Global Ethics and Global Common Goods 9781474240062, 9781472580849

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Introduction

In a world in which the news bulletins at the time of writing carry reports of Crimea and Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and so many other places in which there is violence, it may seem strange to write about common goods. Many other issues such as competition for water, neo-colonialism in the purchase of vast tracts of land, the increasing vulnerability of low-lying places to flooding due to rising sea levels, air pollution due to China’s rapid industrial expansion, and so on, provoke a doubt about the relevance of the concept. With the integration of markets for capital, goods and services and human labour, purchases and trades in high-street shops or in our big cities’ exchanges have unintended and unforeseen consequences in harm done to anonymous and distant others. It seems that the only thing that is common in such a world is the reality of violent conflict, competition and division, and not a sharing in the enjoyment of the good things life has to offer. Why consider or discuss a concept that seems so irrelevant? Such problems and conflicts are indeed the context in which global ethics appears relevant. We wonder about the appropriate ways of responding to these crises and what we are obliged to do in the face of human suffering, injustice, and deprivation. We ask about the limits that ought to be respected in our attempts to intervene in the lives of others, whether in political or in cultural or in economic affairs. We can feel overwhelmed by the scale of the problems and the poverty of our own capacities to respond. Even where we have a sense of what needs to be done – ‘someone ought to stand up to those bullies’ – it appears we lack either the resources, or the will, or the vision, to act effectively. Why is it our business, anyway, to be concerned about the viability and security of South Sudan? What has it to do with us? And even if it does concern us, what resources do we have available that we could employ in assisting that situation? But why pick that one in preference to all the other problematic situations in which we could possibly intervene? How well have we managed to succeed

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in setting and achieving goals in other situations in our experience? Have we not been over-hasty before and gotten our fingers burnt – let us not make the same mistake again? And if we do somehow find the will and the motivation to intervene, to what end? What are we trying to achieve? What vision do we have for ourselves and those who work with us and for the many suffering people in the world? Perhaps you have been provoked to ask, after this long listing of questions seemingly without answers, who are the ‘we’ referred to in each one of these? Who is the intended audience of the questions and the book? If you do not find yourself spontaneously asking one or other of these questions, if you don’t feel included in the shared sense of ‘we’ as in ‘what can we do about this?’, then this book will not be of much benefit to you. It is addressed to those who at some level, not necessarily professionally or in a technical way, experience the anxiety and wonder, the powerlessness and frustration in face of the complex problems of the world we live in today. The audience of this book is self-selecting, and will include students and professors, citizens as well as politicians and persons in position of public responsibility. Most generally, it will include people from various contexts, both those who identify themselves as victims or at least vulnerable in their life, relationships and work, and also those who unwittingly find themselves complicit in structures and relationships that impact negatively on others. We know who we are. We know that we want the world to be different, and we want to be able to make a difference, and we want to be able to identify what we can do and how we can explain and justify both what we do and what we don’t do, to make that difference. We know that there are many of us, but we do not know each other. We have glimpses of each other on occasion, as when we gather in public on some issue. It might be in response to victims’ call for compassion, or a leader’s initiative that invites support, or public demonstration of horror at abuse. Then we recognize each other through the values that bring us together, albeit momentarily. The sense of ‘we’, the recognition of communal interest, is presupposed by the argument offered here, but, at the same time, it becomes an object of interest and investigation. Roger Scruton’s (2012) reflections on the importance of the ‘we’-identity as key to finding solutions to the environmental crises facing ‘us’ will be helpful, but his scepticism about the possibilities of building this shared sense of identity beyond the local and national will be a challenge for any consideration of global goods in common. John Searle’s (2012) analysis of collective intentionality will be helpful also in providing a means to comprehend a communal sense without presupposing an emotional tie such as those provided by shared locality, culture and belonging.

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We discover who we are through the goods we value together. This book is addressed to a ‘we’ in the process of self-discovery. How can we live together in this complex, conflicted and precarious world? And is it just a matter of surviving, or can we ask more profoundly with a view to the quality of our life, how can we live well together? For Aristotle, the most basic question of ethics is ‘what is the good life?’ This book attempts to follow Aristotle in questioning this on a global scale, in the awareness that this is an exceptional undertaking, in contrast with the usual approaches in the field. Very few treatments of global ethics to date take up such questions. They are heavily conditioned by those traditions that consider the justification of norms to be the main task of ethics. Whether influenced by Kant and the concern for universalizability, or by forms of consequentialism and the challenge to measure and compare outcomes, whether of actions or of the adoption of rules, these traditions strive to generate and justify norms that are applicable on a global scale. So they address the very difficult but pressing question whether there are moral standards that can be applied universally. The usual approach, therefore, surveys deontology, forms of utilitarianism and virtue ethics for their sketches of what a global ethic in this sense would look like. This book is not intended to replace such investigation or debates, but is offered as complementary to the standard approaches. It focuses on human goods, and asks about goods in common, and explores what goods in common might be pursued and realized on a global scale. So formulated, the question seems both strange and awkward. One reason for this awkwardness is the way in which the modern distinction between public and private typically relegates the matter of the good life to the private sphere. The public sphere, by contrast, is concerned with the establishment and implementation of common standards of regulation and adjudication of conflicts, taking care not to privilege any one’s understanding of the good, but remaining neutral between their conceptions. So if the good life is the private business of each individual who attempts to determine her own conception of her good and to construct her narrative and life plan in her own circumstances, it is not directly part of the public agenda. And since the global dimension of ethics is definitely public, extending beyond the narrow confines of the private, the local and the national, there cannot be a good life on a global scale. It seems like a contradiction in terms. In addressing this question and clarifying the ways in which the good life can be meaningfully understood as a public matter and therefore as a relevant topic for global ethics, it will be necessary to confront and challenge some of the standard

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objections to a focus on the good. Since the emergence of the modern discourse of ethics, the question of the good has been sidelined, and this is reinforced by the standard account in political philosophy of the rational grounding of law and authority. It is taken for granted that the status of the concept of human good as outlined by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume is correct. That is to say that people’s given desires and interests are varied and pluriform and that they will not necessarily agree in desiring the same thing. Whatever they happen to desire they will call good, but the various objects of their desire will not necessarily be compatible or consistent with one another. Without a common standard of what is good that they might agree on, their common and public life will be fraught with conflict. To be deemed good, the common standard must be something that all involved happen to desire, and since such a standard might be available only coincidentally, but not necessarily, there is a great fragility in common life. This might only be countered by a public authority, which will facilitate the pursuit by each individual of their own good, that is, their own desires and inclinations, but insist on the imposed common standard when conflict occurs. But, on a global scale, world government, a global authority, seems both threatening and fanciful, and impossible to achieve for these and other reasons. So without a ‘common power’ at the global level, there cannot be a ‘common good’, at least according to the standard Hobbesian way of considering these matters. There is a gap caused by the neglect of the topic of the good in practical philosophy as this affects global ethics. There is no intention to fill the gap, but I hope this study will contribute in a programmatic way to an outline of what might be done to make up the deficit. This is a challenging project for a number of reasons. The dangers are that one either presents a substantive vision of the good, which will prove implausible, and be rejected as cultural imperialism or a projection of parochialism, or that one speaks only in the vaguest terms about the good or considers only procedural aspects of the pursuit of the good. The present context is characterized by a heightened sensitivity to anything that may seem to be an imposition of a vision of human fulfilment, with a consequent disrespect for people’s freedoms, which are assumed to extend also to the choice of the account of the human good making sense of one’s life. Another widespread assumption, characteristic of liberal political thought, is that, given the extent of disagreement on the good, there is no possibility of achieving consensus (for many, in principle impossible, not just in practice) so that effort is more fruitfully invested in topics such as justice or liberty. To deal with this complexity, I rely on an account of the good, and of common goods, which exhibits two features. The first is that the language of the good

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is analogical. That is, it is fluid, in that its meanings shift systematically – not arbitrarily – from one context to another. The unity sustained through this ranging across contexts is assured by an Aristotelian conception of the good as completion, fulfilment, excellence in functioning. For this the second feature is essential, namely the recognition that the concept in question is heuristic, naming that which is sought (‘whoever acts, acts for some good’), but which is not completely known in advance of its achievement. With this approach, the dangers persist, since analogical language may result in a loss of precision, and heuristic concepts may appear to be hollow. The early chapters provide some spade work in clarifying basic terms with which global common goods can be discussed. ‘Good’ and ‘value’ are distinguished in Chapter 1, and values are explained both in the sense of the intelligibility of concrete goods, and the manner in which goods are realized. A realist focus on the objects of valuation is distinguished from a consideration of the attitudes of valuation (Anderson, 1993). An integrating perspective locates the fundamental question of ethics in a search for the good of a life as a whole. In Chapter 2, the possibility of goods in common is clarified and the relationship between affirmations of the good and prescriptions of action is explored. What obligations, if any, follow from the identification of something as a common good? Bernard Williams’s (1981) denial of external reasons as possibly motivating action is challenged with the help of John Searle’s (2001) analysis of rationality in action and of the creation of desire-independent reasons for action. Finally, the analysis is applied to the concrete example of the rule of law as a common good in a social context, since it is commonly taken to be beneficial to individuals and to society. Aristotle spoke of the good life as the point of politics and that the good life would be the supreme good embracing all other goods. Would commitment to the good life as the common good of politics or even of global cooperation commit one to a monist view of the good, and would rejection of a monist view in favour of a pluralist account of goods entail abandonment of the notion of a supreme good? Examples of flourishing universities and cities enable clarification in Chapter 3 of what meaningfully can be said of the common good of complex and sophisticated forms of cooperation. Chapter 4 explores the economic categories of public goods, private goods, club goods and commons to examine how they relate to the categories of the common good. Economists’ concern with the distribution of costs and benefits is contrasted with Aristotle’s concentration on the nature of the good pursued and its relation to practical reason. The complementarity of the two sets of categories reveals the distinctiveness of talk of the common

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good. Economic analysis of types of goods abstracts from meaning, but the Aristotelian approach is sensitive to the domains of shared meaning in explaining social and political reality. In Chapters 5 and 6, the analogical use of the term common good is elaborated to show the variety of applications and corresponding forms of cooperation. John Searle’s social ontology is applied to help fill out the Aristotelian judgement that it is sharing a view on what is good and just that makes a community. International relations become much more the focus of attention from Chapter 7 onwards, applying the concepts and distinctions presented in earlier chapters. Developments within the discipline of international relations reveal a growing awareness of the incidence of cooperation at international levels, which remains unexplained when traditional rationale of coercion and selfinterest are invoked. Researchers in the field invoke the concept of common goods to explain the phenomena of cooperation. Evidence from the literature supports the argument of the book that attention to global common goods enriches our understanding of what is going on and helps focus on what can be done. Disputes about supposedly shared meaning, such as that of human rights, exposed in disagreements about the International Criminal Court, preventive war, and Guantanamo Bay, reveal the need to find agreement on the meanings at the basis of international cooperation. The struggle to identify and articulate global common goods reveals the heuristic nature of the concept. The usefulness of the concept is challenged by the apparent success of game theoretic analysis of collective action. Chapter 8 considers this challenge and asks whether game theoretic explanation alone can suffice to account for the examples of cooperation adduced in favour of common good analysis. While the modelling of problems and situations is found useful, the deliberate abstraction from what participants in forms of cooperation say about themselves and about what they are doing excludes dimensions of meaning from consideration that would have to be addressed if genuine cooperation is to occur. In Chapter 9, dimensions of meaning are shown to be important to John Rawls’s (1999a) analysis of global order in The Law of Peoples, in which he uses the concept of common good. Rawls’s work is relevant to the discussion of global common goods in two senses. The second, more implicit case, is in the way his vision of global order provides a conception of a possible global political good. But the first and explicit case is in the use of the notion of common good in characterizing a sense of justice. The implied distinction between liberal notions and common good notions evaporates on examination. Liberal peoples too can be said to have common goods.

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So many of the problems of our world are noticed and addressed by Cosmopolitans such as Thomas Pogge (2002) and Charles Beitz (1999) in discussing global justice. Chapter 10 reviews the tension between social justice and global justice following David Miller (2000). Justice is an associative obligation, and in the absence of the relevant associations at a global level, there can be no justice, at least none comparable to what is made possible within sovereign states. The requirements of justice analogous to those of national states do not apply to the world as a whole, unless the world was ruled by a unified sovereign power. But it is not an all-or-nothing situation, as the identification of collective authority in international relations will show. Chapter 11 completes the exploration of aspects of global common goods with a review of the disputes about human rights. It also enables a return to the opening distinction between a focus in ethics on norms and a focus on goods. Rights appear to be both, being moral claims articulated as norms, and appearing as the goods of liberation, and living life as one chooses. The institutions in place to secure rights are also goods. Human rights would seem to qualify as a common good, it being part of the well-being of everyone that they enjoy security in the conduct of their lives and are assured of protection and redress in cases of discrimination or violation. While there are international conventions to secure them in law, the bases of human rights remain disputed. Accused of being parochial, particularist, an unwelcome foreign ideology, there is no agreement either on their foundations or on their meaning. The continuing lively discussion reveals that the dimension of shared meaning is fragile and still unsettled. The common good of global human rights is a heuristic, which is still in the process of being discovered even as it is being constructed. The concluding Chapter 12 attempts to draw together the discoveries of the various explorations conducted in the chapters of the book. In each of the fields surveyed, the emphasis on shared meaning as a good in common is a constant theme. Sometimes that shared meaning is taken for granted, and sometimes it has to become a goal of action, when there is a crisis and a need to repair or sustain or regenerate the meaning. A recurring image throughout is invoked again, namely that of a flourishing university, or of a university city. Given the complexity of cooperation involved, this allows for extrapolation, so that we can also speak meaningfully of global common goods. Various authors such as John Rawls and David Miller are shown to invoke visions for a well-functioning global order even though they might be addressing a narrower agenda, while others such as Chris Brown explicitly defend the need for a disciplined articulation of the vision of human flourishing, which motivates the generation of human

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rights law. The political philosopher arguing in Aristotelian mode would agree. Let the good appear, in the sense that it be made comprehensible and shown in its attractiveness, and let those attracted by it be moved to pursue it. Let it not be the lack of vision that frustrates our desires to tackle the problems outlined earlier. The intended outcome of the project of this book is that we find ways of speaking meaningfully and constructively of the goods for the sake of which we collaborate at every level, including the global level. Those goods of our cooperation are our common goods, and as we pursue them we discover more and more what they are and how they benefit us, and we also discover more and more who we are and what we can become.

