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The Common Good: a provisional account and summary

 

The philosopher Spinoza once wrote that ‘every determination is a negation.’ In that spirit I shall start with what the common good is not.

 

What the Common Good is not

The common good is sometimes confused with other things. Although there might be areas of overlap, it should be distinguished from them. The most common confusion is between the notion of the common good and the quite different notions of the commons (or common pool resources) and the public good. The common good is not the commons, because the latter, in the cyber context, refers to to freely available material not subject to copyright or payment. Of course, the provision of such commons is often seen as desirable and it might be that a conception of the common good will necessarily include reference to the commons: but it is not in itself the commons. On a related point, the CG is not common or collective ownership and neither is it the same as the ‘greater good’ or the ‘public interest’ or the ‘good of the people’, although it has a relation to each of these. The CG would certainly be in the public interest and it would be for the good of the people, but that doesn’t mean that it is the same concept.

           

As stated above, the CG is not a public good in the economist’s sense. This sense is a technical one, subject to precise definition. A public good in this sense is a good which is jointly produced and consumed, not subject to crowding, and from which it is impossible to exclude free-riders. However, the common good might contain or rely or recommend the provision of public goods. In this context it should be noted that the opposite of a public good is a private good , that is, a good which is individually produced and consumed, and whose consumption by one person prevents it from being consumed by another, and on which it is impossible to free ride.

 

The common good, it should now be clear, is the opposite of a purely private good but in a different sense to that in which a public good is the opposite of a private good. A private good in this sense is a good which is assumed to be a good relating solely to a private individual or entity and expressing their needs or wants. Advocates of the CG would argue that ultimately there might be no such thing as a purely private good; certainly the notion of the common good suggests that private goods are not merely competing private goods and that they can be deliberated on and modified through that deliberation in so far as they are directed upon the common good.

           

Let us turn to a positive account of the common good.

 

What the Common Good is

The common good is not a mere compromise but is based on principles which regulate the conduct of agents. As such, it regulates the distribution of goods in a society. Here the term ‘goods’ refers not primarily to material goods, but social goods, ethical goods, political goods, for example, liberty, order, security. The common good understood in this way is a framework which regulates relationships between those affected by it. The common good can contain both formal and substantive elements, that is it might have elements which regulate the conduct of agents as well as elements which stipulate particular requirements. Hence the common good does not necessarily mandate particular forms of conduct; rather, it typically adverbially regulates the manner in which agents conduct themselves. On those occasions where an agreed common good prohibits or permits particular forms of conduct, its prohibitions and permissions should be clear and there should be robust boundaries between acts which are included or excluded. In all this the common good can be thought of as a foundation or framework which makes possible the exercise of private goods.

 

Although the common good, if we can agree on it, should be expressible in terms of rules, it will comprise not only rules but customs, habitual ways in which things are done. The rules will express collectively agreed norms and the interpretation of those rules requires legal, ethical and political judgement. Hence exercise of the common good requires both accomplished legislators together with the development of virtues of deliberation and interpretation.

 

What is the common good about?

It primarily concerns issues of justice and the allocation of goods and resources: material, conceptual and spiritual. It concerns the relations between rights bearers, between duty bearers and between rights and duties and the bearers of rights and duties. It also, paradoxical as this might sound, concerns the common good itself: in other words, deliberation on the what the common good is, is part of the common good.

 

Foundations and content of the common good

We have already stated that the common good is not the same as the public good and it is not the same as the aggregate of private goods. It might be thought of as  the will of each person directed upon the common good of all. In this it is similar to the idea of the general will found in Rousseau, where the general will is contrasted with the will of all which is merely the aggregate of individual wills.

 

The common good is not utilitarian in the narrow sense of the term. Although, like any political project it looks to consequences, it is not merely consequentialist, and is not defined by its consequences alone. It requires a principle of justice which stresses the separateness of persons and does not swallow up private goods in an aggregate of goods. Such a swallowing up could lead to substantial injustice, especially to the least powerful in society.

