Should Bearing the Child Mean Bearing All the Cost? A Catholic Perspective on the Sacrifice of Motherhood and the Common Good

The secular state, the church, and the caliphate are associations that each hold universal aspirations, at least implicitly. While the universal aspirations of the church and caliphate may be obvious enough, every state seeks dominion over the whole world. (“Secular” describes states that limit their vision to this world, as opposed to the transcendence to which both the church and caliphate appeal.) As an essay in Catholic speculative theology, Griffiths asks two questions: Whether Catholic theology supports or discourages the variety of political orders, and whether these orders could be ranked in terms of goodness from a Catholic perspective? In response to these questions, Griffiths appeals to two aspects of St. Augustine’s political thought: Political rivalries serve the common good; and the principal indicator of the degree to which a state serves the common good is its explicit service to the god of Abraham. The United States (a secular state) is compared with ISIS (an attempted caliphate).

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Losing Real Life: James Baldwin and the Ethics of Trauma

James Baldwin Review ◽

10.7227/jbr.4.9 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 4 (1) ◽

pp. 114-127

Author(s):

Mikko Tuhkanen

Keyword(s):

Common Good ◽

Real Life ◽

James Baldwin ◽

Native Son ◽

The Common Good ◽

Present Essay ◽

Sarah Schulman ◽

The World ◽

The Common ◽

The Cost

This essay proposes that we turn to James Baldwin’s work to assess the cost of, and think alternatives to, the cultures of traumatization whose proliferation one witnesses in contemporary U.S. academia. Beginning with some recent examples, the essay briefly places these cultures into a genealogy of onto-ethics whose contemporary forms arose with the reconfiguration of diasporic histories in the idioms of psychoanalysis and deconstructive philosophy in 1990s trauma theory. Baldwin speaks to the contemporary moment as he considers the outcome of trauma’s perpetuation in an autobiographical scene from “Notes of a Native Son.” In this scene—which restages Bigger Thomas’s murderous compulsion in Native Son—he warns us against embracing one’s traumatization as a mode of negotiating the world. In foregoing what Sarah Schulman has recently called the “duty of repair,” such traumatized engagement prevents all search for the kind of “commonness” whose early articulation can be found in Aristotle’s query after “the common good” (to koinon agathon). With Baldwin, the present essay suggests the urgency of returning to the question of “the common good”: while mindful of past critiques, which have observed in this concept’s deployment a sleight-of-hand by which hegemonic positions universalize their interests, we should work to actualize the unfinished potential of Aristotle’s idea. Baldwin’s work on diasporic modernity provides an indispensable archive for this effort.

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Inclusive groups can avoid the tragedy of the commons

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-020-79731-y ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Arend Hintze ◽

Jochen Staudacher ◽

Katja Gelhar ◽

Alexander Pothmann ◽

Juliana Rasch ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Common Good ◽

Tragedy Of The Commons ◽

Entire Group ◽

The Public ◽

The Common Good ◽

Costly Punishment ◽

The Commons ◽

Group Members ◽

The Common ◽

The Cost

AbstractThe public goods game is a famous example illustrating the tragedy of the commons (Hardin in Science 162:1243–1248, 1968). In this game cooperating individuals contribute to a pool, which in turn is distributed to all members of the group, including defectors who reap the same rewards as cooperators without having made a contribution before. The question is now, how to incentivize group members to all cooperate as it maximizes the common good. While costly punishment (Helbing et al. in New J Phys 12:083005, 2010) presents one such method, the cost of punishment still reduces the common good. The selfishness of the group members favors defectors. Here we show that including other members of the groups and sharing rewards with them can be another incentive for cooperation, avoiding the cost required for punishment. Further, we show how punishment and this form of inclusiveness interact. This work suggests that a redistribution similar to a basic income that is coupled to the economic success of the entire group could overcome the tragedy of the commons.

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