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The Good

An adequate global ethics must include a consideration of global goods among which are some goods in common for which peoples and countries cooperate. The tendency in ethics to concentrate on issues of justification of norms and the consequent regulation of action means that questions of the good as such are often neglected. For instance, Andrew Gamble identifies three major strands in recent ethical discourse about politics. He points out how the deontological and the consequentialist approaches can seem to crowd out all others (Gamble, 2010, p. 88). The approach that I attempt here, focused on human goods and specifically common goods, is not adequately covered by the third category of contextualism employed by Gamble. I attempt to remedy that neglect at least in the context of global ethics and to outline some dimensions in global debates for which a more satisfactory account of global common goods would be useful. It is not an attempt to say the last word on the topic but rather to facilitate meaningful ongoing debate. But what are we talking about? What is the good? In this introductory chapter it will be useful to begin with some intellectual housekeeping and clarify how the important terms will be used. There is a tendency to move quickly from talk of the good to questions about what should be done. What demands do various goods make of us? What obligations fall on us from the identification of common goods or essential and necessary goods? Such questions are postponed until the next chapter. Although concern with obligations will emerge in subsequent chapters, such as Chapter 10 on cosmopolitanism and global justice, or Chapter 11 on human rights, the principal focus is not on clarifying what ought to be done and who is obliged to do what. The focus throughout remains on the good, whether it is meaningful to speak of global common goods, and how the relevant terms are to be understood in relation to cognate terms such as public goods. What

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can the study of international relations reveal about goods in common in interstate relations and how can they be made the objectives of action and of coordinated global action. Hence the patience of the reader is requested to explore the notions of the good and of common goods before getting caught up in deliberating about what should be done. While this approach may provoke impatience, it is not without its supporters in contemporary philosophy. Several authors are returning to the discussion of the good as the appropriate starting point for ethics or moral philosophy. Among these I note a few relevant writers whose work I will draw on for my argument. David Oderberg (2000) has taken a clear stance comparing his emphasis on basic goods with the alternative approaches of consequentialism and deontology, the dominant moral theories. He considers what he calls the architecture of the various moral theories. By this he means the conceptual framework relied upon to formulate the theory and its prescriptions. Utilitarians and consequentialists focus on pleasure and pain, or desires, or preference satisfaction, and construct rules and prescriptions in terms of maximization. Kantians and deontologists articulate criteria such as the categorical imperative for the selection of genuinely moral norms. For the theory that Oderberg articulates, the architecture is provided by ‘the framework of basic human goods which together constitute living well and in accordance with human nature, and in which the good of life underlies and preconditions the pursuit of all the rest’ (Oderberg, 2000, pp. 146–7). Oderberg is not alone in taking this stance: many other authors might be cited at this point to support the orientation, and Oderberg in another publication compares the various lists of basic human goods proposed by authors such as John Finnis, Alfonso Gómez-Lobo, Timothy Chappell, Mark C. Murphy and himself (2007, p. 129). At this point I leave to one side the question of the most satisfactory listing of basic human goods, content to note that all the authors adopting this position agree on the plurality and variety of goods and that they are not reducible to one another or to any one. Further, they are all concerned to resist the reductionism of utilitarian theories with their emphasis on the maximization of some category of good (Chappell, 2009).

Goods and values In ordinary speech we use the words good and value and their cognates in various ways and the great variety of usage can be a source of confusion. Are values the same as goods? Are goods and values the source of obligation

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and how might that be so? How do we make sense of expressions like ‘value pluralism’, ‘value empiricism’, ‘the incommensurability of values’, ‘moral value’, ‘monetary value’ and the like? Accordingly, it will be useful to clarify the core usages of the relevant terms so that the further argument can proceed. I am not assuming that fundamental issues can be resolved by regulating language use. However, I suggest that a case can be more clearly made and subsequently challenged and revised if the use of basic terms is clarified. I begin with the distinction between good and value. How might we best use these terms and this distinction so as to make sense, not only of our experience and of our world, but also of our speaking? Does our proposed clarification serve to explain what people are talking about when they use the terminology? If a proposed usage succeeds in removing confusion at the cost of meaning, then very little has been gained. We should be able to recover the concerns and contributions of speakers and writers of the past, despite confusion in the use of terms. Raphael’s famous mural The School of Athens in the Vatican’s Stanza della Segnatura is renowned for its clever depiction of the two great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. Positioned right in the centre of the painting attention is drawn to them and to the conversation going on between them. Plato, the older figure on the left, points upwards, while Aristotle gestures with his extended right hand, indicating what surrounds them. This way of depicting them allows a contrast between their theories. Plato’s upward gesture represents his view that the real is to be found in the world of ideas, transcending the world of experience. Aristotle, by contrast, famously holds that the essences of things do not reside in an otherworldly transcendent sphere, but are to be found in the things themselves. The books they hold also show a contrast, not only in the directions in which they are held. The spines show their titles, Plato’s Timaeus held vertically, and Aristotle’s Ethics held horizontally, as if to say ‘it’s about how we deal with what surrounds us’. The contrast is reinforced by the choice of colour for their garments. Plato is robed in red and grey, Aristotle in blue and brown. Interpreting these colours in terms of the four elements, Plato’s red and grey represent fire and air, the ethereal elements, while Aristotle’s blue and brown evoke water and earth, respectively, the tangible, weighty elements. The figures surrounding them also divide into two groups, the artists and mathematicians on Plato’s side, the geometers and astronomers with Aristotle, reflecting a division between the intangible and the tangible, the ideal and the actual. Even the statues of the Greek gods in the painting take sides: Apollo (god of music) with his lyre sides with Plato, Athena (goddess of war) with Aristotle.

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Raphael’s simplification of the complex views of Plato and Aristotle is nonetheless an effective pedagogical tool. It draws attention to a lasting tension with its roots in the Greek world and very present in the Renaissance, and indeed continuing beyond Raphael’s time into modernity. The polarization between rationalism and empiricism reflects the same tension, as does the parallel polarity of idealism and materialism. A similar tension emerges in the philosophical discussions about the good as in the domains of epistemology and metaphysics. We seem to fluctuate between speaking of our friends, and speaking of friendship, between a good book, and the value of literature. At the concrete pole in each case is an actual thing or person, a book or friend, while the abstract pole in each case identifies a value, literature or friendship. In pursuing a philosophy of the good, should we focus on the abstract, what belongs in the realm of ideas, namely values, or should we concentrate on the concrete goods around us, the things we seek and use and enjoy? Do we examine friendship as the relevant value, or do we reflect on our actual friends, on the times we shared and the activities we have undertaken together? Do we consider knowledge as a value, or think about our curiosity and the actual instances of knowing in which we invest effort? The correct answer, of course, as with the concerns of Plato and Aristotle, is that it is not a matter of opting for one or the other, choosing either – or. Both must be integrated in our approach, but will one or other be given priority? Aristotle’s often repeated remark in his Ethics and Politics that the good is that at which all things aim provides a useful pointer. ‘Whoever acts, acts for some good’ is a similar expression, which doesn’t actually tell us very much about the good. It is more a case of setting out what it is for something to be a good. To be a good is to be desired, worked towards, striven for, pursued. And in the full range of our experience of human action it is evident that the objects of pursuit are many. I want pasta for dinner, I want to finish that article, read that book, see that film, visit that aunt, get that degree, be given that job. The things we want are concrete and specific, even though we might speak about them in abstract or universal terms.

What are values? Do we pursue values in our actions? Strictly speaking, no. The good at which we aim in our action is always concrete, specific. It isn’t nutrition I seek, it is dinner. It isn’t friendship I pursue, it is time with my friend, it isn’t knowledge I’m after,

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but I work to understand Raphael’s painting of the School of Athens. What is the relationship between the abstraction and the concrete object in each of these pairs: nutrition – dinner, friendship – evening with friend, knowledge – insight into this text or problem? The abstractions tell us something about the concrete goods in each case. They locate those goods within a larger horizon and so exhibit what it is about the particular good that makes it attractive. So the abstract noun ‘nutrition’ recalls the biological processes whereby any living being requires nourishment to sustain itself, and the meal on the table looks good, precisely (but not necessarily only) because it could function within that process of sustaining life. Values can be said to express the intelligibility of the good that appears as such in concrete particular objects. A dinner is a material thing, with food and drink, so it can provide an example of a good meal. But goods are not always material things. They might be particular actions, they might be particular skills, they might be institutions, and they might be persons. A loaf of bread, the baking of the bread, the skill of baking, a bakery and a baker are all examples of goods, which in Aristotle’s sense could be the object of action. They could be pursued in action focused on achieving them. If these are goods, what is the value that expresses their goodness? On first sight, it would seem that the values of nutrition and the sustaining of life are relevant to the goodness of each of these cases. But as I will argue shortly, we should not assume that only one value is required to express the relevant goodness, nor should we assume that the obvious value is actually the value that makes sense to the agent of the goodness of his object. Nutrition is not necessarily the only value involved in baking – other values can be involved also such as friendship and aesthetic experience. And an investor who pays for the building of a bakery may value the profit to be made, exploiting the need for bread, without valuing nutrition as such, even though his whole undertaking is predicated on the assumption that bread is nutritious. This is why traditionally a distinction was drawn between the purpose of the work or operation (finis operis), and the purpose pursued by the worker (finis operantis). Might someone object that his assumption only needs to be that bread is in demand? This is true, but provokes the further question: Why is there a demand for bread? What is it about it that makes it good, or at least appear good? That there is an answer to the question is presupposed by the entrepreneur, even if he doesn’t have to articulate the possible reason. In summary, values are the terms we rely on to express what it is about the goals and purposes we pursue that explain why they appear good to us. Perhaps I shouldn’t be stressing ‘appear good’ too much. This is the usual qualification to

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allow for the fact that people can make mistakes about what is good for them. But even if we are mistaken, we still work at getting what we want and desire because we see it as good. And we use the abstractions formulated as values to express what it is about our goals that constitutes their goodness. Still, it bears repeating that it is not friendship that attracts me, but my friend, whose company and affection I desire. Reflection on my friend’s attractiveness can lead beyond simply pointing to the friend in the expectation that her evident goodness will be apparent to the observer, to the attempt to express in accessible terms what it is about her that is attractive. Do we have to explain the reasons why what we want appears good to us? For instance, is it helpful to explain why we might want to hold or attend a dinner party? It is useful to reflect on the things that we can normally take for granted since the reflection generates paths of understanding that can be helpful when we turn to the less familiar and the sometimes difficult. We spell out what is obvious and tease it apart so that we won’t overlook important truths. Dinner this evening with company is pursued because we will be well fed, nutrition for today will be secured, it will allow us time to meet old friends, catch up on news, reaffirm our affection for one another, and so on, all aspects of our action that we take for granted. The values realized in our activity include life and health, and also friendship. Knowledge is usually a value in our dinner parties, because our conversation leads us to discover aspects of each other’s lives and projects, and usually the burning issues of the day demand our attention as we ponder what is going on in our society and in the world. I have briefly identified life, friendship and knowledge as some of the values lending intelligibility to the practical project of a dinner party. The listing of dimensions could go on: Will we invoke a blessing with grace before or after dinner and so include a conscious recognition of a religious dimension to our activity? Will our host excel himself in the exercise of his culinary skills and thereby enrich our aesthetic experience? Will we play cards after dinner and so enjoy also the delights available to those who engage in play? The one concrete event, with its associated objects and activities, the meat, the vegetables, the wine, the dessert, etc., and activities of eating and drinking, talking, sharing, toasting, joking has a complex intelligibility. Dinner together is worthwhile and attractive, and in our attempt to say why it is so good we could list the aspects of nutrition, health, life, friendship, knowledge, delight in fine things, religion, play. These are our values, the intelligibility of the goods we pursue (Finnis, 1980; Finnis, 1983; Oderberg, 2007).

