This is the first essay in a symposium on the common good. Essays by Rachel Lu and Michael Pakaluk will be published this week on Wednesday and Thursday.

　　Another round of “common good” discourse has swept across the conservative landscape. When this phrase first started to become the center of attention in conservative circles several years ago, the conversation was driven largely by eccentric Roman Catholic integralists whose extremism ultimately made the conversation look silly to many observers. This time around, those arguing for something like “common good conservatism” are taking a more moderate stance. No more talk of the moral bankruptcy of the original American constitutional order; no more throne and altar; no more moral quandaries about whether to clandestinely baptize and kidnap Jewish babies.

　　Yet the vocal advocates of common-good language often still continue to avoid the meaningful question at stake. Much of the published debate over the past few weeks seems to be concerned mostly with whether we ought to use that specific phrase (“the common good”) when talking about desirable political or social arrangements. That is not a particularly important question.

　　One entrant in the debate defined the common good as “the ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing.” Surely any one of us can easily put together such an “ensemble” that in his judgment would be conducive to “flourishing.” (We could also put those same conditions together and not use the phrase “the common good” to describe them.) And on the other side, one could argue that true human “flourishing” requires individual freedom, and call the conditions that allow for that “the common good.” And of course many have used phrases like “the common good” or the “general good” simply to mean something that benefits all parts of society, not merely one group. It is rather pointless to insist on the phrase, or to ceremoniously disclaim it, if you’re not willing to get down to brass tacks about what is actually being contested. 

　　And what is actually being contested in contemporary discourse, of course, is government power and political ambition. The postliberal-leaning crowd, which has been largely responsible for the expansion of “common good” talk, has always been eager to see government power used in a paternalistic attempt to remake society after a particular model. As one recent commentary argued, “the point of societies [is] to embody a particular conception of the good life,” and the point of politics is to choose which vision it will embody, and to get us there as much as possible. If that is the claim, then the question worth pursuing is about the kinds of goods the institutions and practices of politics are actually capable of securing.

　　The common-good framework demands this question be asked. Almost no reasonable person would hold that the political state can directly provide the entire “ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing.” And nearly everyone would acknowledge that the political state does secure some shared goods (except, presumably, the hypothetical quasi-anarchic libertarians against which most postliberal essays seem to be written). So if we are supposed to use the common good as a meaningful political category, we would have to inquire further about what goods we can reasonably expect to be secured through political action, and which ones are better attained (or can only be attained) through some other form of interaction.

　　But this essential question seems to be the very one that common-good advocates are allergic to. Indeed, one reason they seem so insistent on using that specific phrase is precisely because it obscures the question. Instead of drawing attention specifically to what we can and can’t reasonably expect from politics, the phrase “the common good” dissolves such distinctions and puts all goods shared between human beings into one big bucket. And since we’re all obviously pulling something out of that bucket to describe what politics should do, we can’t be upset about what they choose to pull from it.

　　In his final book, the late, great political theorist Kenneth Minogue brilliantly diagnosed the tendency of contemporary liberals to “bypass[] the dialogue of morals and politics” by collapsing both into a category he called a “politico-moral” realm. From the Greeks on, the West had retained a sense that there is a perennial tension between moral questions (“what is the right thing to do?”) and political questions (“what does the polis demand?”). Yet there has also existed an allure of “the idea of harmonious monism,” in which all the complexities of moral decisions, and all the questions about the proper task of politics are collapsed into “social criticism” in the form of “grandiose remarks about the supposed condition of our society as a whole.” When that happens, political and moral questions become one and the same, and they both boil down to holding the correct views about what society as a whole ought to look like and then using political levers to make it so.

　　By blurring any distinction between the total goods of a social order and those goods specifically secured by politics, today’s common-good conservatives are leaning in the same direction. The way the conversations often go, social desirability in the abstract becomes the primary criterion of political judgment.

　　But the approach often entails vast oversimplifications, not least of which is the oft-repeated presumption that social or political orders are the projection of a unified, coherent vision of The Good. There is a vast conceptual middle ground between absolute, metaphysical neutrality (against which the postliberals tend to pit their arguments, and which is, as they point out, impossible), and a society consciously built around a single coherent ideal good (which is equally impossible).

　　By teaching that the good life must be politically arranged for you, the politico-moral inclination degrades the virtues that are actually necessary to live well in an unsettled time.

