scholarly journals The Common Good As A Social Debt and Patrimony of the Person

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Ilboudo SJ
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual

Aristotle’s statement that the individual human being is a social or a political animal can be misguiding if we understand it as meaning that relationships between the individual and the society are natural and obvious. Individual’s dream of autonomy and ruthless struggle to access to scarce resources on one hand and liberal and competitive societies where there is no room for “lame ducks” on the other hand, can make relationships between the person and the society conflicting and violent. The consequences can be marginalization from the social order or rebellion against it.How can we strive to make person-society relationships more integrative and fecund? In other words, what skills, social ethics as a field of Christian theology and Catholic tradition does provide for the social integration of the person and the awakening of his or her social responsibility?  This paper would like to suggest and defend that the concept of the common good is a common ground for the person and the society mutual flourishing. The paragraph 26 of Gaudium et Spes defines the common good as “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” Interestingly also, Laudato Si’ builds up on the common good and defines it as “belonging to all and meant for all.” (Paragraph 23) In a more complex way, Thomas Aquinas elaborates the common good and locates it at the junction of distributive justice and piety as one’s love of his or her country. In the light of his thought, the common good as a dynamic interaction between the person and the society, becomes the cement of what Thomas Aquinas calls “civil communion.”

A Failure of Modernization: Police Reform, The “Common Good,” and Serfdom In Eighteenth-Century Russia

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-271
Author(s):  
Hugh D. Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Max Weber ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Creation

For Russian subjects not locked away in their villages and thereby subject almost exclusively to landlord control, administration in the eighteenth century increasingly took the form of the police. And as part of the bureaucracy of governance, the police existed within the constructions of the social order—as part of social relations and their manifestations through political control. This article investigates the social and mental structures—the habitus—in which the actions of policing took place to provide a better appreciation of the difficulties of reform and modernization. Eighteenth-century Russia shared in the European discourse on the common good, the police, and social order. But whereas Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff see police development in Europe with its concern to surveil and discipline emerging from incipient capitalism and thus a product of new, post-Enlightenment social forces, the Russian example demonstrates the power of the past, of a habitus rooted in Muscovy. Despite Peter’s and especially Catherine’s well-intended efforts, Russia could not succeed in modernization, for police reforms left the enserfed part of the population subject to the whims of landlord violence, a reflection, in part, of Russia having yet to make the transition from the feudal manorial economy based on extra-economic compulsion to the capitalist hired-labor estate economy. The creation of true centralized political organization—the creation of the modern state as defined by Max Weber—would require the state’s domination over patrimonial jurisdiction and landlord control over the police. That necessitated the reforms of Alexander II.

scholarly journals The Principle of Subsidiarity: Lessons from the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church

2018 ◽  
pp. 42-48
Author(s):  
Sergiy   Prysukhin
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Social Teaching ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
Proper Functions ◽  
The Catholic Church

The article by S. Prysukhin “The Principle of Subsidiarity: Lessons from the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church” analyzes the achievements of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, represented by the works of Leo XIII, Pius XI, Pius XII, John Paul II, revealing the meaningful characteristics of the concept of “the principle of subsidiarity”, its role and meaning in the system of Christian values. The principle of subsidiarity makes possible such relationships in social life, when the community of higher order does not interfere in the internal life of the community of the lower order, taking over the proper functions of that function; for the common good it gives it when necessary support and assistance, thereby coordinating its interaction with other social structures. The principle of subsidiarity guides social practice to the promotion of the common good in the human community. The spread and application of the principle of subsidiarity opposes the danger of "nationalization" of society and the most terrible manifestations of collectivism, restricts the absoluteization of power, bureaucratization of state and socio-cultural structures, becoming one of the guarantors of respect for the rights and freedoms of citizens of their country.

Medicine and the Common Good in the Aristotelian-Thomistic Tradition

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-144
Author(s):  
Kyle E Karches
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Thomas Aquinas ◽  
Alternative Conception ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Individual Good ◽  
Medical Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Political Theory

Abstract Whereas bioethicists generally consider medicine a practice aimed at the individual good of each patient, in this paper I present an alternative conception of the goods of medicine. I first explain how modern liberal political theory gives rise to the predominant view of the medical good and then contrast this understanding of politics with that of Thomas Aquinas, informed by Aristotle. I then show how this Christian politics is implicit in certain aspects of contemporary medical practice and argue that Christians ought to draw more attention to this point in order to direct medicine toward the common good.