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Someone might reasonably interject here, on reading that list: it seems not to include obvious and important values such as justice, liberty, equality, tolerance, respect, dignity. Are they values of a different order? Or perhaps they are not to be considered as values at all? None of the examples of value in the dinner party case seems to make room for these kinds that we typically refer to as values. To accommodate them we have to expand the reflection on the dinner party. There are various ways in which we could imagine the mood of the dinner party being disrupted. Suppose we became aware that the food and drink provided were in fact stolen, or were the product of exploitative relationships, then the pleasure of their consumption would be compromised. And suppose we noticed that our host had employed kitchen staff whom he was treating abusively, or indeed that the women in the company were continually made the butt of sexist remarks, or that the conversation veered towards endorsing racist ideology, then, as is said in the popular idiom, ‘the good would have gone out of it’. The goods of the dinner party would be lost or at least severely jeopardized in these circumstances. The harm done is of various kinds, which we can distinguish, and to prevent such harms we can also formulate standards that we would invoke in criticizing disruptive behaviour. We know the difference between being a guest at a dinner party, and being a member of the catering staff. The latter is not invited to sit down at the table with the guests, so to that extent there is inequality in the treatment of the various persons present. We could say that there is discrimination in their treatment, but it is not arbitrary discrimination. There are good reasons for the difference, and none of the participants will be shocked by it. That this particular inequality in treatment is unobjectionable does not imply that any treatment is permissible. There is a basic decency in treatment which is due to every person, expressing a respect to which they are entitled because of their dignity. We are more readily able to recognize when the behaviour or speech is inappropriate than we are able to articulate precisely the reasons why certain action is wrong and what exactly is due. The literature in ethics and philosophy on these themes of justice, liberty, equality, tolerance, respect and dignity illustrates the difficulty in finding the correct articulation. The point here is to clarify what it means to consider these as values when I have described value as the intelligibility of the good, whereby the good is always concrete. The good is pursued and achieved in action, and the good of persons is also pursued through cooperation, action together. The relevant actions are also goods. The manner in which actions are performed and how their objects are

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achieved are relevant to the pursuit of the good, so that when the values at stake are articulated, they can include not only the intelligibility of the goods (as life, health, nutrition make sense of a plate of food) but also the manner of the action. In that case, terms such as justice, liberty, equality, tolerance, respect and dignity can name qualities that we want to find realized in persons, actions and situations in which goods are pursued. Let us call them qualitative values. To the extent that they qualify the manner of our actions they are values that make sense of our pursuit of the good. All the things we wanted to achieve and realize in the dinner party – nutrition, friendship, play, aesthetic experience – we wanted to achieve under certain conditions, too many to elucidate, but any one of which, if absent, could destroy the mood of the occasion – take the good out of it. That people be treated with respect, that the dignity of each one, and of the occasion be recognized, that toleration be shown towards the differences and idiosyncrasies of the participants, that equality be insofar realized that no one feels unfairly treated, that each one be allowed the space to be themselves at the party and that the whole set of relationships sustaining the occasion be just, from the sourcing of the food and drink to the treatment of suppliers and employees. This way of considering these qualitative values maintains the focus on the concrete goods that are pursued in action. The additional values qualify how the goods are pursued. Another way of putting this is to highlight the abstraction involved in speaking about pursuing justice or liberty or equality. These are useful abstractions and conveniently summarize long lists of concrete goods and the manner of their attainment. The striking employees of a firm may say they want justice: what they are seeking is a fair wage or more humane working conditions. The litigant seeks justice, meaning she wants a judgement that vindicates her case always with a particular content: a barring order against an abusive partner, an enforcement of paternity payments, a remedy against a neglectful landlord. And, similarly, when we speak of equality we are focusing either on some outcome to be equalized or on some access to resources or opportunities. Equality as such is never simply the goal of our pursuit. This is an initial clarification of basic terms. The clarification is not intended as prescriptive, to regulate how these terms are to be used – that would be a futile exercise. And yet the fluidity with which these terms are used in practice can be confusing, and can lead to misunderstanding between different speakers and authors, unless we have available to us some means of clarifying what is at stake. The distinction between concrete good and value as the abstract intelligibility of goods and the qualitative manner of action is proposed as a tool to facilitate such

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clarification. The term ‘common good’ can be used analogically, to range over many instances of the objectives of action and cooperation, and not exclusively to refer to concrete goods. It is also meaningful to speak of values as common goods. In such a case, however, the challenge for an interpreter is to identify how the value that is the supposed common good of the cooperation translates into actual concrete goods, either as the goals of action or as the desired manner in which the actions are performed. Our pursuit of justice illustrates this tension. We have learned what conditions must be realized for a criminal trial to be fair. John Rawls distinguishes various types of procedures relied upon for achieving outcomes that are just. There are procedures that are not linked to any criterion for what would be the right outcome. The operation of the procedure alone ensures that whatever is the outcome it is just. The play of a game, poker for instance, according to the rules is an example of such pure procedural justice. Other procedures do have an associated criterion for what would be a just outcome. The criminal trial is one such, since it has criteria of success among which is that the innocent be acquitted and the guilty convicted and sentenced. However, a criminal trial is an example of imperfect procedural justice, because the operation of the procedures does not guarantee that the innocent are acquitted and the guilty convicted and punished (Rawls, 1999c, p. 74). The relevant procedures require that someone accused of a crime should have the opportunity to know the accusation and the accuser, the law that supposedly was violated, and to have access to competent advice in presenting her case. We invest a lot in ensuring that those conditions are met, but that does not guarantee that the outcome will in fact be just. It can happen that the guilty are acquitted and that the innocent are convicted and sentenced. A just verdict and a just punishment are the goods we pursue. They are particular, and concrete. Justice, as a value, is abstract. In fact, when we begin to reflect on it as a value, we realize that it is not a single value, but a complex of values. Social justice, general or legal justice, distributive justice, commutative justice, procedural justice and now more recently global justice are some of the traditional terms for mapping the complexity. The philosophical literature on justice reflects this complexity, for instance J. Walzer’s Spheres of Justice (1983) or the kind of integrative treatment of J.R. Lucas’s On Justice (1980). If at the national or regional or global level we espouse policies formulated in terms of abstractions such as justice, liberty or equality, or the values of health, security or education, we can be challenged to say what concrete goods are to be pursued so that the policy can be achieved. We have to be able to cash out our

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optimistic policies in terms that identify realizable goals. That is not easy to do, since the provision of health in one place will require one set of concrete goods (prevention and treatment of malaria) and a different set of concrete goods in another (prevention and treatment of skin melanoma). The pursuit of justice at different places and times will require the establishment of different institutions as well as the operation of different functions (changing the law on sexual discrimination in one place, ensuring that judges are freed from the temptation of bribery in another). The abstract formulations such as the pursuit of justice can cover over the great diversity of concrete goods occasioned by the variety of circumstances.

Is everything we appreciate or approve of a value? Abstract formulations in terms of values can also obscure another relevant distinction between those things that we can achieve through our own action, and those things for which we can only provide the conditions but cannot guarantee the achievement of the goal. I have concentrated on the goods pursued in action for explaining the meaning of value. Another usage of the term focuses on the cognitive and emotional status of the agent or agents who pursue certain goods. This focus on the subject, the agent, can introduce a complexity in our use of value terms that can be a source of confusion. We can use the language of value to speak of what we appreciate, enjoy and approve of, although the things in question, the things valued in this sense, are not the object of our action. For instance, I really value sunny summer days on the beach. We know how to organize spending a day on the beach, but we don’t have it under our control to ensure that it will be a sunny day. Given a sunny day, we could spend it on the beach. That is one of our options, and in choosing it we reveal our values. That is, our choices and actions demonstrate to others what we like or prefer. This is an important distinction. At its heart is the difference between what we can achieve through action, and what we would like to see happen, but cannot achieve through action. Spending the day on the beach is one pole, and the day being sunny is the other. However, there is a spectrum of possibilities in between. We can do a lot to ensure that there will be edible food on the table, but we can’t guarantee entertaining conversation to the same extent. We can do our best to create the conditions for it, for instance, by inviting compatible people, but sometimes the company doesn’t gel and the conversation flops. Many important areas of social life are like this, as for instance in the realm of education. We

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can invest a lot of resources in enabling and facilitating students to realize their potential, but no amount of resources or effort will guarantee a desired outcome. This is not only because the success of our projects is dependent on the cooperation of others, including, in education, the cooperation of the students, but also because it is dependent on factors that are beyond the scope of human action – factors that reduce to chance, good fortune, providence; the insights that come at the right time, the chance encounters that lead to something else, the illness that knocks one out at a crucial juncture. In other words, while we can imagine the states of affairs we would like to see realized, in many aspects of our social lives we know that our effective action is limited to creating conditions and then hoping for the best. When the scope of human cooperation is on a global scale, this is more and more the situation. The common good for which they work together will rarely be something completely within the power of the cooperating parties: they will have to be satisfied with the creation of conditions.

Does value reduce to valuing? I have drawn attention to the distinction between valuing something that is not achievable by my action, and valuing goods that I can act to bring about. In this distinction, pre-eminence is given to the goods to be pursued in action. There can be a tendency to reduce the distinction, however, by concentrating on the emotional stance of valuing, which can appear to be the same attitude regardless of whether or not action is possible to realize the desired good. Focus on the attitudes of appreciation, approval and desire can lead to understanding value exclusively in terms of the subjective stance of the valuing person. Hence the traditional philosophical question: Do we desire objects because they are good, or do we call them good because we happen to desire them? This is the problem provoked by Thomas Hobbes’s assertion in Chapter 6 of Leviathan that nothing is of its nature either good or evil, but that we call it good (or evil) because we happen to desire (or are repelled by) it (Hobbes, 1996, p. 35). I am taking it for granted that this argument is resolved in favour of the first option: we desire objects because they are good (Kraut, 2002). This is because our desiring is inseparable from the matrix of our knowing. We change the menu when our nose suggests that the meat is a little ‘off ’, when the carrots are gone spongy, when the wine is corked. What is sought as good for us is evaluated as such against the background of what is bad and harmful. As well as

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nourishment there is the possibility of food poisoning, as well as health there is the possibility of ill health. Similarly, in our choice of table companions we look for compatible guests whose interaction will allow for mutual entertainment. In contrast to my focus here on goods as the objects and goals of action, Elizabeth Anderson in Values in Ethics and Economics espouses what she calls a ‘rational attitude theory of value’ (1993, p. 1). She focuses on the performance or activity of valuing and argues that it is not a singular operation but is fundamentally pluralistic. Her target for this pluralist emphasis are the various monist theories that consider values as reducible to a single category, such as Moore’s aesthetic monism, hedonism and rational desire theory (1993, p. 117). While the concern to uphold a pluralist theory of the good is compatible with the position I have outlined earlier, the concentration on evaluative attitudes is in marked contrast to the focus on goods as the objects of action. Exploration of this contrast should help to clarify the position further. Since we humans value what is good, it is understandable that the attempt to understand the relevant relationships might focus on one or other pole, on the valuing attitude or on the goods that are the objects of valuation. Should the initial concentration on the valuing attitudes eventually lead to a separation from acknowledgement of the goodness of the objects valued, then there would be little to separate the adopted stance from that of Hobbes, namely that nothing in itself is good or bad, but that it is human valuing or disvaluing that makes it so. Does Anderson go so far in her discussion? Anderson’s theory is more subtle than the ‘rational attitude’ label would suggest. As well as attitudes that are emotional responses, she also discusses evaluative criteria on which judgements of value rely. In addition, there are said to be different kinds of goods revealed by the attitudes and criteria, and there are ideals by which people try to make sense of themselves expressed in their evaluations and actions. In each of these four categories Anderson argues for pluralism. There are many evaluative attitudes such as ‘use, respect, appreciation, consideration, and love’ (Anderson, 1993, p. 11), and she expands this list to underline the emotional complexity. There are many criteria applied to the valued goods such as ‘beauty, convenience, and loyalty, by which we evaluate different goods and adjust our attitudes toward them’ (1993, p. 55). When we judge something to be valuable, she suggests, we measure it according to some appropriate standard, but there are many such, not only one. These two terms, attitudes and standards, permit her to affirm a double sense of the plurality of goods. In the first sense, the goods are said to be ‘plural in that they are sensibly valued in fundamentally different ways’ (1993, p. 4). In

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the second sense, goods are said to be plural in that ‘the authentic evaluative standards they meet are fundamentally diverse’. This distinction allows a helpful contrast with monist theories of the good on both counts. On the first, ‘the opposing monistic view holds that all goods are the proper objects of a singular evaluative attitude, such as desire, pleasure, or admiring contemplation’. And on the second case, ‘the opposing monistic view maintains that the apparently diverse standards for rational valuation can be reduced to some single ground or explained by reference to a single good constituting property, such as being desired or pleasant’ (1993, pp. 4–5). Ideals are applicable to a person valuing, as a conception of the kind of person one would like to be or ought to be. As such they are objects of admiration and aspiration. As Anderson puts it, ideals give people ‘perspectives from which to articulate and scrutinize the ways [they] value things’ (1993, p. 6). At the same time, ‘[f]ailure to live up to one’s ideals will prompt shame, guilt, self-contempt, or other negative self-assessing emotions’ (Anderson, 1993, p. 7). The introduction of these various terms and distinctions is not sufficiently explicit to allow a conclusion in favour of realism in the account of goods. There are definitely some elements in the presentation of the criteria of evaluation that point to the qualities in the goods themselves that warrant the subsequent evaluation. These could be strengthened, perhaps, with a more deliberate metaphysical realism so that Anderson is saved from the conclusion that goods are valuable because they are valued. However, the suspicion remains because of the conventional aspect she invokes in the account of the social dimension of valuation. Relying on a distinction similar to that introduced earlier between things we value and cannot bring about and things we value and can aim at producing or achieving in our action, she draws her distinction between appreciating something and using it by locating the latter in the context of social relations. She writes: ‘[t]he following shall be my primary account of the heterogeneity of goods: goods differ in kind if people properly enter into different sorts of social relations governed by distinct norms in relation to these goods’ (1993, p. 12). As an example to illustrate the difference in kinds of goods, she points to the different social norms and practices associated with the enjoyment of classical music as distinct from country or folk music. This example is useful for illustrating the role of social norms and practices in relation to goods, but it is unhelpful in distinguishing kinds of goods for a number of reasons. First, the enjoyment of musical performance depends on preference or taste, and that different kinds of music attract different audiences is not a surprise. Second, jazz and country are different, but they can both be said to be instances of music.

