The Common Good Belongs to Everyone It Touches

In August, the small city of Ronceverte, West Virginia, voted to sell its water and sewer systems to West Virginia American Water for $31 million. On October 13, the Greenbrier County Commission came out against the sale, speaking for the county customers who live outside city limits and depend on the same pipes. Underneath the fight over the sale of Ronceverte’s water and sewer system sits a question every town must come to terms with. When the Church talks about the common good, what exactly is she asking a community to secure, and for whom?

The Principle

The Church’s working definition of The Common Good is older than most of her readers. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church gives it in the form the Catechism and the current Pope both use: the common good is “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”1 John XXIII had already put the idea to public officials in 1961, telling them they “must take account of all those social conditions which favor the full development of human personality.”2 Four years later, the Second Vatican Council took it up in Gaudium et Spes. (The Vatican’s English of no. 26 renders the Council’s phrase a little differently, as conditions that allow groups and their members “relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.”3 The meaning is the same.)

Notice the word conditions. The common good is the set of things a person needs and can’t secure alone: peace, honest courts, roads, schools, and water that comes out of the tap clean. The Compendium counts among its demands “the provision of essential services to all.”4 Nobody lays a water main for himself. So the Compendium insists that the common good “does not consist in the simple sum of the particular goods of each subject of a social entity.” It stays common “because it is indivisible and because only together is it possible to attain it, increase it and safeguard its effectiveness, with regard also to the future.”5 That last phrase matters more than it looks. The common good includes people who can’t vote yet, and some who haven’t been born. There is an element of future generations that must be considered when discussing the common good.

The Catechism breaks the idea into three elements: respect for the person, the social well-being and development of the group, and peace, meaning the stability and security of a just order.6 Every human community has a common good of its own, from the family up to the community of nations, and the Compendium calls that good “the authentic reason for its very existence.”7 A town exists for the common good as does a water district. Once any community forgets that, at the heart of its reason to exist is the common good, that is when that community begins to have challenges.

St. Thomas Aquinas built the same truth into his definition of law. Law, he wrote, “is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated,” and so “every law is ordained to the common good.” He even names a virtue for the citizen’s share in it, legal justice, which “directs the acts of all the virtues to the common good.”8 A rule that serves only the ruler’s interest falls short of law on Thomas’s account, which is why, in On Kingship, he draws the line between a king, who governs for the multitude, and a tyrant, who governs for himself. Thomas and the Compendium put the same test to every arrangement: whom does it serve?

In May, Leo XIV took up the definition in Magnifica Humanitas and carried it further. He calls the common good “the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person,” and he calls the classic formula “a valuable initial reference point, because the common good cannot be reduced to a mere list of conditions or institutions. It is not the sum total of individual benefits, nor the intersection of their particular interests; it is a greater good that belongs to everyone, and it can only be achieved, nurtured and protected by our collective efforts.”9 That is a real development, and you should see it plainly. The older wording can sound like a checklist for administrators. Leo XIV keeps the checklist and adds that the good itself is shared, built together, and larger than any tally of the parties’ interests.

Be clear about the weight of each claim. That public authority exists for the common good, and that the common good reaches everyone a decision touches, is the ordinary magisterium, taught without a break from John XXIII to Leo XIV. How a given community secures a given condition (who owns the pipes, who sets the rates, who carries the debt) is prudential judgment. Faithful Catholics can reach different answers there and remain faithful.

More on this principle: The Common Good. All twelve principles.