all those born into a certain
“starting position” in social life. Citizens in each group share certain choice-independent
characteristics, such as their class position at birth and their level of innate talent. Group
members have sectional interests in better life prospects (as measured in terms of primary
goods), where these interests make partly competing claims on the basic structure of
society. The difference principle says that social institutions should answer to the interests
of each group equally, with the caveat that institutions should incorporate whatever
inequalities would serve to maximize the prospects of the least advantaged group. Citizens
are then understood to have a relational obligation to maintain a scheme of institutions that
attends to everyone’s sectional interests in the way that the difference principle prescribes.

The disagreement between communal and distributive conceptions of the common good is
perhaps the most important disagreement among different conceptions, and it raises some
important questions about the nature of the political relationship. Let me make two general
points.
The first has to do with the moral underpinnings of the communal view. It is helpful to
think of communal accounts of the common good as appealing to a certain conception
social life (e.g., Rousseau 1762b; Hegel 1821; Walzer 1983). According to this conception,
citizens form their various private and sectional interests within the framework of a more
fundamental effort to maintain certain social conditions together. The political bond is prior
to their private interests in a certain way, so the political relationship may sometimes
require citizens to set their private interests aside in order to act collectively to maintain the
relevant social conditions. Perhaps the clearest example of this is national defense (see
section 9 below). When defending the constitutional order against a foreign threat, political
morality requires citizens to act collectively in defense of common interests, without
organizing their efforts in a way that answers specifically to their competing private
interests in different levels of protection.

An analogy may help here. Members of a family each have distinct interests as private
individuals—e.g., in developing their talents, pursuing relationships, cultivating career
prospects, and so on. At some level, the household must be organized in a way that answers
to these private interests. But there are some matters where the familial relationship
requires members to act together in a way that sets their competing private interests aside.
If the family home is on fire, members are required to save the home, without special
regard for how resources are being deployed in ways that are more likely to save one
member’s room rather than another’s. In certain domains, members are supposed to act
from a communal point of view that focuses on common interests that are essential to their
social bond, rather than their distinct and potentially competing interests as private
individuals. Communal conceptions of the common good see the political relationship as
having a similar character.[18]

The second point is that—surprisingly—Rawls himself favours a substantially communal

rather than distributive conception of the common good. In A Theory of Justice, he does not
define the common good in terms of his full conception of social justice. He defines it
instead in terms of the “principle of common interest”. This principle assesses social
institutions from the position of equal citizenship. As he says, “as far as possible, the basic
structure should be appraised from the position of equal citizenship” where this position “is
defined by the rights and liberties required by the principle of equal liberty and the
principle of fair equality of opportunity” (1971 [1999: 82–83]). Rawls thinks that a wide
variety of policy questions can be settled by appeal to the principle of common interest,
including “reasonable regulations to maintain public order”, “efficient measures for public
health and safety”, and “collective efforts for national defense in a just war” (1971 [1999:
83]).[19]

Social deliberation, on Rawls’s view, should unfold, as far as possible, within a framework
of reasoning that focuses on interests that are common to all citizens, where the difference
principle enters the discussion mainly when the appeal to common interests alone could not
properly decide an issue. But why should political deliberation unfold in this way? Why
does Rawls think that, “as far as possible, the basic structure should be appraised from the
position of equal citizenship”?
One possible rationale has to do with the kind of solidarity that citizens realize through
their shared status as “citizens”. When members of a society reason in terms of the
principle of common interest, they set their private and sectional interests aside whenever
possible in order to focus on their common interests as citizens. Setting their sectional
interests aside (e.g., as members of the least advantaged group, the second least advantaged
group, the third least advantaged group, etc.), citizens treat their shared interests as
“citizens” as being more fundamental than their distinct and potentially competing interests
as private individuals. Each citizen effectively tells her fellow citizens, “What unites us is
more important than what divides us”. Bringing the status of “citizen” to the center of how
citizens relate to one another in public life is particularly important for Rawls because
mutual recognition on the basis of this shared status is important to his account of how a
just social order will prevent envy and positional competition from undermining the basic
liberties (1971 [1999: 476–9]).

