Seeking Balance Between Competing Notions of the Common Good

Some 20 years ago now, the writer and philosopher John Ralston Saul wrote On Equilibrium, an insightful study of the human struggle for personal and social balance. In it, he explored what he regarded as the essential qualities of humanity—common sense, ethics, imagination, intuition, memory, and reason—and how they can be used to achieve equilibrium for the self and foster an ethical society.

However, Saul argued that when our qualities are worshipped in isolation, unbalanced by our other qualities, they become weaknesses and, worse, forces of destruction. In short, Saul argued, they become ideologies.

These insights are just as relevant to our conceptions of the common good which, as Sluga (2014) has observed, can be construed in terms of justice, freedom, security, order, morality, happiness, individual well-being, prosperity, progress, and much else besides.

In the context of the prevailing polarization of the Western world, and the growing division in our beliefs about what constitutes a good society and how best to achieve it, it is timely to reflect on the notion of equilibrium in the context of the common good.

What does it mean to balance different conceptions of the common good and how is this balance related to our ability to foster a good society?

In this short essay, it is not my intention to set out how different conceptions of the common good ought to be balanced. Rather, proceeding from the assumption that, in pluralistic societies, there are reasonable differences of opinion about what is the right or fair thing to do, and that each perspective distills aspects of wisdom that are missed by the others (Verweij et al., 2006), I want to show how different conceptions complement each other, notwithstanding the tensions that inhere between them.

There is, of course, nothing especially new about this insight. It was, for example, observed by the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill in his seminal work, On Liberty:

“In politics…it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress and reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life…Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity” (2003, p. 113).

This idea found expression more recently in the work of social scientists Marco Verweij and colleagues. Drawing on decades of research that reveals that, beneath the rich diversity of human cultures, human ways of life are patterned by a limited set of basic social forms, Verweij and colleagues (2006) contend that four social forms characterize social life—egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism, and fatalism—all of which are natural, legitimate, and co-occurring ways to perceive, organize, and justify social relations.

Crucially, despite representing contradictory modes of social organization, egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism, and fatalism exist simultaneously and persist over time. Ultimately, despite their contradictions and tensions, each social form requires the moderating influence of the others to stop them from devolving into self-limiting, destructive ideologies. Schwartz (1991) characterizes these moderating interdependencies thus:

“Each way of life undermines itself. Individualism would mean chaos without hierarchical authority to enforce contracts and repel enemies. To get work done and settle disputes the egalitarian order needs hierarchy. Hierarchies, in turn, would be stagnant without the creative energy of individualism, uncohesive without the binding force of equality, unstable without the passivity and acquiescence of fatalism. Dominant and subordinate ways of life thus exist in alliance, yet this relationship is fragile, constantly shifting, constantly generating a societal environment conducive to change” (p. 765).

Ultimately, each of these social forms, or ways of life, distills certain elements of experience and wisdom that are missed by the other social forms and provides an expression of the way in which a considerable proportion of the populace feels we should live with one another and with nature (Verweij et al., 2006).

Ethics and Morality Essential Reads

Do People Everywhere Cheat?

Maybe We Need to Say Less About Ethics

Crucially, each time one of these perspectives is excluded from collective decision-making about complex problems in the "shared-power contexts" (Crosby & Bryson, 1992) that typify life in pluralistic societies, governance failure inevitably results (Verweij et al., 2006). This is a vital insight.

Similar arguments could be made for the tensions that inhere between the social justice and social order worldviews that I have outlined previously. Although these worldviews are in tension, each worldview nevertheless contains important wisdom that is lacking in the other perspectives, without which each worldview would devolve into pure ideology, harming the individuals and society it purports to help.

Thus, although the social justice worldview centres outcomes and the social order worldview centres processes, concern for both is necessary because the common good is much about process as outcome (Wilson, 2023). This seems to be as true in normative ethics, overall, as in folk conceptions of the common good (Wheeler et al., 2024). Thus, it behooves us to balance these worldviews in a manner that is alive to the different ways in which polysemous concepts like fairness and justice can be understood.

Similarly, as observed by John Stuart Mill, perspectives that value stability (i.e., social order) and those that value reform (i.e., social justice) are both necessary for healthy political and civic life, their co-existence tempering our natural desire for progress with an equally natural desire to conserve the good things have been bequeathed to us by our forebears. In Saul’s (2001) terms, striking this balance might be understood as seeking equilibrium between imagination, common sense, and memory.

If, as Sluga (2014) argues, the common good is not something that can be determined by the supposed experts on the common good, such as politicians, economists and psychologists, but something more akin to an ongoing search in which experts inform but do not determine the good, then it falls to us, as citizens, to seek and sustain this fragile balance between our competing conceptions of the common good.