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They are subdivisions of the same kind of good. Third, any subdivision of the kind of good will have its own appropriate criteria. There are cognoscenti who can distinguish between different performances of a piano sonata by applying relevant criteria to distinguish the more faithful rendition, the more technically accurate, the more empathetic interpretation, and such like. Considering the different kinds of goods as indicated in my earlier examples, the goods of health, knowledge, friendship, aesthetic experience, and so on, it is not necessary to appeal to different social norms or practices to appreciate that these are different kinds of goods. It is the understanding of their significance in relation to practical concern, the different answers that people would give in answer to the question ‘what are you doing?’ that reveals the differences in kind. Despite the danger of a seeming lack of realism in her account of value and the good, Anderson’s contribution is to be welcomed as a challenge to monist theories. Also, as will be seen, her approach allows for one way of speaking of higher goods in a hierarchy that may turn out to be useful for speaking of common goods in global contexts. But before those questions are addressed, further clarification of talk of the good is required.

What does it mean for something to be good for someone? Among the questions that still remain to be clarified is one that explores what it means to say that something is good for someone, or indeed, for something else. A renowned Aristotelian scholar, Richard Kraut, has addressed questions of the good in a book dedicated to the topic (2007). He asks what it means to say something is good for a subject, S. His answer is Aristotelian in spirit: what is good for S depends on what S is. The relationship of being ‘good for’ applies not only to humans, but is also relevant across the board, including animals, plants or artefacts. The assertion that ‘it is not good for the lawnmower to be left out in the rain’, for instance, is perfectly intelligible. Kraut focuses on the relationship insofar as it affects living things, and he adopts the familiar term ‘flourishing’ to consider what is good for living organisms. ‘For most living things, to flourish is simply to be healthy: to be an organism that is unimpeded in its growth and normal functioning’ (Kraut, 2007, p. 5). The use of the term flourishing for this purpose is associated with Elizabeth Anscombe (1958), John M. Cooper (1975) and many others, including John Finnis (1980). Aristotle

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remarks that eudaimonia is what all ultimately seek in their action. Eudaimonia is usually translated as ‘happiness’, but more recently, following the suggestion of Elizabeth Anscombe it is commonly rendered as ‘flourishing’ (1958, p. 1). John Cooper contributes a fresh reading of Aristotle following this suggestion. He understands Aristotle to identify human flourishing, eudaimonia, ‘with a lifetime of morally virtuous action’ (1975, p. 88). In a similar vein, German philosopher Robert Spaemann offers a new account of eudaimonia as the end of a good life. His translator J. Alberg renders the German original das Gelingen des Lebens as ‘a life which turns out well’ (Spaemann, 2000, p. 7). In both cases, it is the lifetime, the living of the life as a whole narrative, which is stressed, not some end-product. Kraut proposes as a hypothesis to be explored the following: ‘That the things that are good for us human beings are the ones that play a role in our living flourishing lives – lives that go well for us in a way that is comparable to the way the lives of other sorts of creatures go well for them?’ (2007, p. 5). This begs the obvious question as to what a flourishing life for humans would be. He proceeds to clarify what it is not. As with many other writers on the topic of the good, Kraut sees the need to rule out a utilitarian approach, to which two aspects are relevant. Utilitarians tend to identify one thing or element that is to be pursued, such as utility, pleasure, preference-satisfaction. And utilitarianism prescribes maximizing whatever is the key element. For Kraut a flourishing life cannot be accounted for by just one element, and even if there are several relevant elements, a flourishing life is not a matter of maximizing it or them. Having distinguished between two ways in which something can be said to be good for someone, instrumentally good, and non-instrumentally good, Kraut considers the issue of obligation and proceeds to ask whose good should be the focus of action. Four types of answers might be given. Should one promote only one’s own good, at least one’s own good, everyone’s good to some degree or anyone’s good, to the extent that doing so produces the greatest amount of good in the universe? Kraut formulates the question this way to highlight how faulty the question is: ‘we do not need a formula that tells all people whatsoever, regardless of their circumstances, whose good they should promote’ (Kraut, 2007, p. 56). A common and popular reading of the phrase that something is good for someone is that from their perspective the thing in question is good. It appears to the person to be good for them, because it would satisfy some desire or preference, or would allow for the realization of some plan. Kraut goes to some length to counter this reading. At core it results in emptying out the content

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of what is desired so that the objective of pursuit is simply the satisfaction of desire, and not the achievement of the things desired. ‘Its basic idea is that it is good for us to satisfy our desires or to carry out our plans, and that it does not matter at all what it is that we want or what we plan to do’ (Kraut, 2007, p. 99). Nevertheless, this conative or perspectival reading of ‘good for’ is very common and is widely embraced even in academic writing. The attractiveness of the thought is closely linked to the interest in protecting the freedom of individuals to choose for themselves their own conception of the good (Kraut, 2007, p. 114). Not simply the freedom to choose a profession, or a partner, a place to live or consumer goods, the conception of the good itself along with the corresponding vision of a fulfilled life are items thought to be chosen, for which people demand the relevant liberty. Hence, being good for someone is understood primarily in the sense of being the conception of the good they have chosen for themselves. To counter this radical freedom to choose position, Kraut develops his account of human flourishing as ‘developmentalism’. He appeals to the observation that organisms flourish ‘by growing, maturing, making full use of the potentialities, capacities and faculties that (under favorable conditions) they naturally have at an early stage of their existence. Anything that impedes that development or the exercise of those mature faculties – disease, the sapping of vigor and strength, injuries, the loss of organs – is bad for them’ (Kraut, 2007, p. 131). For humans, flourishing requires the development and exercise of ‘certain cognitive, social, affective, and physical skills’ (Kraut, 2007, p. 141). Kraut’s notion of developmentalism is useful for linking his account of what is good for humans with political values. Developmentalism provides a way of understanding what it means to say something is good, namely by contributing to flourishing. In the case of humans, the powers of knowing, deliberating and autonomous decision are distinctive. This explains the importance of the central values of liberal democracy with its emphasis on self-governance, liberty and autonomy. Kraut’s stance reverses the priority of those theorists who see autonomy as the basic value to be protected. By contrast, he sees autonomy as among the skills to be developed and when well exercised that they realize human fulfilment, a flourishing life (Kraut, 2007, p. 197). Robert Kane endorses the developmental approach offered by Kraut, and sees it as complementary to his own account of ethics as the search for wisdom (Kane, 2010, pp. 172, 197). As noted earlier, Robert Spaemann is one of several

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recent authors whose work restores the good life, the life that turns out well, as the main object of ethical reflection. ‘To be sure, the turning out well of a life is not a particular goal, in relation to which other contents of volition are degraded to mere means’ (2000, p. 14). When obliged to choose between alternative projects (do I marry or remain single, do I study medicine or philosophy, do I give priority to my research or to my teaching), the human agent can seldom rely on some calculus of costs and benefits: the exercise of freedom selects one from a set of morally possible options and so is both creative of history and constitutive of the human subject. In this initial exploration of the notions of the good and of value, I have suggested an approach that is realist in its focus on the objects of valuation as distinct from a consideration of the attitudes of valuation. The discussion has led to an integrating perspective that locates the fundamental question of ethics in a search for the good of a life as a whole. In the following chapter I will investigate the relationship between what is good and what is obligatory, to clarify the prescriptive implications, if any, of identifying common goods. This will lead in the subsequent chapter to a consideration of the idea of a highest good, and a return to the theme introduced here of the good of a life considered as a whole.

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Common Goods and the Obligatory

Are there common goods? From the initial introduction of goods and values in the previous chapter, several questions arise concerning the goods and values that are shared. Does everyone have the same values? Are there some goods that are good for all human beings, even if not actually valued by everyone? Are there any goods that ought to be recognized as such by all human beings? And would their recognition entail an obligation to pursue them? Or is it the case that our agreements about what is good are always local, confined to communities of interest, or location, affiliation or nationality? When we invite friends to dinner, we usually don’t have to rehearse all the reasons why it would be a good thing. What makes us friends in the first place is that we agree on what is worth doing in some central way. We have values that we share. Of course, in the process of socializing our children, or in introducing newcomers into the circle, it will be necessary to articulate to some extent the reasons and values we share. And the occasion of transmission is also always an occasion for misapprehension or change. We take it for granted with our friends and families that we love and like the same things. But to what extent can we assume that we share values with neighbours with whom our only connection may be that we happen to live in the same suburb, or in the same country? To what extent can we assume that we share values with fellow citizens, who may well have different political allegiances and different political aspirations to ourselves? What values do we share with other participants in the market place? These questions are not merely rhetorical; they can be given answers. To some extent, our answers are based on reasonable assumptions, as when, for instance, we assume that consumers share an interest in consumer protection legislation, that employees in general favour a representation of their interests by trades unions, or employers on the other hand share such concerns as are represented

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by the Confederation of British Industry. But when we move into the social and political domains, we are on less safe ground in assuming we know what values are in fact shared. Roger Scruton (2012) has inverted the order of the question. Instead of asking what values we share with others not of our immediate circle he asks how unknown others can share sufficiently in appreciation of some goods for there to be collaboration between us, particularly on environmental issues. Any good in common presupposes a ‘we’ who share in valuing the good. How do we gather the ‘we’ and foster the sense of identity of common purpose? He prefers a concentration on the local as distinct from the global, since it is at the level of the local that the sense of identity and the loyalty to one’s own can be mobilized for the protection of the environment. Accordingly, he takes issue with campaigning non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that attempt to garner support for abstractions, in comparison with the concrete goods of local communities. ‘We need to retreat from the global back to the local, so as to address the problems that we can collectively identify as ours, with means that we can control, from motives that we all feel. That means being clear who we are, and why we are in it together and committed to our common survival’ (Scruton, 2012, p. 36). Echoed in his approach is the distinction drawn in the previous chapter between concrete goals and abstract values. The goods of local communities are concrete and sustain a sense of ownership. His approach also echoes the point at issue in this chapter, and throughout the book, that it is appreciation of goods that will attract the commitment of people to preserving those goods, and not the articulation or enactment of obligations. He sees this as a strategic error of the environmental movement that it defines itself through global agendas, resulting in ‘top-down edicts, some issued by transnational bureaucracies, others imposed by treaty, all unaccountable, unresponsive to local conditions’ (Scruton, 2012, p. 235). Hence the two themes are closely integrated in his argument: it is the concrete good that attracts and motivates collaborative action, and not the imposed prescriptions in the name of some abstract value or principle. ‘Only where people have a strong sense of who “we” are, why “we” are acting in this way or that, why “we” have behaved rightly in one respect, wrongly in another, will they be so involved in the collective decisions as to adopt them as their own’ (Scruton, 2012, p. 239). He coins the term ‘oikophilia’, love of one’s home, to identify local affections as the driving force of what he considers to be the only effective motivator for environmental protection. Policy must be based on this and not on the generation of norms imposing obligations (Scruton, 2012, p. 325). The question of the extent to which collaboration in matters of justice

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can be achieved beyond borders will be addressed in Chapter 10, and Scruton’s scepticism about the limits to common action set by the boundaries of common identity will be revisited. Here his contribution reinforces the point about the priority of the good over obligation and the correlation between common goods and communities of concern. Aristotle in Book I, Chapter 2 of The Politics reminds us that it is agreement about the worthwhileness of some good that unites people who cooperate in some society or organization. We can assume agreement in certain matters with those who are our fellow members of the sports club, parents’ committee, residents’ association, and so on. And the existence of constitutions and rules allows us to identify clearly enough, should it be necessary to do so, what exactly is our common purpose. Aristotle also thought that it was sharing a view on what is useful and harmful, good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, lawful and unlawful, which makes a political entity (polis) as much as a household. In our contemporary society, characterized by a rate of change so rapid that no one knows exactly what is happening, with a political system increasingly conscious of not only its own limitations but also its own autonomy from the value systems of participant groups, it is very difficult to establish what exactly are the shared values that sustain us. The mention of consensus or agreement prompts me to introduce a warning at this point. I do not wish to suggest that our social collaboration is founded on some agreement or contract, whether tacit or explicit. This is the position elaborated in social contract theories of society and indeed of ethics and which I hold to be mistaken. What we in fact share as participants together in social and political life may be nothing more than an acceptance of one another as potential partners in conversation and negotiation. To reach and hold this level of acceptance of one another, and for it to function as the taken-for-granted basis of our social existence, does not require any prior agreement or contract (Barden, 1999).

Is there a political common good? Those who cooperate in any common activity will share some understanding as to the point of their activity and this shared understood point is the common good of their cooperation. This is the basic experience that enables us to recognize a common good of cooperation. When we focus on a particular society, then it is a valid question to ask in what its common good consists. How is this to be

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established? It is conceivable that there would be different articulations of this operative common good depending on the different political or philosophical or indeed religious starting points from which people enter the discussion. If a society is said to have a common good, then whose articulation of that common good should be taken as normative? Furthermore, our political engagement with one another is more and more concerned with forging agreement on fundamentals and is less able to assume that there is already a consensus in existence concerning the basic terms of our social and political co-operation. Our common good is to be constructed in a public exploration and debate about what it is we want to achieve. In this double agenda of articulating the achieved common good and in proposing a vision for the future, there is need for a great sensitivity to the widespread reluctance of people to allow any agency to determine for them what is their good. Increasingly, the political culture demands great openness in the discussion of values and of our visions for the kind of life we aspire to. This is the familiar problem elaborated by John Rawls in his Political Liberalism (1996) in which he spells out the understanding of liberalism as the search for and maintenance of an overlapping consensus concerning common life between individuals and groups who hold competing and indeed incompatible positions on the human good. In Chapter 3, I will consider an argument that denies that there be such a thing as a political common good that functions as a highest good, embracing all other goods, as Aristotle conceived of it. I will postpone to that discussion the presentation of the relevant aspects of Aristotle’s thought.