A closely related idea has to do with mutuality (section 4.4 and 4.5 above). When members
of society reason in terms of their common interests in liberty and opportunity, they assess
policies from a standpoint that does not distinguish between one citizen and another. They
each accord the interests of their fellow citizens the very same status in their reasoning that
they accord to their own interests. When citizens do their parts in a social arrangement that
answers to common interests, and they do so on the grounds that the arrangement serves
common interests, citizens realize a form of solidarity that is perfectly mutual: each citizen
works for the interests of each her fellow citizens in exactly the same way that each of her
fellow citizens works for her interests.

Social cooperation on the basis of the difference principle does not embody the same kind
of mutuality. Imagine that citizens are reasoning about their institutions. Starting with an
arrangement that creates equal prospects for those born into every starting position, they
consider different arrangements that would yield Pareto improvements over the egalitarian
scheme.[20] Citizens must now choose between different possibilities: one arrangement
would maximize the prospects for the least advantaged group; another would maximize the
prospects for the second least advantaged group; a third would maximize the prospects for
the third least advantaged group; and so on. Given these possibilities, the difference
principle requires citizens to choose the arrangement that is best from the standpoint of one
group in particular—i.e., those in the least advantaged position.

Imagine now that we live in a social order that satisfies the difference principle. There are
certain facilities in society—say, certain educational facilities—that answer distinctively to
the interests of those in the least advantaged group. The resources involved could have been
deployed in ways that would have been better for those in the second least advantaged
group, or the third least advantaged group, etc., so the arrangement as a whole is tilted in
favour of one group in particular. Because it is tilted in this way, the pattern of interaction
lacks the property of perfect mutuality: each citizen does not work for the interests of each
of her fellow citizens in exactly the same way each of her fellow citizens works for her
interests. Everyone works in a way that is distinctively oriented towards the interests of the
least advantaged.
Of course, citizens realize a form of solidarity insofar as social cooperation is organized in
light of the difference principle; the point is just that citizens realize a distinctive form of
solidarity insofar as social cooperation is organized in light of the principle of common
interest. In the latter case, they realize a more communal form of solidarity, as citizens set
their private interests aside to focus on common interests and citizens attach no special
significance to the distinctions between different groups. A more communal form of
solidarity answers better to the social dimension of the political relationship and this may
be one reason why Rawls favors a form of public reasoning in which the principle of
common interest governs “matters which concern the interests of everyone and in regard to
which distributive effects are immaterial or irrelevant” (1971 [1999: 82–83]).

8. The Common Good in Politics: Democracy and Collective Decision-Making

In the vast literature on the common good, several topics stand out as important subjects of
concern. One important topic is democracy. Democracy figures prominently in
philosophical reflection about the common good because there is broad agreement among
philosophers—though by no means universal agreement!—that a private society would be
defective in terms of the way that members make collective decisions. Collective decision-
making in a political community must unfold in its public life, that is, in the sphere of
interaction in which citizens transcend their own private concerns and reason from the
standpoint of the common good.

On some accounts of democracy, citizens are not required to take up the perspective of the
common good. According to pluralism, for example, democracy is best understood as a
collective decision-making process that disperses power and influence among many
different groups in society (see Dahl 1956 and 1989). Citizens each have their own private
interests and groups of citizens with similar interests advance these interests in various rule-
making forums. The overall process is essentially a form of bargaining, where each group
strategically trades concessions with other groups in order to maximize the satisfaction of
their policy preferences. A properly ordered democratic regime will maintain fair
bargaining conditions, where all important groups are able to exercise a meaningful degree
of influence on the collective decisions that affect their interests. But on the pluralist view
no one needs to take an interest in the common affairs of the community: each citizen may
care only about her own private affairs, entering the public forum to advance her private
interests against the interests of others.

Many philosophers criticize pluralism and other similarly privatized views of democratic
reasoning because these views fail to capture an important aspect of political life. As
Jeremy Waldron notes, citizens often vote on the basis of something other than their own
private interests:

People often vote on the basis of what they think is the general good of society. They are
concerned about the deficit, or about abortion, or about Eastern Europe, in a way that
reflects nothing more about their own personal interests than that they have a stake in the
issues. Similarly, the way they vote will usually take into account their conception of the
special importance of certain interests and liberties. (Waldron 1990 [1993: 408])
Many critics also contend that pluralism does not distinguish properly between the form of
practical reasoning appropriate to democratic decision-making and the form that is
appropriate in market contexts. Managers in a firm may justify one business strategy over
another on the grounds that this strategy will improve the bottom line for the firm, taking
no account of how the strategy might harm competitors or other groups. But citizens in a
democratic process are not supposed to reason this way:

…it is a political convention of a democratic society to appeal to the common interest. No

political party publicly admits to pressing for legislation to the disadvantage of any
recognized social group. (Rawls 1971 [1999: 280])

If a privatized approach to democratic decision-making is morally defective, what exactly

is the problem? What is wrong with citizens assessing laws and voting on laws based on
how well these will serve their private interests?