 

Should one of the foundations of the common good be shared values? And if it is to rest on shared values, what values are they to be? Are they to be ‘thick’ values, which typically would be found in local ways of doing things, in local traditions, or is it better to look for something which is ‘thinner’ in the sense of being in principle universalisable? The latter seems to be the most promising conception for the application of a notion of the common good in cyberspace and cybersecurity. In other words, whatever values it rests on have to be values which can be agreed in principle by all users, and this suggests that they should be, so far as possible, formal and procedural. Another way of making this point is to suggest that the common good should be built, not on particular comprehensive conceptions of the good but, as John Rawls would suggest, on an overlapping consensus. What does this mean? For Rawls an overlapping consensus on principles of justice can emerge from deliberation amongst people with different comprehensive conceptions of the good. In this deliberation they refrain from disputes over fundamental arguments concerning religion and philosophy. An overlapping consensus of this sort is a distinctive feature of political liberalism. On this view of the matter, although the common good can emerge from an overlapping consensus, it is nonetheless free standing in relation to the comprehensive conceptions of the good comprising its base. It follows from this that the common good thought of in this way does not commit people to comprehensive political and moral doctrines/conceptions of the good even though its elements might be derived from such elements.

How does the common good emerge?

It is important that the common good should, at least in principle, be freely endorsed by everyone subject to it. This endorsement can be achieved from public deliberation, the exercise of public reason and the giving of reasons in public for the candidate elements of a putative common good. One question here is whether the common good has to be, as it were, inaugurated as a formal set of principles or whether it can be an emergent property of already existing systems of interaction. It is most likely that the common good in cyberspace will require both formal legal statement and explicit agreement on principles but at the same time that these will be in many (perhaps most) respect  a recognition of procedures and practices which emerge from practice, custom and tradition. The key point is that these procedures and practices can be recognized (in a strong sense of the term ‘recognised’) according to a set of appropriate criteria and the reasons for that recognition stated.

 

In place of a conclusion I offer, first, a summary of what can be termed the four phases of the common good and, secondly, a starting list of further issues that need to be addressed in conceptualizing the common good in relation to cybersecurity. This list is merely a beginning and is necessarily both incomplete and tentative at this stage.

 

The four phases of the common good are overlapping and non-disjunctive. They are:

 

  1. The performative or reflexive common goo

    • that is, the act itself of seeking the common good

  2. The provisional or prima facie common goo

    • ​preliminary ideas concerning the content of the common good

  3. The emergent common good

    • the common good that emerges from deliberation on the common good

  4. The constitutive common good

    • the common good of a community once it has emerged and been recognized as such.

 

Further issues to be addressed

There are, of course, many other issues that need to be addressed as the project proceeds. Among them are:

 

  • The common good in relation to liberalism

  • The appropriateness of liberalism as a guiding framework for the CG in cybersecurity

  • Whether the CG is possible in cybersecurity and not elsewhere or vice versa.

  • Whether it is in principle and practice possible to harmonise rights and responsibilities

  • Whether the principles and concept of CG should adapt to cyber security and the cyber age in general or whether the cyber world should be brought into line with  older conceptions of the CG.

  • Consideration of experimenting with personalities and notions of the self. Agents in cyberspace adopt different personae, different self conceptions and different forms of behaviour: how should this be addressed

  • The role of anonymity and groups such as Anonymous  

  • The problem of empathy and understanding in the cyberworld where interactive cues and clues are markedly different to everyday life.

  • The issue of perfectionism and the common good: is the CG merely a framework for policing and controlling interactions or is it at the same time a means for encouraging agents to develop themselves?

  • What are the limits of freedom? Is trolling the realization of freedom? Is it part of CG?

  • Human rights – governmental legislation.

  • Privacy and security – opposed or mutually supportive

  • Is the distinction between the public and the private a robust distinction? Some (eg Geuss) claim that the distinction needs to be re-thought and that it should not be thought of as an antecedent distinction which sets limits to political action but, rather, as a political distinction conferred by marking what is regarded as an appropriate sphere or topic for state interference, regulation or control.

  • How can the common good be sustained?

What is the Common Good?

An Explanation and Exploration by
Professor James Connelly
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