The good and prescription There is a popular misapprehension about common goods. It is frequently assumed that the assertion that something is a common good entails the prescription or imperative that everyone ought to value, want or pursue that good. This misunderstanding is closely linked to the tendency noted earlier to view the task of ethics as the justification of norms, so that any invoking of common goods is immediately suspected of being an attempt to justify some norms as obligatory. Many reject the notion of common good because they resist the idea that anyone or anything may tell them what they ought to value, want or pursue. Either one desires and wants something, or one doesn’t. How can it be that one ‘ought’ to desire such a thing? Unpacking this requires a number of clarifications. Is it the case that the assertion of (common) good entails a prescription? And if perhaps on occasion a prescription is linked to the identification of a common good,

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would that necessarily be an invalid move? May there never be any prescription addressed to people informing their desires? The issue is obviously relevant to any discussion of global common goods, and it is important to clarify what will follow from any clarification of goods in common at the global level. There is no subterfuge in play here, no attempt to import obligations by a back door. I explore these issues using the example of the following essay title set for my first-year class: ‘Present and evaluate Machiavelli’s reasons for saying the Prince must be prepared to break his promise’. A good essay succeeds in doing the following: first, it identifies what exactly Machiavelli says about keeping faith; second, it presents the reasons Machiavelli gives in support of his advice; third, it evaluates those reasons applying identified criteria. ‘Good’ and ‘not so good’ essays are graded as such with the reasons given. A student receiving feedback on a ‘not so good’ essay might discover what he ‘ought’ to do to perform well in future submissions (attend to the tasks specified in the question, structure the work accordingly). The force of ‘ought’ in his discovery of what he ‘ought’ to do in this case is not derived from the affirmation of the good. That force of ‘ought’ comes from his own prior commitment to the programme that he hopes will get him a degree. In giving feedback to the group, attention is drawn to the skills required for the tasks set and examined. Attention is drawn further to the published aims and objectives of the module. Feedback on actual performance may enlighten some candidates as to the actual meaning of the listed transferable skills that perhaps were read without understanding. Feedback, whether given individually or in the group, highlights the fact that the goods in question are common goods. I cooperate with the students and they cooperate with me, and with each other, to achieve mastery of the material and of the relevant skills. That knowledge and those skills constitute our common goods, which we pursue together in our collaboration. This remains true even if we don’t advert to the fact. An observer could reach that conclusion even if the participants don’t notice this dimension of their collaboration (Riordan, 2008). In this classroom example we have a case of a common good of collaboration. Does it follow from the identification of this common good (specific knowledge and particular skills) that the participants ‘ought’ to value, desire and pursue this good? It would seem silly to insist that it does follow. Those who don’t actually want to acquire the knowledge and skills won’t be motivated by being told they ‘ought’ to want these. The skills and knowledge might not be the things they want for their own sake; they might well be valued instrumentally for the sake of good grades, the degree and the hoped-for career. For those lacking the necessary motivation, reference to their further goals for the sake of which they

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take the course might facilitate the relevant insight into the worthwhileness of the common goods. Then they might be in a position to report that they ought to make it their business to get the relevant mastery of knowledge and skills. But this ‘ought’ that they experience and report is not introduced from outside their own goal structure: it is their own commitment to their own goals. The good is concrete, while values are abstract. The concreteness of the good is clearly exemplified in the case of the good essay. It may not be equally evident that Jane’s mastery of a skill is also a concrete good. The skill is neither tangible nor visible as the essay. Until it is exercised, it remains hidden. The transferable skill of drawing distinctions is evidenced in the performance. But it is a concrete good, one person’s mastery, one student’s learning outcome. The values at stake here are knowledge and truth, competency and autonomy. These abstractions articulate the point that is realized in many different forms and on many different occasions. Each of the participants in my class have his or her own plans and objectives. But in this venture we cooperate, so we have some goods in common. The relevant skills and knowledge are our common good in this cooperation. It might be objected here that since the benefits of our collaboration, the knowledge and skill, accrue to individuals separately, they are not common goods. I will discuss this at greater length in a later chapter on public goods. Suffice it to say here that it is precisely the individual goods, the progress in learning and mastery of the individual students that is the common good of the cooperation. Pushing the objection further, it might be added that no individual student need care about the achievement of another student while cooperating to pursue the goods in question. This is true, but it does not follow from the absence of such care that there is no common good. Cooperating in the process of the class, a condition for his or her own success, each student facilitates also the progress of every other student. And the communality of the values at stake in the goods pursued is implied by each student’s identification of his or her own good. By cooperating in the shared venture of the philosophy class, we have these goods in common as the point of our cooperation. Does it follow from the sharing of some goods that we have other goods in common? We might find that we have more in common than we at first realized. Certainly, there are conditions for our common venture such as the continuing existence of the college, the good functioning of the library and IT support. These and many others we take for granted, but we might have to make them the focus of our concerted action in the event of a crisis. The links between the goods will be traceable via a ‘sound deliberative route’ (Chappell, 2009, p. 68).

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But many other links will be coincidental if it turns out that students of political philosophy also share the same interests in literature and art and support the same football teams or causes. But no single common good here obliges one to commit to any of the other concrete goods. However, despite the variety of interests and preferences we might reveal, it is conceivable we could endorse the abstractions as our common goods, as for instance aesthetic experience and play. In doing so, we extend the application of ‘good’ from concrete goods to the abstract values, which make sense of our goals. In sharing the value of aesthetic experience, even though the same value makes sense of our various aesthetic involvements, in music, drama, literature or dance, we can be said to have this value as our common good. Might it be meaningful in some circumstances to identify a good and draw from it a prescription or recommendation that another ‘should’ value and pursue it? A student might enquire about the value of the specific skills identified among objectives of the module. Why is one supposedly better-off having them than not having them? In what way are they an asset? The answers to such questions will attempt to show how their possessor is benefited by their possession, how his or her capacities for achieving one’s goals will be increased, and that will figure as a benefit, given that it can be assumed his or her goals will benefit him or her. Here the tutor may draw on such an account of the good as is reflected in Kraut’s developmentalism discussed in the previous chapter (Kraut, 2007). Perhaps the student, seeing the benefit, and hence the point, will commit to the pursuit and exercise of the skills. Or failing to see the benefit, will abandon attempts to acquire the no-longer-desirable skills. In this case might the tutor be warranted to make a moral appeal: the student ‘ought’ to engage with the course because the benefit is real, whether or not the student recognizes it? This is a trivial case, but it represents in structure some kinds of arguments made in terms of the common good grounded in human nature, or a concept of nationality, or of citizenship. For instance, friendly relations with one’s neighbours, colleagues and clients might be deemed a good, and a common good of those who collaborate to maintain such relations in their situations of life and work. To the new recruit who objects that she ‘doesn’t like those people’, the mentor might attempt to explain and illustrate the benefits that arise from having the desired quality of relationships. But someone who would need such answers lacks experience and the upbringing that might have facilitated the relevant learning. Alasdair MacIntyre has explored this and related issues in his reflection on practices, and the need for neophytes to submit to the authority of experienced practitioners if they are to grow in

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appreciation of the goods and the skills realized in the practices (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 190). Still, the questions posed by the neophytes arise from their new experiences occasioned by transition to a work environment. Questions about social relations and the cement of cooperation might seek greater understanding of an experienced reality, rather than reflect a doubt about that reality. How important it is to distinguish and, when necessary, keep apart ‘good working relationships’ from ‘good intimate relationships’ can be appreciated. How these fit into an overall picture of what it is to live well as a human being, at this point in history and in this place, can be elaborated. Particularities of time and place may pinpoint special features with attendant loyalties or sensitivities. Grasping these, appreciating their point, means that the recruit will want to care for the goods in question. ‘Ought’ adds nothing in terms of motivation for the student’s compliance.

Desire-independent reasons In taking this position, am I endorsing Bernard Williams’s denial that there are any external reasons? Williams maintains that a person cannot be provided with a reason to act that is not connected in any way with that person’s motivational set (Williams, 1981). John Searle sees this as a reformulation of what he calls The Classical Model derived from Hume and others. This model considers that a rational act can only be motivated by a desire (Searle, 2001, p. 26). Searle regards both the classical model and Williams’s restatement of the position as a denial that there can be any ‘desire-independent’ reasons for action. He attempts to counter this and to demonstrate not only that there can be and are desire-independent reasons for action, but also that all human social life depends on the human ability of agents to create for themselves desire-independent reasons for action (Smith, 2003, p. 27). A simple example is used to make the basic point. John orders a beer in a bar, which he drinks with relish. Eventually the waiter brings the bill, which in the normal course of events John pays. But why does he pay it? Is it rational for him to do so? The classical model asserts that he can only be motivated to pay the bill if he has a passion or a desire of some kind, either for the act in question, or for something else for which the act appears as a suitable means. But for Searle such a view is absurd. He draws attention to the ordinary dynamics of the beer buying scenario: someone who orders a beer in a bar freely commits himself to paying in due course, and this commitment is the creation of a reason to act,

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and to act independently of whatever one’s desires or passions at the time will happen to be. There is an important distinction here between reason and motivation. Famously, Hume and those who follow him deny that reason as such can motivate; only passions motivate and reason guides in deliberating about best means. With Searle I reject the separation of reason and motivation. Reason, in the form of a judgment about what is worthwhile and good to do, can motivate action. This fundamental stance is essential for an appreciation of the importance of the common good in relation to action. Searle links his defence of desire-independent reasons for action with a reaffirmation of the freedom of the will. This is because an agent’s set of beliefs and desires is not sufficient to cause the action. Searle uses the notion of a gap between the beliefs and desires, on the one hand, and the action, on the other. It is freedom, the free will of the agent, which bridges the gap (Searle, 2001, p. 13). Without the possibility of free choice, the usual experience of deliberation, as for instance in the choice among candidates in an election, would be pointless. Desires on their own are insufficient to cause the action, but reasons generated from deliberation contribute, providing grounds for further desires. However, while Searle aligns Williams’s denial of external reasons with the classical model, he also finds that Williams is inconsistent in the exclusion of reasons from the motivational set (Searle, 2001, p. 169). As evidence, he cites with added emphasis a passage in which Williams summarizes how he wishes the term ‘desire’ to be understood: ‘I have discussed S primarily in terms of desires, and this term can be used, formally, for all elements in S. But this terminology may make one forget that S can contain such things as dispositions of evaluation, patterns of emotional reaction, personal loyalties, and various projects, as they may be abstractly called, embodying commitments of the agent’ (Williams, 1981, p. 105). Searle points out how this survey of what is to count as desire is confusing, since it does not maintain any clear distinction between desire-dependent and desire-independent reasons for action, a distinction that Searle glosses as ‘the distinction between things you want to do and things you have to do whether you want to or not. It is one thing to want or desire something, quite something else to regard it as “obligatory” or as a “commitment” that you have to do regardless of your desires’ (Searle, 2001, pp. 169–70). If prior commitments undertaken by the agent give her reasons for acting, regardless of what her desires happen to be at the time of the action, then there can be desireindependent reasons for action. Among prior commitments Searle notes the

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special case of promising, but this does not exhaust the range of possibilities. Someone who promises creates for themselves a reason to act in the future, which will be available to motivate action, even in the absence of desire. He emphasizes that this understanding of what it is to promise as the creation of a desire-independent reason is internal to the activity of promising. There is no need to import from outside any additional elements, such as for instance a principle that promises are to be kept. The action of promising contains its own rationale. This is underlined by the parallel case of making assertions. Whoever makes an assertion undertakes a commitment to the truth of what is asserted, assertions contain truth-claims, and this fact is internal to the activity of making assertions. A truth claim entails the acceptance of responsibility for the speaker’s sincerity, the possession of evidence for the assertion and warrant for the assertion (Searle, 2001, p. 176). Underlining the way in which commitments are integral to beliefs, and how beliefs can motivate action, Searle considers the question of how evidence and proof can motivate researchers to believe something they do not wish to believe. Many are disappointed that the paths of exploration they undertake in their various sciences turn out to be dead ends, and this can be an uncomfortable truth to accept, as also can the successful proof generated by a competitor. Nonetheless, those scientists are commonly motivated to change their views. The validity of the proof provided gives them a reason for accepting it. Reason can motivate action. Timothy Chappell, writing in a different context, but also engaging with Williams’s denial of external reasons, suggests that ‘rational moral motivation is paradigmatically a matter of being motivated by a belief ’ (Chappell, 2009, p. 68). He reconstructs the pattern of motivation as follows: ‘I form the belief that I have a reason to act, and – being rational – I act on that belief.’ In response to the objection that someone promising is relying on an established institution of promising, and that the obligation to deliver on the promise derives from that institution, or from a related moral principle, Searle is adamant. He distinguishes the first-person point of view of the agent from the third-person point of view of those who describe the institutions to which others conform. The observer may describe how practices such as promising function within a society enabling patterns of collaboration. But the participant in the practice from her first-person perspective creates an obligation for herself by making a promise. It is her own free undertaking that creates the obligation: the institution of promising makes it possible (Searle, 2001, p. 178). An agent can create for herself a reason for acting, which, independent of the desires of the moment, can function in grounding a new desire. With his