　　Indeed, in some ways, the postliberal politico-morality (the idea that society is to embody a particular vision of the good life, and that politics is how we make that happen) is a collectivized, mirror-image of the autonomous individualism it critiques. The atomized, empowered individual demands complete, uninhibited freedom to choose his (or xis?) own identity, choose his own values, and have social conditions adjusted by law to accommodate his choices. Rather than challenge the basic assumptions about the possibility of such absolute freedom of choice, the postliberal collectivizes it. There is very little wrestling with the complex relationship between law, culture, and morality. The Good is simply out there for us to choose voluntarily. We just do so collectively.

　　No real individual or society, though, ever has such a clean choice. In real polities, the law will reflect certain moral sentiments that operate within a society, but those sentiments are the product of innumerable influences, not one unified vision that we are consciously able to pursue. And insofar as the morality of a society is reflected in its law, it also needs to be filtered through some other shared or negotiated standard of what is appropriate to the realm of politics and what is not.

　　That standard, of course, is also a matter of contestation, and it’s not my purpose here to lay out my own views in any detail. But those who make grandiose claims for politics ought to defend their proposition with some basic questions in view. Is government actually capable of manipulating a social order to match a chosen model? If it is, are the institutions and practices of the modern state such that it is likely to choose a good model, rather than one that gratifies the impulses of the electorate? Can we be confident that an attempt to legislate a morally unified society won’t disrupt the relationship between citizens in other, unintended ways? In choosing to ban or incentivize a certain activity for the people’s own good, does government inadvertently entangle itself in a broader area, in which it will do more harm than good? Are there certain human goods that can only be attained precisely when they are not pursued with collective political goals in mind?

　　These are not new questions, and a common-good framework would seem to demand answers to them. But its contemporary advocates are often keen to dismiss them with a handwave and an offhand comment about how “libertarianism didn’t work.”

　　To answer those questions though, we might consider certain qualities of the political state in the modern West: It is impersonal and necessarily bureaucratic. It is possessed of power that can’t be rivalled by any other institution. It is essentially an involuntary association. Its scale is such that decisions are made far away from the daily activity of life. Insofar as it is answerable to society at large, it responds primarily to mass opinion, generally manipulated by those who profit in one way or another from public discontent.

　　In short, it is a blunt instrument that seems unlikely to make moral judgments with any degree of subtlety. Its power and scope make it well-positioned to enforce certain broad standards of conduct between the various parts of society, upholding a framework of public expectations that we have for one another. But if instead of upholding public expectations, government tries to create its own standards of the good without a social consensus around them, it is much more likely to create rent-seeking and perpetual conflict than a morally unified society. American experience over the past century is a prime example.

　　Many of the specific points of policy that the common-gooders point to as examples (restrictions on kids’ use of social media, age verification for adult websites, or limits on abortion) are perfectly compatible with a much more limited conception of the political sphere. So why is it that they claim so much more for politics? Perhaps they really believe that blue laws will make America pious again. But it may just be that they realize how enticing the “allure of harmonious monism” is, especially to animated young men who don’t know any better.

　　But the tendency to talk about politics in such comprehensive terms has consequences. It raises expectations for political institutions that cannot be met. In doing so, it not only breeds disillusionment, but also undermines government’s ability to attain the goods it actually can achieve. As Thomas Sowell convincingly argued in one of his more neglected books, the more people expect politics to provide “cosmic justice,” the more it is pulled away from the traditional justice that offers a stable, if imperfect, civil life.

　　But it also has consequences for character. Minogue recognized the politico-moral inclination as a manifestation of creeping moral servility. It presents the collective project, rather than the messy reality of real human relationships, as the playing field of virtue. It redirects moral energies to an arena which can only culminate in disappointment and disillusion. And by teaching that the good life must be politically arranged for you, it degrades the virtues that are actually necessary to live well in an unsettled time.

　　“The common good,” like any other term, is only as useful as the discourse around it. It could be an opening to a more precise discussion of various shared human goods, perhaps aiming to get beyond rights talk. But currently, it is being used as a shorthand for more expansive government and loftier expectations of politics, while avoiding the hard questions. As long as that remains the case, the term ought to be met with skepticism.

　　Any opinions expressed are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect those of Liberty Fund.