The Common Good: A Buck‐Passing Account

THE “common good” is appealed to by philosophers, political scientists, and politicians alike. Although their purposes are diverse, most invocations of the common good share a unified orientation toward it. The common good is taken to be an ideal worthy of our political pursuit. The common good represents a way of rising above private or parochial interests, setting aside political posturing or gamesmanship, and working toward goals whose value none could deny. Given its uniformly positive valence, it should not be surprising that the common good is often paired with the other guiding concept of political society: justice. We are frequently told that the appropriate aim of a deliberative democracy is toward “justice and the common good,” implicating both that the common good is something beyond justice itself, but also that the concepts play a similar function—as appropriate guides to political activity. What will interest us here is not how justice and the common good are treated similarly, but in a contrast between them. While justice—perhaps without much controversy—is the most examined concept in political philosophy, there has been relatively little systematic study of its complement. If we agree that justice if the “first virtue” of political society, it may well warrant greater scrutiny. Yet the comparison between justice and the common good sets in relief the deep disparity