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example of buying a beer, Searle explains that the desire to pay follows from the obligation to pay, an obligation created by the commitment undertaken in the act of ordering the beer. This means that ‘the reason can be the ground of the desire and not conversely’. Having an obligation is a ground for a desire. Searle insists that to ‘recognize a valid reason for doing something is already to recognize a valid reason for wanting to do it’ (Searle, 2001, p. 213). Searle stresses the first-person perspective of the one who promises, for whom the assumed obligation is internal to the act of promising. He notes the parallel to the commitment undertaken in the act of asserting a proposition. It is a weakness of the classical model that it is unable to account for the fact that the obligation to keep a promise is internal to the act of promising (Searle, 2001, p. 193). Various attempts are made to provide an account of promising compatible with the classical model of passions and reasons, but Searle finds them deficient. Whether the appeal is to the institution of promising, or to a moral principle as the source, or whether the nature of the obligation itself, is called into question by labelling it prima facie, or as merely prudential, all avoid what is obvious to one who makes a promise: she freely takes on the obligation of delivering on the promise. Searle underlines how essential this capacity of the human will freely to bind itself with commitments, and assumed obligations is to the possibility of social life. The formation of reasonable expectations and the possibility of reliance on the future cooperation of others depend on this. Whether with promises, conventions, covenants or contracts, social life depends essentially on shared expectations arising from commitments freely undertaken. We create external motivators that will provide a reason for an action, and they motivate precisely because they are freely adopted. In his later book, Searle (2010) develops this thought to explain the ontology of social life as dependent on the creation of shared meaning. I will return to this point in a later chapter when applying the argument to the topic of the common good, but here Searle draws attention to the distinctive ontology of commitment and obligation. In contrast to empirical facts, whereby the reality logically precedes the perception (because things are heavy, they feel heavy to us), in institutional facts the intentional act logically precedes the institutional reality. Since I ordered the beer, I will pay for it; because I promised, I will deliver on the promise; because I freely undertook an obligation, I will fulfil it. In these cases the intention precedes the event. Leo Zaibert raises a warning note with regard to Searle’s analysis of obligation. While acknowledging the validity of the point about obligations freely undertaken in the act of promising, Zaibert cautions that not every

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obligation can be explained in this manner. Searle does not consider other sources of obligation nor does he deny that there are such, but his silence about them may mislead. A relevant example cited by Zaibert is the obligation to offer an apology, following a gratuitous insult. Such an obligation is not undertaken in the act of insulting, parallel with the obligation undertaken in promising (Zaibert, 2003, p. 78). But for present purposes, in clarifying the relationship between appreciation of common goods and the adoption of obligation, Searle’s analysis of obligation, while not exhaustive, does serve to counter the exclusion of external reasons from an agent’s motivational set. In rejecting the internalism of Bernard Williams, Searle maintains that there can be desire-independent reasons for action. He devotes most attention to these as exemplified in freely assumed obligations as in promising. Other possible external reasons acknowledge facts concerning the agent’s long-term interests. To a certain extent, Williams already left a door open for this argument in acknowledging that the agent might proceed by a valid deliberation from his actual desires to recognition of the need for action. Timothy Chappell exploits this concession in his discussion of Williams’s denial of external reasons. The context of Chappell’s discussion is a consideration of arguments in favour of ethical subjectivism, whereby the supposed impossibility of external reasons is interpreted as supporting the case for ethical subjectivism. Chappell rejects ethical subjectivism, but seeks to undermine or counter the arguments made in its favour. His strategy is to argue that ‘even if there are no external reasons, ethical subjectivism is not the best explanation of this phenomenon’ (2009, p. 69). He considers Williams’s concession that one might proceed by ‘a sound deliberative route’ connecting one motivation with another. Then from anyone’s given motivation one might argue by a sound deliberative route to additional conclusions about what she ought to do. If she wants to run the marathon next year then she should give up smoking now. As noted earlier, Chappell stresses that motivators of action are beliefs, so the exploration of a sound deliberative route between motivations does not involve invoking a set of desires in some other form. Of interest here is the link to the common good. Is there a way of arguing by a sound deliberative route from anyone’s motivational set to a common good that ‘ought’ to be pursued? Identifying a common good means articulating the benefits for the collaborating society that make sense of the cooperation of the participants. It requires neither a postulate nor an empirical determination that all collaborators in fact do recognize and appreciate the good as a common good, or the benefit that makes sense of the good. But it does entail commitment to

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the belief that there is a ‘sound deliberative route’ from actual motivations to the proposed common good. This discussion about how beliefs about goods might be motivators of action may seem remote from the topic of this book concerning global common goods. But given the suspicion often aroused by mention of common goods, it has been necessary to clarify what will be attempted. No covert importation of prescriptions or obligations will be attempted. On the understanding that beliefs can be motivators, the argument of the book will attempt to show the reasonableness and usefulness of recognizing global goods in common. If the reader is persuaded of the worthwhileness of some global common good, he or she will have a reason to cooperate, but any collaborative action will follow only if the reader chooses to act. As Searle has argued, there is a gap between reasons for action and action undertaken. Free will is the bridge between desires and beliefs and consequent action.

The rule of law as a common good Before proceeding to further clarification of what global common goods are, or might be, it is useful to apply the analysis so far to a concrete example. Since the rule of law is commonly taken to be beneficial to individuals and to society, it is a convenient example. The former Lord Chief Justice in the United Kingdom, Tom Bingham, has produced a neat short book explaining the rule of law for lay people (2010). He does not speak of it as a common good, and that in turn makes his contribution particularly valuable, since it can exemplify the point that something being a common good does not presuppose that all who pursue it or benefit from it must recognize it as a common good. Bingham notes the difficulty of providing a tight definition of the rule of law, and he shows how legal scholars offer varying accounts. Nonetheless, he suggests that the central idea of the rule of law is ‘that all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly made, taking effect (generally) in the future and publicly administered in the courts’ (Bingham, 2010, p. 8). This is not a comprehensive statement nor presumed to be applicable without qualification or exception. In eight chapters he elaborates important features of the rule of law, drawing attention to complexities and disputes. These features include accessibility of the law, equality before the law, entitlement to a fair trial, protection of fundamental rights and that the application of the law rather than the exercise of discretion should characterize the determination of

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right and liabilities. A brief survey of the historical milestones that have led to the establishment of the rule of law, from Magna carta and Habeas corpus to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, underlines how the rule of law is an achievement of history deserving to be valued and carefully guarded. The value of the rule of law is clearly intelligible from a grasp of the situations and issues from which the various elements of solutions emerged, which together comprise the set of systems that is the rule of law. Bingham does not write of the rule of law as a common good, but it is convenient to make this connection. His own interest in the topic is fed by current concerns in the context of ensuring security against terrorist attacks, and the corresponding risks posed to human rights and civil liberties. The book ‘is addressed to those who have heard references to the rule of law, who are inclined to think that it sounds like a good thing rather than a bad thing, who wonder if it may not be rather important, but who are not quite sure what it is all about and would like to make up their own minds’ (2010, p. viii). Bingham, the experienced judge, is himself convinced that the rule of law is a good thing. His reasons are formulated in terms of the protection of the liberties and rights and interests of people who are vulnerable to the more powerful. He is sure that the rule of law is a good thing for all the people who live and conduct their business within a law-governed society. Is it their common good? If the assertion of a common good among collaborators requires that all who cooperate are in fact aware of the goods involved in their collaboration, and of the reasons explaining those goods, then the rule of law could not be such a common good. But Bingham writes the book for an audience of those affected by the rule of law, but who do not understand it or know the reasons for having it as an element of our public life. They do not yet know of their good, but the judge knows about it and attempts to explain it. Is he in fact tracing a sound deliberative route from their existing reasons for action (interests, liberties, rights) to the additional reason of supporting and guarding the institutions of the rule of law? If so, he is providing reasons that can be source of new beliefs, beliefs that in turn can be the motivators of action, as explained earlier in the discussion of Searle and Chappell. His strategy is to explain, to assist people in understanding, so that ‘they make up their own minds’ about the value of this legal culture. Grasping the point is sufficient; he makes no other effort to motivate cooperation from his readers. Forming a belief will be sufficient to generate the motivation. As a system of systems, the rule of law is not a single concrete good, but a myriad of concrete goods including individuals’ exercise of their freedoms,

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judgements given in courts, laws enacted by legislatures, treaties between states, international covenants and many such. The phrase itself, ‘rule of law’, functions more as a value naming the intelligibility of those systems of systems. It is a benefit for all who live within its ambit, to be free from arbitrary arrest, to be treated as equal before the law, to be protected against discretionary power of government officials, and so on. There are many actual and possible concrete goods at stake. The system that secures those goods, summarized as the rule of law, can be spoken of in two ways, as a concrete but complex good (the British legal system), and as an abstract value (the rule of law) making sense of the worthwhileness of any and all of the particular goods. It can be assumed that this is a good for all and so a common good, whether recognized as such or not. The searching question formulated by Chappell in his discussion of motivation is relevant here. ‘The real issue is not whether there are motivations that we can share in practice; obviously there are. Rather it is whether there are any motivations that we must necessarily share. The problem is that the applicability of ethical reasons is still conditional on people’s actual motivations, and local to those people who have the right motivations’ (Chappell, 2009, p. 71). The discussion of the rule of law as a common good is a helpful example for answering this question. As discussed, the assertion that the rule of law is a common good does not entail that everyone actually recognizes it as such. The claim is rather that a sound deliberative route can be traced from anyone’s actual interests to the rule of law as belonging to the good from which they benefit, and for which they have a reason to appreciate and support it. Recalling Scruton’s insistence that it is only those who have a sense of solidarity in valuing some good who will have the motivation to act to protect it, a similar point can be made. As Chappell puts it, ethical reasons find purchase with those who actually have the right motivations, but anyone’s set of motivations is expandable in principle by following a sound deliberative route. There is no doubt that legal professionals have a vested interest in maintaining the rule of law. But, by the same token, anyone who might find herself before a court or within the sphere of influence of benefit-dispensing government officials also has a vested interest in maintaining the rule of law. Not all have an equal interest in improving the rule of law. The present system has come about through a complex history in which conflicts and disputes have led incrementally to changes, mostly improvements. Learning from experiences of injustice, unfairness, vulnerability or weakness, lawyers and legislators have slowly developed the present system. It continues to develop, as Bingham documents, with the incorporation of human rights

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legislation (Human Rights Act 1998) in the UK’s Common Law system (2010, p. 66). The development of their common good does not require the active engagement of all participants; however, it does require that there be some who exercise concern for the good of all and strive to secure their good in appropriate instruments. That striving can also be by means of debate among qualified legal professionals about the adequacy or inadequacy of the legislation, as exemplified by John Finnis’s criticism of the reasons ‘advanced for entrenching the European Convention on Human Rights’ in British law (2011c, p. 19). Among the concerns expressed is that the language of the law and of Courts’ judgements tend to treat asserted rights (e.g. to privacy, or freedom of speech) as absolute to the extent that any limitation by governmental authority for the sake of some element of public order automatically appears as an infringement of the right. This follows from the manner in which the countervailing concerns of public interest or public order are poorly expressed in the European Convention, which reflects the postwar atmosphere of its formulation. The concerns then were conditioned by the experience of the abuse of state power. The strength of rights’ assertion in the Convention means that the legitimate concerns of democratic governments to regulate the exercise of rights for the common good are not sufficiently supported. ‘Specified and “enshrined” in a public commitment, and protecting the individual against the state, they [rights to free speech and privacy] must extensively prevail over the competing considerations which have usually found a place in bills of rights only, if at all, in vague mention of “morals” or “public morals”’ (Finnis, 2011c, p. 39). This is a revealing example to illustrate what is proposed here: Finnis’s argument for strengthening of appreciation of the element of common goods in the context of the weakness of its legal formulation is a pursuit of a common good of the relevant communities, namely the United Kingdom, and The Council of Europe. Work on improving the shared meaning that sustains cooperation is action addressed to a good in common, serving the interests of many persons who may not be aware of the good in question, or how it serves their interests. Gerhard Seel (2013, p. 41) makes a similar point in relation to the juridical and political institutions of the European Union, proposing that they qualify as a common good of the Union. However, he arrives at his conclusion by a different pathway, which may pose a challenge to the argument of this chapter. The challenge is couched in the formulation of the title of his essay: ‘What are common goods and why should we pursue them?’ I will return to the discussion of the first question of this title when considering the distinction between common

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goods and public goods. But here the concern is with the second question: why should we pursue common goods? His formulation of the question gives the impression that from the identification of common goods an obligation to pursue the goods follows. But that is not the path of his argument. He first establishes an obligation grounded in a moral principle, derived from the thought of Fichte and Kant, which he maintains ‘obliges everybody to live in such a way that everybody else can accept his actions and live in agreement with them’ (Seel, 2013, p. 40). This moral principle, to be satisfied, would require people to live according to established laws, so that it follows there is an obligation to uphold the juridical and political structures that facilitate communal life. When certain institutions such as the rule of law are identified as the kinds of structures fulfilling this purpose, then they qualify as common goods. An obligation to pursue those goods is derived from the moral principle independently of the identification of the goods in common. Accordingly, in his view, there no direct move from the identification of a common good to the assertion of a duty to pursue that good. An appeal to a moral principle is required to ground the obligation. Whether or not the invoked principle can deliver the conclusions required of it may be discussed in such ethical debates that are concerned with the justification of norms. The discussion of an obligation to pursue common goods poses no challenge therefore to the approach adopted here of considering that beliefs about goods can be sufficient motivators for those who perceive and understand the goods in question.

Conclusion These opening chapters lay some of the groundwork for a consideration of global common goods. I have clarified what it usually means for something to be a good, contrasting the concrete objectives pursued with the abstract values that articulate their intelligibility. I have examined the implications of the phrase, ‘good for’, and the different senses in which it can be used. Kraut’s account of developmentalism was found useful in distinguishing the perspectival sense from the realist sense of the phrase, linking to the flourishing of the subject. Roger Scruton was helpful in seeing the correlation between a self-identifying group with a sense of ‘we’ and goods in common for which they cooperate. His preference for the appreciation of the good as a source of motivation rather than the imposition of prescriptive norms supported the argument. The denial of external reasons as possibly motivating

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action, a denial that could jeopardize the project of appreciating common goods, was challenged with the help of John Searle’s analysis of rationality in action. Relying also on Timothy Chappell’s discussion of beliefs as motivators of action, the path was opened for an exploration of how the identification of common goods, including global common goods could provide reasons for action. This path did not require defending any derivation of obligation from the identification of common goods. This conclusion was reinforced by consideration of a possible objection arising from a discussion of juridical structures such as the rule of law as examples of common goods.