One prominent line of reasoning in democratic theory appeals to an epistemic conception of

democracy (e.g., Rousseau 1762b; J. Cohen 1986). According to this view, there is an
independent standard of correctness for legislation, which says that laws must serve
common interests. Democratic decision-making is a requirement of political morality
because the legislative process is more likely to generate laws that meet the standard when
the process is democratic. Moreover, a democratic process is more likely to generate laws
that meet the standard when those taking part in the process are actually trying to identify
laws that meet the standard. So citizens taking part in the democratic process should assess
legislative proposals in terms of how well these proposals serve common interests because
this is the best way to identify and enact laws that are justified.

The other main line of reasoning in democratic theory appeals to a deliberative conception
of democracy (J. Cohen 1996, 2009; Habermas 1992; Gutman & Thompson 1996).
According to Joshua Cohen’s deliberative conception, political morality requires citizens to
make binding collective decisions through a process of public reasoning in which citizens
recognize one another as equal members of the political community (J. Cohen 1989, 1996).
The process of public reasoning requires that each citizen should offer reasons to convince
others to adopt a legislative proposal, where these reasons are reasons that she could
properly expect others to accept, given the facts of reasonable pluralism.

Cohen argues that the ideal of deliberative democracy, as he understands it, provides a
compelling account of the common good orientation of democratic decision-making (1996
[2009: 168–170]). No citizen could reasonably expect others to accept a legislative
proposal simply because it serves her own interests, so there is a basic requirement that any
legislative proposal must be responsive to the interests of all citizens. Furthermore, the
background idea that citizens are equal members of the political community imposes an
additional requirement. Citizens

can reject, as a reason within [the] process, that some are worth less than others or that the
interests of one group are to count less than the interests of other groups. (1996 [2009:
169])
This constraint on acceptable reasons leads to a substantive requirement that legislation
must be consistent with a public understanding of the common good that treats people as
equals in the relevant sense.

Cohen cites Rawls’s difference principle as one example of a public understanding of the
common good that satisfies the relevant requirement.

Treating equality as a baseline, [the difference principle] requires that inequalities

established or sanctioned by state action must work to the maximal advantage of the least
advantaged. That baseline [i.e., equality] is a natural expression of the constraints on
reasons that emerge from the background equal standing of citizens: it will not count as a
reason for a system of policy that that system benefits the members of a particular group
singled out by social class or native talent or any other feature that distinguishes among
equal citizens. […In addition, the principle] insists, roughly speaking, that no one be left
less well off than anyone needs to be—which is itself a natural expression of the
deliberative conception. (J. Cohen 1996 [2009: 169–170])

Note that Cohen argues here for a “distributive” rather than a “communal” conception of
the common good (see section 7 above). On Cohen’s view, members of a political
community have a relational obligation to provide one another with a set of facilities that
answers to everyone’s sectional interests in the way that a certain distributive principle
prescribes (i.e. the difference principle). This differs from a communal conception, which
does not conceive of the relational obligation of citizens in terms of a distributive principle.

Cohen is probably right that the difference principle is a natural expression of the
deliberative ideal against the background of an assumption that all citizens are equal
members of the political community. But defenders of a communal conception might argue
that the political relationship among citizens has a social dimension that goes beyond equal
membership in the political community. Like the relationship among friends or among
members of a sports team, the political relationship must be understood to impose
obligations on people that embody relational ideals such as solidarity and mutuality. This
means that the political relationship may require citizens to reason with each other in ways
that embody these values. For instance, the political relationship may require citizens to set
their private and sectional interests aside in certain deliberative contexts in order to focus
on their common interests as citizens. An implicit concern for social ideals such as
solidarity and mutuality may be one reason why Rawls identifies the common good with
the principle of common interest and gives this principle a special role to play in political
reasoning.

9. The Common Good in Civic Life: Burden Sharing and Resource Pooling

Many philosophers agree that citizens must transcend their private concerns when they take
part in the political process. But some philosophers believe that there are other aspects of
social life in which citizens have a relational obligation to transcend their private concerns.
Two especially prominent examples in the literature involve burden sharing and resource
pooling. Michael Walzer’s discussion of conscription and national defense highlights
several important issues (1983: 64–71, 78–91, 97–9, and 168–70; see also Walzer 1970).

