What are the different facets of the “common good”? Where does this notion come from? What commitments does its implementation entail? This study aims to support citizens, political leaders and business decision-makers in their decisions, so that they take into consideration a certain number of points of attention which relate to the common good.
Description
“The poor lack the will to get by”, “migrants make no effort to integrate into society”, “everyone is responsible for their own happiness”, all these common formulas are based on the idea received that human beings can realize themselves alone, as if happiness was above all an individual matter and that each person had the fate they deserved.
However, cooperation and mutual aid are essential to the harmony and well-being of the members of a society. Faced with this ideology which encourages the pursuit of individual interests to the detriment of the values of solidarity, the Justice and Peace Commission and the members of its working group on economic and social issues EthEcoPol wanted to reflect on the "common good", convinced of the need to promote a certain number of common values to meet the many contemporary ethical and political challenges.
This study, born from this collective questioning, aims to support citizens, political leaders and business decision-makers in their decisions, so that they take into consideration a certain number of points of attention which relate to the common good. In this regard, the grid of decision criteria proposed in this essay, with targeted questions for readers, constitute an ethical compass that each person can adopt, in anticipation of any choice that has a societal impact. For a citizen, this decision can relate to a political commitment, a consumption choice or a way of building their relationship with other members of society. For a political decision-maker, it may be the vote on a law, the constitution of a political program or the way of integrating citizens into decision-making processes. Finally, for a business manager, decisions can for example relate to the purposes of the company, the design and/or origin of the products sold or the organization of work.
But what do we mean by common good? Where does this notion come from? What are the compromises involved in its implementation? In the first part of this study, we endeavored to answer these questions by highlighting the fact that the common good concerns the entire human being (in all its dimensions) and all human beings. Secondly, it seemed necessary to us to explain how the search for the common good was inseparable from the pursuit of social justice, environmental protection and democracy.
These different ethical requirements do not exhaust all the dimensions of the common good, but they nevertheless constitute a field of action, an ideal horizon whose implementation can vary, depending on the decision contexts. It remains for each person or each group to transpose it to their own situation…