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Is There a Supreme Good, a summum bonum?

Talk of the common good provokes among many the reaction that there cannot be a single common good that is the highest and ultimate good of human cooperation, human cultures and politics, either national or international. Accordingly, many will refuse to consider the idea of global common goods since the notion of a single all-embracing objective of human action seems absurd. The basis for this reaction is found in Aristotle’s discussion of politics and the common good, and so it is necessary to return to his treatment to clarify what can and cannot be defended in speaking of global common goods. Aristotle in his Politics suggests that the political association is devoted to pursuing a highest good that encompasses all other goods: ‘. . . every polis is an association of persons formed with a view to some good purpose. . . . [A]s all associations aim at some good, that one which is supreme and embraces all others will have also as its aim the supreme good. That is the association which we call the polis . . .’ (Politics, Bk I chap. 1). Few political philosophers today will defend this assertion of a supreme good as the aim of politics. Value pluralism will be listed among the many reasons for rejecting a highest single good as the common good of the political community.

Value pluralism American political philosopher William Galston sees value pluralism as central to the liberal political movement that values pluralism and diversity. In Liberal Pluralism, Galston (2002) claims that value pluralism is espoused by so many significant philosophers that it must count as a distinctive movement in contemporary moral philosophy. Isaiah Berlin’s ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is acknowledged as the originating text for this movement to which Galston

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assigns Bernard Williams, Stuart Hampshire, Joseph Raz, Steven Lukes, Michael Stocker, Thomas Nagel, Charles Taylor, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Larmore, John Gray and John Kekes as well as himself (2002, p. 5). Galston spells out the basic tenets of value pluralism in five points. First, the position that holds that there is a plurality of values is not relativism. Second, values are incommensurable, so that there is no possible rank ordering of goods. Third, some goods are recognized as basic, belonging in any account of a decent life. Fourth, there is a legitimate diversity of conceptions of a good life, of public purposes and of cultural emphases, grounded in the plurality of values. And fifth, value pluralism is distinguished from various forms of monism. For Galston, a theory of value is monistic, ‘if it either (a) reduces goods to a common measure or (b) creates a comprehensive hierarchy or ordering among goods’ (2002, p. 6). Elizabeth Anderson (1993) also espouses pluralism in opposition to monist accounts of value. Similar to Galston’s enumeration of the elements of monism, Anderson notes two different forms that it might take. In this she relies on her central notions, as discussed in Chapter 1, of the evaluative attitude, and the criteria applied in evaluating something. Where she recognizes a plurality of criteria and a plurality of attitudes, monists reduce these to a single criterion and a single attitude. ‘Monists could hold that the apparently diverse evaluative standards we use can be explained in terms of their relation to a single, unitary, good-constituting property. Or they could hold that all goods are the proper objects of a single favourable attitude’ (Anderson, 1993, p. 117). Ultimately the two stances are related, in her view, since ‘attempts to reduce the normative authority of plural standards to a single good constituting property ultimately depend on the assumption that just one attitude or response lies behind all evaluative claims’ (1993, p. 117). Anderson and Galston agree that there is no single common measure for all goods, and they both recognize that this fact poses a challenge for anyone who wishes to uphold a highest good. However, they take different positions on the challenge. Anderson’s discussion will be treated later. Galston is explicit in drawing out the implications of the incommensurability of goods, that the absence of a common measure for all goods ‘means that there is no summum bonum that is the chief good for all individuals’. He repeats this in a later chapter in which he elaborates Isaiah Berlin’s position on moral pluralism. Berlin ‘depicts a world in which fundamental values are plural, conflicting, incommensurable in theory and uncombinable in practice – a world in which there is no single, univocal summum bonum that can be defined

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philosophically, let alone imposed politically’ (Galston, 2002, p. 30). The five features of value pluralism outlined in the book’s introduction are reviewed in his chapter linking the thesis of value pluralism to the political stance of liberal pluralism. Along with value pluralism, Galston outlines two other pillars of liberal pluralism which he terms expressive liberty and political pluralism. Expressive liberty is the freedom to live according to one’s own convictions and commitments, regardless of whether the relevant way of life would acquire a stamp of approval from advocates of autonomy. People who wish to live according to an inherited tradition should have the liberty to express their traditional values in their lives, even if from another’s point of view such submission to tradition is incompatible with true liberty. The third pillar of liberal pluralism alongside expressive liberty and value pluralism is political pluralism. Under this heading, Galston understands the recognition that there are many sources of authority apart from the state, and that these multiple sovereignties do not exist ‘simply as a concession or gift of the state’ (Galston, 2002, p. 36). Galston denies the possibility of a single ‘univocal’ highest good in politics. Is there any special significance to the introduction of the word ‘univocal’ to qualify the supreme good in this context? Certainly it functions rightly to exclude equivocation, but is it also intended to exclude analogy? The terms to be used in argument must be used univocally if the arguments’ conclusions are to be persuasive. And the possibility of some argument that might conclude to a single overriding good is excluded on the grounds of value pluralism: there are many values, and they have no common feature that would permit strict comparisons or rank-ordering. Hence, Galston concludes, a highest good in a rank ordering is impossible. ‘These qualitatively distinct values cannot be fully rank-ordered; there is no summum bonum that enjoys a rationally grounded priority for all individuals’. And in the following paragraph he repeats: ‘No single good or value or set of goods or values, is overriding in all cases for the purpose of guiding action’ (2002, p. 31). At the same time, Galston wants to acknowledge that there can, on occasion, be a rank-ordering, for instance, in terms of urgency, but it would be a different ordering to one made in terms of nobility. And he has no difficulty conceding that one might well achieve a prioritization in one’s own life by structuring one’s goods and purposes in terms of a single overriding goal (e.g. in medicine, or education or the theatre). This is no concession, in fact, since the scenario of many individuals realizing their own chosen goods exemplifies the point at issue in value pluralism.

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Is Galston’s exclusion of a summum bonum warranted? Does it follow from the assumption of value pluralism that there can be no highest purpose or end that is the same for all individuals? On the face of it, the assertion seems justified, but, on reflection, one can wonder if the kind of candidate for highest good excluded by the fact of value pluralism could ever seriously have been embraced as such by a defender of the idea. Could there not be an account of the highest good of human kind that is not only compatible with value pluralism, but also actually exploits the richness of the human good as mapped by value pluralism in order to outline the most complete good? The question has been raised by one particular critic of Galston’s account of value pluralism. Nicholas Wolterstorff presented his objections at a conference held in response to Galston’s account of liberal pluralism in his 2002 book, and Galston replied in his 2005 book, The Practice of Liberal Pluralism, in which he reproduced Wolterstorff ’s criticism. That criticism points to the common acceptance in the world religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that there is a highest good of all human beings ‘in being rightly related to God’. Wolterstorff concedes that they differ in specifying what this right relation entails, ‘but that there is a highest good for everyone in all circumstances, and that that consists in being related to God in a certain way, is, as I say, the conviction of a dominant strand in each of these Abrahamic religions. Now I assume that . . . the value pluralist means to deny this claim’ (Wolterstorff, 2002, pp. 8–9, cited in Galston, 2005, p. 194). Galston makes a twofold reply to this challenge, which he distinguishes as the political and the theological. The political move is to query the assertion that adherents of the three world religions would all hold the same view of the highest good. Sociological surveys measuring popular belief are cited to show that variety rather than uniformity predominates (Galston, 2005, p. 195). Galston’s second, theological response to the objection reinforces liberal pluralism’s concern for the pluriform dimensions of the human good and of good ways of life. The singular concept of the highest good is articulated in many conceptions. ‘While Wolterstorff is obviously right that the Abrahamic faiths endorse the general concept of the highest good as right relation to God, they disagree, not only among one another, but also internally, as to the specific conception of that right relation’ (Galston, 2005, p. 195). This disagreement reflects both the acknowledged inexhaustibility of the divine, and the human capacity for variation. Galston points to the possibly ‘endless variety of orientations – towards faith as opposed to works, the heart as opposed to the law, inner spirituality as opposed to external observance, self-improvement as

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opposed to social reform, retreat from the world as opposed to immersion in the world, contemplation as opposed to action, political innocence as opposed to worldliness, and so forth’ (2005, p. 195). The theological move enables Galston to disarm the force of Wolterstorff ’s objection, because the supposed agreement of the world religions turns out to be illusory. In fact, Galston maintains, there is found a coherence rather than a contradiction between monotheism and value pluralism, since ‘the unknowable inexhaustibility of God’s nature recapitulates, at the level of theology, the diversity that value pluralists observe on the plane of the mundane’ (2005, p. 195). Doesn’t this alleged coherence between monotheism and value pluralism defeat Galston’s confident assertion that there can be no summum bonum, no highest good? His rejoinder to Wolterstorff seems to silence the challenge, but that may be because of a weakness in the formulation of the challenge more than because of the strength of the position defended. Accepting the analogy with the inexhaustibility of the divinity, Galston seems to allow for a different kind of highest good than what might be envisaged by a monist. The impossibility of a singularly valid rank-ordering of all values does not entail that there can be no highest good. It follows only that if there is a highest good, it cannot be the kind of thing that would fit into a monist’s order of values. Galston turned the attack as if it had been an attack on value pluralism. But if it were an attack on his assertion that value pluralism entails the denial of a summum bonum, he has not succeeded in turning it: indeed, he seems to concede the point, while at the same time claiming victory. So the question remains. Does value pluralism preclude a summum bonum? If not, what kind of good would the highest turn out to be, consistent with value pluralism? In the remainder of this chapter, I will clarify first of all what exactly is included and what is excluded by a commitment to value pluralism. I will explore the implications of value pluralism for an adequate account of human well-being. From the attempt to articulate human flourishing as compatible with the complexity of the good, I will propose an account of common goods such that a common good might function as a supreme good, along the lines of Aristotle’s suggestion.

The rejection of monism Galston’s commitment to value pluralism leads him to reject monism, which he characterizes as either reducing all goods to a common measure, or establishing

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a complete ordering of all goods. The ordering in question might be hierarchical in a qualitative sense. such as more or less important, more or less valuable, more or less perfecting of human beings, or it could be quantitative, comparing goods as having more or less of whatever component is taken to provide the measure of comparability. There are possible orderings of goods also in terms of the means–goal relation. Utilitarianism is the predominant modern form of monism (Galston, 2005, p. 11). Timothy Chappell also rejects monism about the good in favour of pluralism (Chappell, 1998, p. 13). He considers nihilism as a third possibility and eliminates it, since it would make all action (even the brushing of one’s teeth – ‘dental hygiene’ – or the combing of one’s hair – ‘spruceness of appearance’) pointless, and that goes against ordinary experience. Monism about the good is ‘the assertion that there is, at bottom, only one form of value in the world, so that if, for example, friendship and knowledge are both goods, then there must be some meaningful sense in which they are instances of the same good’. By contrast, pluralism about the good is ‘the assertion that there are, at bottom, more than one form of value in the world, so that, e.g., friendship and knowledge need not be instances of the same good, but may well be fundamentally different forms of value’ (1998, p. 13). Obviously, Chappell is not using the terms ‘good’ and ‘value’ so as to distinguish the concrete goods from the abstract values that express what it is about the goods that makes them attractive. However, the distinction introduced in Chapter 1 is perfectly compatible with what Chappell says about values in the discussion of value pluralism. Chappell reinforces the case for pluralism by outlining the different basic goods for humans that comprise the typical ends of human action. Pluralism about the good is not without its problems, however. It poses a challenge that Chappell calls the Problem of Reconciliation: ‘the question of how we are to reconcile such diverse basic goods within a single life’ (1998, p. 61). His attempt to answer this question provides one possible way of answering Galston and illustrating how the plurality of ends need not exclude the possibility of a highest good or a highest good as a common good. The difficulties posed by the problem of reconciliation should not be underestimated. How can there be coherence in a life lived in pursuit of many different goods that are incommensurable and incapable of being brought into harmony under a single conception of the good? ‘If the different basic goods . . . really are basic and really are different, they can’t just be aspects of some further good or super-good such as “utility” or “happiness”. There is no such

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further good or super-good’ (Chappell, 1998, p. 69). The denial of any super good is used to eliminate the possibility of maximization as a meaningful strategy towards the good. But it does reinforce the challenge of finding grounds for coherence. Chappell’s strategy is to outline a set of appropriate attitudes towards goods, since maximization is not coherent. There are three possible attitudes, which he names as promoting the good, respecting the good and not violating the good (Chappell, 1998, pp. 74–5). Values such as knowledge or friendship are promoted when they are pursued in action. Respect for any good does not require that one actually make it the point of one’s life, or even an important element in one’s life, but to disparage it or to deny it to be a good that others might properly pursue would be disrespect. Violation of a good, such as destruction or harm to any instance, would certainly reflect a lack of respect, but goes beyond disrespect to actual damage. Violation is always prohibited, but the other two attitudes are permitted. These attitudes are appropriate to a plurality of goods where human freedom has the possibility of making choices and creating a combination of goods in a single life. They preclude maximization as the appropriate moral attitude.