When a foreign power threatens the constitutional order in a liberal democracy, political
morality seems to direct citizens to defend the order in a particular way. Citizens must
approach national defense as a communal enterprise in which they organize themselves to
achieve a certain common level of security together through various forms of burden
sharing and resource pooling. Burden sharing, in this case, requires every member of the
community to participate in some way in carrying the collective burden of fighting the
threat. Some citizens will do the actual fighting, but others will contribute by treating the
wounded, developing weapons, taking care of children, sending care packages to soldiers,
rationing essential resources, and so on.

The moral importance of burden sharing comes out most clearly when we consider certain
highly privatized ways of organizing national defense. Consider, for example, a market
based approach. A political community might allow entrepreneurs to set up “protection
agencies” that would act as firms, hiring mercenaries, buying weapons, and selling varying
levels of protection to individual citizens based on their preferences and their ability to pay
(see Nozick 1974). Even if it were possible to defend people’s constitutional liberties
through a mechanism of this kind,[21] political morality seems to rule it out. One reason is
that the market scheme would allow citizens who are wealthy enough to buy protection
services for themselves, but then leave it to others to face the actual dangers of combat.
This would violate the communal ideal that all citizens must share in some way in carrying
the collective burden of defending the community (see Walzer 1983: 98–9 and 169).

Another problem with a highly privatized approach to national defence has to do with the
injured. When soldiers get injured in combat, their injuries have a different moral status as
compared to the injuries that they might suffer if they decide to do things as private
individuals like ride a motorcycle or work in a circus. The difference is that combat injuries
are not private injuries that citizens must bear as private persons. Even in the case where
soldiers volunteer for combat, they perform a public service and we treat their injuries as
part of a collective burden that the community as a whole must bear, e.g., by providing
medical care and rehabilitation services to the wounded free of charge.

The communal ideal of public service and burden sharing might extend beyond national
defence to other forms of socially necessary work that is difficult or dangerous.

Miners today are free citizens, but we might think of them…as citizens in the service of the
nation. And then we might treat them as if they were conscripts, not sharing their risks, but
sharing the costs of the remedy: research into mine safety, health care designed for their
immediate needs, early retirement, decent pensions, and so on. (Walzer 1983: 170)

A more extensive application of the communal ideal might require citizens to treat the
burdens associated with other occupations as parts of a shared social burden, including the
burdens faced by police officers, firefighters, teachers, day care workers, nurses, nursing
home workers, and so on (cf. Brennan & Jaworski 2015).
Besides burden sharing, resource pooling is another way that citizens may organize their
activities in light of the common good. Many facilities in a modern liberal democracy serve
common interests, including the armed forces, public health services, and the education
system. These facilities require material resources, and this raises an array of questions
about how to generate these resources and incorporate them into the pool of assets that
serve common interests.

Aristotle favors an approach that works through private ownership. In Plato’s Republic,
almost all of the resources held by the guardians are held as collective assets that the
guardians may use for the sake of the common interest of the community.[22] Importantly,
because the guardians hold almost nothing as private property, they do nothing that is
analogous to the choices that a group of friends might make on a camping trip to
voluntarily pool their resources for the sake of common interests. In other words, the
guardians do not express their concern for the members of the community through gifts,
donations or other forms of private contribution. Partly for this reason, Aristotle favors an
arrangement in which citizens have private ownership and control over assets and a civic
obligation to pool these assets for the sake of common interests (see Kraut 2002: 327–56).
For example, if the community faces a naval threat, wealthy citizens in Aristotle’s ideal
community would be responsible for building warships and contributing these ships to the
war effort.

Aristotle’s view draws attention to an important set of questions in contemporary market

societies. The civic obligation he has in mind comes closest to our notion of private
philanthropy. But is private philanthropy really the right way for a community to maintain
common facilities for the sake of common interests? In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, the
billionaire founder of Facebook, announced that he would donate 99% of his shares in the
company to charitable causes, including public education (Kelly 2015). From Aristotle’s
point of view, this reflects well on our society: our institutions put wealth in private hands,
thereby allowing citizens to make meaningful choices to pool their wealth for common
interests. But many would argue that our arrangements are seriously defective insofar as
they put some individuals in a position to control a private fortune worth over $45 billion,
even if these individuals will eventually devote these resources to common interests. Plato
is on to something when he says that political solidarity requires that social institutions
channel some wealth directly into the public domain. But Plato seems to go too far in the
other direction, and this leaves us with an important set of questions about when society
should pool resources through the state and when society should pool resources through
private philanthropy.

