The problem of the common good and the contemporary relevance of Thomas Aquinas (Saint, Michael Sandel, John Rawls, Charles De Koninck, Jacques Maritain)

This dissertation considers the contemporary importance of the concept of the common good. It argues that an important contribution towards understanding the common good, especially in its relation to the good of individual human beings, can be made by reexamining the thought of Thomas Aquinas. The first chapter treats Michael Sandel's critique of John Rawls's Theory of Justice, insofar as it bears upon the possibility, nature, and limits of a genuine common good. Various limitations in Rawls's liberal and especially Sandel's communitarian notion of the common good prompt an inquiry into Aquinas's position. The second chapter analyzes the mid-twentieth-century exchange between Thomists Jacques Maritain and Charles De Koninck on the relation between personal and common goods. Chapters three through five center on Thomas's texts themselves. Chapter three aims to explicate how, according to Aquinas, the social and political orientation of human nature informs the human or moral virtues, thereby elucidating an important aspect of the interrelation between proper and common goods. Chapter four treats Thomas's conception of “legal” or “general justice,” that virtue which considers human acts in their social orientation, and inquires why he posits it as a preeminent personal excellence. The fifth and final chapter turns to human or civil law, which Aquinas stipulates should be framed for the community with a view to the common good. Aquinas's estimation of law's possibilities and limitations as an “extrinsic principle” of good acts and virtue are examined. The dissertation concludes by suggesting that Thomas's engagement of the problem of the common good, while not without problems of its own, is most timely for being both political and transpolitical. Aquinas reminds the contemporary reader of both the ethical core of politics, and the fact that human morality requires a political completion. At the same time, he stresses that the tensions, ambiguities, and limitations inherent in all things human can only be resolved in the light of the transcendent common good. As long as the full transcendence of the theological virtues is recognized and respected, Aquinas's reflections on virtue and the common good should prove as moderate as they are ennobling.