

Instead, he seeks to help others become virtuous like himself, so that they may enjoy the same goods with him in friendship and solidarity.įurthermore, because friendship with God is a common good, its achievement is the direct responsibility of human society as such, and those to whom authority over society is given. Nor does a virtuous person appeal to his own virtue in order to exclude others from the common good. Rather, he seeks the good of others – the essence of Christian love – and desires for them what he himself enjoys. Nor does he appeal to the common good which he enjoys as a justification for depriving others of its enjoyment.

God cannot break any friendship, for he is himself the shared good that constitutes his friendship with his creatures.īecause friendship with God is a common good, it follows that a virtuous person is one who loves the common good precisely as something to be shared, and therefore he does not rob from any of his fellows any of those things on which they depend for their ability to participate in the common good. But whereas any human friendship can be broken by either of the two friends causing a disruption in their community of enjoyment, in friendship with God, this community can only be disrupted by man. Indeed, this is the highest and most universal of all common goods, because it is the end to which all human beings without exception are called.

Even more pertinent to the common good is friendship with God. A virtuous friendship is one that treats what is common as common, rather than seeking to privatize shared goods or possess them to the exclusion of others.īut human friendship is not the only, or even the most important, example of the common good. Such offenses essentially consist in a failure of sharing, or a failure to treat the common good of friendship as truly common, and they result in the destruction of friendships and the birth of conflicts. This is a good that is desirable to human beings by their very nature, even though they sometimes contradict the virtues of friendship through their actions. Friendship practically consists in the shared enjoyment among two or more people of some good held in common. Friendship is, in a way, a paradigmatic instance of the common good. The idea of the common good is easily illustrated by the example of friendship. By contrast, to love the common good as one should is to love it precisely as common, to love its very communicability, and thus to love the whole community of persons for whom that good is intended. Thus does a tyrant love the good of the state in order to dominate it, which is to love himself more than the state for he desires this good for himself, not for the state” ( Quaestiones Disputatae de Virtutibus Q.2 A.2.). Thomas Aquinas, who writes that “to love the good of any society so that it might be had or possessed, does not constitute the political good. DeKoninck here is fully consistent with St. In Dekoninck’s words, “The fallen angels did not refuse the perfection of the good that was offered them, they refused its community and they scorned that community” ( The Writings of Charles Dekoninck, Vol. War and conflict arise when the common good is desired not for its commonness, but simply for private enjoyment. Furthermore, it is a good that does not diminish when it is shared on the contrary, enjoyment of this good increases precisely in the measure that it is shared. In the Thomistic tradition, the common good is by its very nature meant to be shared amongst a multitude of individuals, rather than reserved exclusively for private enjoyment.

The root of such evils is a distortion of the very idea of the common good, and a distortion of the desire for the common good that is natural to mankind. In The Primacy of the Common Good Against the Personalists (1943), the Thomist philosopher Charles Dekoninck put his finger on the metaphysical origins of all war and conflict.