10. Markets, Competition and the Invisible Hand

A third important topic in philosophical reflection about the common good is the market.
Citizens have a relational obligation to care about certain common interests, and social
coordination through markets can draw citizens into a pattern of production activity and
consumption activity that answers to these interests. For example, markets can lead citizens
to make better use of land and labor in society, thereby generating more resources for
everyone to use in pursuing their various ends. The problem is that market coordination
involves a privatized form of reasoning, and the proper functioning of the market may
require citizens not to reason from the standpoint of the common good.

To illustrate, suppose that a society uses markets to coordinate the education of citizens
(see Friedman 1962). A system of for-profit schools would operate as firms, hiring
teachers, buying computers, and selling education services to the public. Parents, in turn,
would act as consumers, buying the best education for their children at the lowest cost.
Each citizen in this arrangement would reason from the standpoint of her own private
concerns: as school managers, citizens would aim to maximize profits, and as parents,
citizens would aim to get the best education for their children at the lowest cost. No one
would act out of a concern for the education system as a shared facility that serves common
interests. In fact, the market may require citizens to avoid this perspective. After all, to
lower costs effectively, school managers must not show too much concern for the education
of their students. And in order to improve the education of their own children, parents must
not show too much concern for the education of other people’s children.

We can divide the philosophical debate into two camps. The first camp says that market
society—i.e., a social order that relies extensively on markets to coordinate social life—is
compatible with the requirements of the political relationship. Theorists in this camp
include Adam Smith (1776), G.W.F. Hegel (1821), John Rawls (1971), Michael Sandel
(2009) and perhaps Michael Walzer (1983). We might also include deliberative democrats
such as Jürgen Habermas (1992) and Joshua Cohen (Cohen & Sabel 1997).[23]

As an example of someone in the first camp, consider Hegel (1821) and his view of the
market. Hegel follows Adam Smith in thinking that the market draws citizens into a pattern
of specialization that serves common interests. The market does this through prices. Each
citizen finds that she can do better for herself by developing her talents and selling her labor
at the going rate, then buying the goods that she needs from others. But following price
signals involves a form of reasoning that is focused only on private interests, not the
common good. As a result, it is essential, on Hegel’s view, that the realm of market activity
must be integrated into a wider political community. As members of a political community,
citizens (or at least some citizens) discuss their common interests in the public sphere, vote
in elections, and find their views represented in legislative deliberations that shape an
official conception of the common good. This official conception shapes the laws and
guides the government in managing the economy. So even if citizens do not reason from
the standpoint of the common good as market actors, their lives as a whole are organized by
a form of reasoning that is focused on maintaining shared facilities for the sake of common
interests.

The other camp in the disagreement says that market society is not compatible with the
requirements of the political relationship. Theorists in this camp include Aristotle (see Pol.
1256b39–1258a17), Rousseau (1762b), Marx (1844, 1867), and G.A. Cohen (2009).
Marx’s view provides an interesting contrast to Hegel’s.

Marx agrees with Hegel that members of a political community must organize their
activities in light of a conception of the common good. But he does not think that members
live up to the ideal if most of them never actually reason from this standpoint. A political
community must be “radically democratic” in the sense that ordinary citizens participate
directly in the collective effort to organize social life by appeal to a conception of the
common good (Marx 1844). What makes social coordination through markets problematic
is that market actors are drawn into certain patterns of activity through prices, which means
that they never actually reason with each other in terms of the common good. On Marx’s
view, a properly ordered political community would move beyond this opaque form of
social coordination:

The life-process of society, which is based on the process of material production, does not
strip off its mystical veil until it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is
consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan. (Marx 1867 [1967:84]).

In a properly ordered political community, members will transcend the authoritarian

mysticism of price coordination and organize their production and consumption activities
through an open and transparent process of reasoning that makes explicit to everyone how
their activities serve common interests.

Many contemporary issues in political philosophy revolve around questions about the
market and the standpoint of the common good. Most theorists today hold views that fall
somewhere between the two camps I just described: they argue for some more nuanced
view about when citizens are supposed to adopt a privatized perspective and when they
must reason from the standpoint of the common good.

