Carozza on the Common Good

Here is an excellent essay, exploring the idea of the "Common Good" in Catholic thought, by friend-of-MOJ Paolo Carozza.  Having just returned from a conference -- a wonderful one -- where many speakers and participants invoked this idea, but few took the time to pin it down, I really appreciated Carozza's clear account:        

First, the common       good involves the good of each person in society; it cannot be the aggregation       of a “collective interest” that considers the good of some number       of individuals to outweigh the good of others. Second, the common good consists       in the conditions that permit each of those persons, in community with others,       to reach for themselves their fulfillment, to develop “the human vocation”(to       use the Catechism’s beautiful phrase). So, the “blessings of       liberty” are a part of the common good exactly so that each of us,       acting together with others in the communities that together give life to       our society as a whole, can be free to develop a life “founded on       truth, built up in justice, and animated by love”(again, using the       language of the Catechism). . . .

      The common good does not give us formulas for how to love the dying or how       to guide our children. By referring always to the good of persons, a concrete       human good in all its dimensions, the common good, in the end, points us       toward a mystery, toward something as inexhaustible as the destiny of humanity.       That is what ultimately makes a commitment to the common good a drama of       freedom and not merely an ideological project.

Rick