Give your commenting on the following information Sometimes people may support a policy that works directly against an individual interest in the name of the common good. For example, a farmer may support regulations about farm waste to protect a downstream watershed. Let’s suppose that the farmer knows that this regulation will not offer material benefit to him. What then could motivate support for this regulation? In this context, appeals to the common good may be a way to express motives justified for reasons other than self-interest. Appeals to the common good are then contrasted against egoistic or prudential motivations The common good would then refer to any ethical outlook that takes into account some aggregated understanding of others’ interest beyond one’s own. For example, utilitarian’s can describe their theory as a theory of the common good: people ought to support policies that offer the most benefits for the community overall by taking each individual interest as valid, and then aggregating those interests to create some overall judgment of community interest. Consider another example: democracy offers a procedure to aggregate individual interests through voting. These democratic outcomes can be interpreted as expressing the common good of a nation, with people who are motivated to support democracy because its procedures express a common good.
The relevant community may be local, national, or global. In The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (2010) writer Sam Harris offers a provocative science-based defense for how to think about the well-being of the aggregated whole. Regardless of its range of application, the essential idea is that people should be motivated to consider other people’s interests and support policies that offer significant overall benefit. Ethics is in part about embracing these more altruistic motives, and, unlike the first account provided previously, these motives can conflict with the pursuit of one’s own individual interests.
Many arguments about the common good fall under the descriptions provided in the previous two subsections, but not all of them do. These accounts still presume that the source of value is defined through and by the individual person. For many, these interpretations of the common good miss a deeper meaning about the social nature of human existence. For example, French philosopher Jacques Maritain, a prominent drafter of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, writes, “The common good… is the good human life of the multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to both the whole and the parts”
In this context the reference to a common good can be a descriptive, spiritual, religious, or metaphysical claim about what it means to be a person. The idea is often conveyed in poetry, such as through this well- known poem by John Donne:
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls it tolls for thee.