When it comes to corporations and corporate executives, for example, Thomas Christiano
(2010) argues for a certain kind of socially conscious orientation: corporate leaders must
reason from the standpoint of the common good at least in limiting their strategic pursuit of
private objectives in a way that is consistent with the broader social objectives established
by democratic majorities.[24] Joseph Heath (2014) argues for a more limited view, such that
market actors must not take a purely privatized perspective in cases where externalities and
other market failures would prevent the market process from generating attractive results. A
great deal of work remains to be done when it comes to other aspects of market life that
may require citizens to reason from a more socially conscious perspective, particularly
when it comes to labor rights, political liberties and climate change.

Another important set of contemporary issues has to do with competition. Market

coordination typically works through a process in which citizens compete with one another
for important goods. In the United States, for instance, labor market participants compete
for jobs that substantially determine who gets access to different levels of income, and by
extension, different levels of health care, police protection, consideration in the justice
system, and political influence. As citizens square off against each other, each one strives to
secure important goods for herself, knowing that her activities will—if successful—
effectively deprive some other citizen of these same goods. In this way, labor market
competition requires citizens to act with an extreme form of disregard for how their actions
affect one another’s basic interests.

Many philosophers believe that the antagonistic structure of market competition is

inconsistent with the relational obligation that members of a political community have to
care about certain common interests. G.A. Cohen (2009: 34–45) articulates the problem in
terms of a “socialist principle of community” that rules out social arrangements that require
people to view one another simply as obstacles that must be overcome. Hussain
(forthcoming) takes a more moderate view, arguing that there is a difference between a
“friendly competition” and a “life or death struggle”. The political relationship allows for a
certain degree of competition among citizens, but it limits how severely institutions can pit
citizens against each other when it comes to goods that are part of the common good, e.g.,
health care, education, and the social bases of self-respect.

11. Conclusion: Social Justice and the Common Good

This article has covered the main points of agreement and disagreement among different
conceptions of the common good, as well as a few central topics of concern. Let me
conclude by saying something about the relation between the common good and social
justice.

Consider the case of friendship. Friendship is a social relationship that requires those who
stand in the relationship to think and act in ways that embody a particular form of mutual
concern. The relevant form of concern incorporates the basic requirements of morality—
i.e., what Scanlon (1998) calls “the morality of right and wrong”—as friends must not lie to
each other, assault each other, or take unfair advantage of each other. But even strangers are
required to conform to these basic moral standards. What distinguishes friendship is that the
form of mutual concern it involves goes beyond basic morality and requires friends to
maintain certain patterns of conduct on the grounds that these patterns serve certain
common interests.

Members of a political community stand in a social relationship, and this relationship also
requires them to think and act in ways that embody a certain form of mutual concern. The
common good defines this form of concern. The common good incorporates certain basic
requirements of social justice, as citizens must provide one another with basic rights and
freedoms and they must not exploit each other. But the common good goes beyond the
basic requirements of justice because it requires citizens to maintain certain patterns of
conduct on the grounds that these patterns serve certain common interests.

The analogy with friendship should make it clear that the common good is distinct from,
but still closely related to social justice. According to most of the major traditional views,
the facilities and interests that members of a political community have a relational
obligation to care about are partly defined in terms of social justice. For instance, Rousseau
(1762b), Hegel (1821) and Rawls (1971) all hold that a basic system of private property is
both a requirement of justice and an element of the common good. Similarly, in Natural
Law and Natural Rights, Finnis holds that respect for human rights is a requirement of
justice and that “the maintenance of human rights is a fundamental component of the
common good” (1980: 218). But the common good goes beyond the requirements of justice
because (1) it describes a pattern of inner motivation, not just a pattern of outer conduct and
(2) it may incorporate facilities and interests that are not general requirements of justice.
All of this leaves us with some important questions. Many contemporary social issues turn
on disagreements about when citizens may take up a privatized perspective and when they
must reason from the standpoint of the common good. Social justice is often silent on these
issues because people could, in principle, act as justice requires, whether they are moved by
a scheme of private incentives or by a concern for common interests. These social issues
are best understood as turning on disagreements about the nature of the political
relationship and the form of mutual concern that it requires. Philosophical reflection has an
important role to play in shedding light on this relationship and what it requires of us
beyond what we owe to each other as a matter of justice.

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