The Social Imagination of Radical Christianity

1992 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Hogan
Keyword(s):  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Theological Anthropology ◽  
Social Imagination ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
Christian Socialism ◽  
The Common

This article reviews Gary Dorrien's Reconstructing the Common Good and Christopher Rowland's Radical Christianity. Dorrien aims to retrieve Christian socialism as a central and vital tradition of Christian social theology and practice. Rowland endeavours to show that despite, or because of, its historically marginalised position vis à vis the institutional churches, radical apocalypticism is anything but heretical. Christian hope represents a life-affirming disposition for a humanity confronting the possibility of its own collective death. If hope is to be prophetic, however, its witnesses must stipulate in what they hope and for whom. The constructive imagining of social order implies the need of a theological anthropology and social theory and ethics as well.

scholarly journals Wojtyła’s Category of Participation and the Question of Common Good

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Karol Jasiński
Keyword(s):  
Reference Point ◽  
Common Good ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Liberal Thought

The author presents Wojtyła’s views on participation and its connections to the common good. The analysis consists of two parts. The first part outlines the concept of participation (coexistence and action together with other people in relation to the common good) and its various forms (solidarity and opposition, conformism and evasion). The second part presents views of the nature of common good found not only in liberal thought (common good as the expression of deliberation and the rights of the individual), and personalist thought (common good as the development of the person and its natural potentialities), but primarily in the work of Wojtyła himself (common good as personal self-fulfilment through coexistence and cooperation with others in relation to the conscience-discerned truth, elected in a free act). His reference point was also personalism, which stresses the inalienable dignity of the person in both the private and the social spheres of life.

What Theology Should and Should Not Learn from the Social Sciences About the Common Good

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary L. Hirschfeld
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Social Thought ◽  
Extensive Literature ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Catholic Social Thought ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

There are two ways to answer the question, What can Catholic social thought learn from the social sciences about the common good? A more modern form of Catholic social thought, which primarily thinks of the common good in terms of the equitable distribution of goods like health, education, and opportunity, could benefit from the extensive literature in public policy, economics, and political science, which study the role of institutions and policies in generating desirable social outcomes. A second approach, rooted in pre-Machiavellian Catholic thought, would expand on this modern notion to include concerns about the way the culture shapes our understanding of what genuine human flourishing entails. On that account, the social sciences offer a valuable description of human life; but because they underestimate how human behavior is shaped by institutions, policies, and the discourse of social science itself, their insights need to be treated with caution.

What Can Economists Contribute to the Common Good Tradition?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew M. Yuengert
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Common Pool Resources ◽  
Economic Approach ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Private Provision ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Insight Into

Although most economists are skeptical of or puzzled by the Catholic concept of the common good, a rejection of the economic approach as inimical to the common good would be hasty and counterproductive. Economic analysis can enrich the common good tradition in four ways. First, economics embodies a deep respect for economic agency and for the effects of policy and institutions on individual agents. Second, economics offers a rich literature on the nature of unplanned order and how it might be shaped by policy. Third, economics offers insight into the public and private provision of various kinds of goods (private, public, common pool resources). Fourth, recent work on the development and logic of institutions and norms emphasizes sustainability rooted in the good of the individual.

Can Communities Protect Autonomy? Ethical Dilemmas in HIV Preventative Drug Trials

1995 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 516-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Zion
Keyword(s):  
Advance Directive ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Ethical Dilemmas ◽  
Drug Trials ◽  
The Common Good ◽  
Gay Community ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Trial Participants

Before sailing past the sirens' “flowery meadow,” Ulysses instructed his sailors to lash him to the mast so that he would not succumb to the siren's singing. His advance directive demonstrated that he valued his dispositional or long-term autonomy over his unquestioned right to make decisions. He also indicated to his oarsmen that he understood the nature of temptation and his inability to resist it. Ideas of autonomy and sexual choice are central to this discussion of new AIDS treatments, especially the trials of preventative vaccines. Questions arise over the rights of individuals and the extent that these should be limited by concerns of the gay community. Should the gay community intervene in the risky decisions of individuals if no explicit advance directive exists? If so, how do they justify their paternalism? Could their aims not be better served through strengthening the individual dispositional autonomy of trial participants rather than making specific claims about the common good?

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