Eudaimonia, flourishing or well-being Chappell and Galston both deny a monism of the good, they both rule out maximization as an appropriate practical attitude towards the good, for the same reason, and they affirm a plurality of goods that are incommensurable and irreducible to each other or to any other. Where Galston moves to consider the implications for political life and political theory, Chappell focuses on the implications for individual life. How might one achieve coherence in one’s life since it will involve many goods and dimensions? Chappell’s proposal is that a narrative conception of the good, of rationality and of the person would facilitate the required coherence (1998, p. 175). If a person’s life is considered as a narrative, this provides a way of unifying the goods in that life without denying their plurality and incommensurability. The pursuit, respect and non-violation of goods throughout a life give it a shape that can appear as intelligible and meaningful. Chappell insists he is not advocating a ‘super-good’ (1998, p. 69). A person is faced with choices in life whether or not to pursue, respect or violate goods, and success in finding balance between the various goods and the appropriate attitudes gives a coherence or integrity to that life

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(Chappell, 1998, p. 93). Accordingly, such success is a necessary precondition for well-being. On this, Chappell distances himself from James Griffin’s account of well-being (Griffin, 1986), suspecting that for Griffin the reconciliation of goods involves a commensuration between the goods. Accordingly, he maintains that there is no single best way of combining the dimension of good in a life. ‘Rather there is one indefinitely large variety of good ways of reconciling the different goods; a second equally large variety of dubious or faulty ways of reconciling them; and a third equally large variety of ways of living which fail to be reconciliations of the goods altogether’ (Chappell, 1998, p. 93). A narrative provides a structure for a life, allowing it to appear as a story. The story of a person’s life is the narrative of how in their choices and actions they have or have not pursued, respected or violated goods. In this way, particular goods fit together in a greater whole, but not by any dynamic of maximization. The greater whole is exhibited in a narrative form and is composed of the many goods as pursued and respected in its time and place. Chappell translates Aristotle’s term eudaimonia as ‘human well-being’, and explains the qualification of self-sufficiency that Aristotle attributed to it: ‘The most complete good, we take it, is self-sufficient . . . and what is selfsufficient, we suppose, is whatever is able on its own to make a life choiceworthy, and lacking in no respect. This is what we believe eudaimonia to be’ (1998, p. 153, citing Aristotle: NE, 1097b7ff.). He reads this as a requirement, not simply that a choice-worthy life should lack none of the human goods, but that it should exhibit a structure. This he reads as including the manner in which life is lived, the way anyone has of pursuing the goods. Intrinsic to the goodness of a life lived in pursuit of human goods is the manner in which those human goods are pursued: as Chappell puts it, it is not only a question of what we get, but also of how we get it. And that how, the structuring of one’s life as lived, the how we do it, is intrinsic to the goodness of the life. The structuring is understood by analogy to storytelling, narrative. By appeal to narrative, Chappell seeks a solution to the problem of reconciliation. He proposes a narrative conception of the good, a narrative conception of the person and a narrative conception of human life. Biography provides instances of life-stories and these enable us to review lives in terms of their structure or narrative. Chappell invites his readers to consider and compare the lives of Oedipus and Vincent van Gogh. He suggests that these familiar examples illustrate the truth that it is not the quantity of goods or delights that comprises the choice-worthy life, but the narrative that gives meaning to the whole. Comparison of comedies and tragedies a la Shakespeare make

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the same point: Why is one life a tragedy and another a comedy? Audiences recognize the difference. Their recognition ‘has to do with how the good and bad experiences which occur within the narrative are to be made sense of as a story, by us and by those in the story; or in the case of our own lives, by us as those in the story’ (Chappell, 1998, p. 160). Chappell devotes a chapter to answering objections to the narrative conceptions of the person, the good and human life. The success of his project is not the issue here; instead, it is the plausibility of this conception of overall goodness of a life that is choice-worthy, which is respectful of the plurality of goods. Well-being (eudaimonia) is defended in terms of narrative structure and is plausible when applied to the individual human life. How useful is it for social and political purposes? Aristotle considers the point of the polis to be the good life, and that understood as the highest good that incorporates all the rest. He applies the criterion of completeness, self-sufficiency, to this good also. Can the good of the political community be interpreted by analogy with the narrative of individual biography? Does the story of a community provide a way of understanding its flourishing while respecting the autonomy of the many persons and partnerships and the variety of goods? Elizabeth Anderson shares with Galston the concern to resist the dominance of monist accounts of the good, but like Chappell, she attempts to do this by sketching how an integrative higher-order good might be described without succumbing to monism or the application of a single criterion. She contrasts calculation and interpretation, suggesting that the good of a life as a whole when used as a criterion for choosing between different possible projects is more a matter of interpretation than calculation. ‘A conception of a higher order good is not like a rigid template which measures first order goods according to the precise degree to which they match its shape’ (1993, p. 55). As opposed to a rigid template, a fixed pattern, she imagines an open-ended and flexible schema, ‘which can be filled out and reshaped in an infinite variety of ways, as circumstances, opportunities, purposes, principles, mood, taste, and imagination recommend’ (1993, p. 55). Unlike consequentialist models of rational choice that purport to offer precision and clarity, but at the cost of the reduction of the vast range of human goods, the ‘open-endedness of higherorder goods encourages creativity and growth, independence, individuality, flexibility, exploration and play’ (1993, p. 55). Her suggestion is an invitation to people to use their imagination and interpretive powers to achieve integration in their lives, not to engage in mathematical calculation.

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The flourishing of a university or a city The suggestions of narrative structure and integrative higher-order conceptualization are useful for considering how one might speak of comprehensive common goods and indeed highest goods of complex collaboration. To explore the possibilities, it is useful to look at particular experiences of communal achievement and success, as might be found in any society or city. London prides itself on its achievement in hosting the 2012 Olympic and Para-Olympic games. How is success to be measured? To explore this question, I take another example – the North American city of Chicago that prides itself on its architecture, and justifiably so, since the city presents a glittering range of innovative designs and structures. My choice of Chicago as an example is due to the impression the city made on me while spending a semester as a visiting professor at Loyola University Chicago in 2010. Famous names have built here: Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and many more (Smith, 2006). One element the visitor cannot overlook is the listing of different ‘tallest’ buildings. The claim to have the tallest building in the world has been ceded to Kuala Lumpur, and that in turn has been outdone by Taipei. But still the visitor’s attention is drawn to the tallest building in the United States, or the tallest building in the world in 1960, or the tallest building designed by a team led by a woman, or the tallest building supported by its external walls, or the tallest all-concrete structure in the world. In these superlatives, the standard of measurement is the same: vertical height above ground. One may wonder if depth underground is to be included in the measurement, or the height of antennae positioned on the roof. But the same standard must be applied consistently if the assertions of ‘tallest’ are to be reliable. Tall buildings provide us with one analogy for a monist view of the good. There is a single standard of measurement, and it allows for an overall winner, and winners in various categories. ‘Winner’ is used deliberately here, since there is a definite sense of competitiveness, in which Chicago’s citizens feel the honour of their city is at stake. Assuming that height might be a good thing for a building, it is clearly not the only good. Attractiveness of design, suitability for purpose, economy in construction and operation, environmental impact, and perhaps most urgently, commercial viability, are also criteria brought to bear on the evaluation of successful architecture. And applying any one of these criteria will produce a different scale from best to worst. With many factors and criteria, there will be many scales. This illustrates the value pluralism thesis, since none of the

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criteria will be identical to or interchangeable with another: the aesthetic and the economic, for instance. For any one of these criteria, it will turn out to be the case that it can be decomposed into subordinate elements. For instance, in assessing the economic aspects one would have to decide whether to factor in the externalities, for example, disruption endured by neighbours during construction, and the inclusion or exclusion of this would affect the assessment of the cost of the building. Might there be a best overall? Could there be one building that stands out because it manages to score highly on several criteria? Of course, this seems plausible, and so the allocation of architectural prizes and awards can be grounded in the reasons given. But more than likely the range of criteria suggests that there will be many prize winners, according to the specific grounds of comparison. Chicago is proud of its universities also, University of Chicago, Northwestern, Illinois Institute of Technology, de Paul University, Loyola University. Which one is best? Such questions are not inviting declarations of personal preference. University administrators must now pay close attention to their institutions’ performance on various league tables. National and international comparisons translate into marketability in recruiting faculty, in recruiting research students and undergraduates, in attracting endowments and research grants. In this field, it is clearly evident that ‘nothing succeeds like success!’ Those who work in universities might find leaders’ focus on league tables and relevant indicators a nuisance and may at times feel the need to protest that values for which the university exists such as wisdom and learning, autonomy and responsibility, do not allow of reliable measurement (Brown and Carasso, 2013). But whatever might occasion such protests, no member of a university faculty can overlook the difference between working in an academic institution that is flourishing and doing well ‘by all accounts’, and working in a demoralized environment to which neither good colleagues nor able students or research projects are attracted. So it is of interest to ask: What makes a university a good university? And the further question: What makes a university city a good university city? The point of this question is to find an analogue for the highest good in a situation in which there is no single value at stake and no single measure of good available. A university exemplifies a complex collaboration in many domains and disciplines and in many activities. It is usually the case that an institution must have a minimum number of graduate schools (or faculties, depending on the preferred nomenclature in the system) in order to qualify as a university. Not every one can manage to sustain a medical school, a

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law school, a business school or school of engineering. And in the latter, no university could manage to achieve a high degree of specialization in every dimension of engineering because of the scale of resources that would be required. In all likelihood, a good university will have more rather than fewer areas of specialization. Along with the range of disciplines, there is also a range of activities. Teaching and research are often in tension, but a university must do both. No university can afford to ignore the challenge to excel in teaching, especially in the professional schools. Research and publication records are also a focus of attention and competitive zeal. In addition, administrators are aware of the emphasis placed by the compilers of league-tables on students’ learning experience. Many dimensions beyond the purely academic come into play and will include many aspects of services on offer to students. Facilities for extra-curricular activities such as sports and students’ societies are seen as enriching the life of the university. Success in attracting, enrolling and retaining capable students and completion rates are also indicators. A stream of funding for research projects and endowment support are included among the concerns of leadership and administration. For a university to be considered as flourishing, many indicators and criteria would have to be invoked. The good of the university is a complex reality. Let it stand for the highest good of the people comprising the university community. This thought experiment requires us to abstract from many other areas of the lives of persons associated with the university, such as family, church, sport and vacation. What might it mean to say the university community has a highest good and how would the highest good relate to the individual goods of persons, departments and teams? The flourishing of the university requires that individual scholars pursue careers in areas that they choose themselves; that they engage with issues and problems they find both interesting and challenging, and that their commitment to their disciplines carries through into teaching and publication. Normally, a scholar will not view his or her own work as merely instrumental to the good of the university, even if management might sometimes do so in the context of compiling reports. Instead, a scholar typically will consider the resources and atmosphere of the university as providing the necessary conditions for his or her work. In fact, the means–goal or instrument–purpose relation (in either direction) is not the best model for understanding the relationship between the flourishing of the individual and the flourishing of the whole. It should be understood instead as a reciprocal and constitutive relationship. That is, the flourishing of many individuals and teams constitutes the flourishing of the whole, and the

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well-being of the whole contributes in a constitutive way to the flourishing of individuals. Constitutive relationship cannot be understood using the means–goal relation. A couple might purchase a dwelling so as to set up home and start a family. Obtaining the house is a means to the goal of having a family home. The hours the family will spend together in that dwelling, the meals they will eat together, the games they will play, the conversations they will have, are not means to having a home and family: these events and activities constitute the goal, not as an extrinsic instrumental cause, but as intrinsic realizations of the desired end. Of course, none of the particular occasions will completely realize the desired end, or exhaust the values at stake. Hence, the emphasis is placed on contributing, in acknowledgement of the limited nature of any contribution. The contributions are constitutive, not in a cumulative way, as stones added to a pile make the pile ever bigger, but as making real, making it happen, but never exhaustively, simply being: being a family, being at home together. This is the constitutive reciprocal relationship at play in the flourishing of a university. The university’s flourishing is not achieved by requiring each member to subordinate completely his or her own activities and goals to the university’s mission. Big business corporations may attempt to streamline the whole by budgeting for a bottom line result (market share, net profit, shareholder value) and then requiring each element in the organization to conform to this goal. Departments that are loss making jeopardize the whole and will be required to change. Some businesses can be run successfully this way, and attempts have been made to manage universities in this manner, but it is not a path on which a university can flourish (Nussbaum, 2010). Nor will a university flourish as a university if its members treat it as a holiday camp, an alternative to unemployment, or occupational therapy. Universities’ missions, however formulated, will always have to do with the pursuit, facilitation and communication of knowledge in many fields, with the induction of neophytes into many professions as well as citizenship (Nussbaum, 1997), and the contribution to wider social concerns through research, analysis and debate (MacIntyre, 2009). The flourishing of the whole will require that many individuals in many departments and in a wide range of activities do well. The range of activities alone highlights the breadth of the spectrum involved in communal flourishing. Lecturing, individual tutoring, supervision, guiding seminar discussion, critiquing written work, team teaching, examining and course design are among the more obvious of the daily activities of teaching faculty members. These activities can go well or badly, habitually or occasionally.

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A good university, doing well, will be able to report on habitually high standards of performance across this range. Multiply this diversity with the number of disciplines represented, note the other essential activities beyond teaching such as research, conference organization and participation, publication, outreach and social engagement, add in the complexities of inter-disciplinary work, networking with fellows in the same field in other universities, and one is faced with a scenario that illustrates the position of value pluralism. For the university to flourish, it is necessary that there be flourishing by its members in many activities in many disciplines. This is very different from saying that the plurality of value and the diversity of realization of those values militates against there being a highest good. Of course, plurality and diversity rule out the possibility of a defensible monist account of the good of a complex organization such as a university. And lacking a monist account of its good, a university cannot rely on a utilitarian approach to measuring its performance. Instead of taking plurality and diversity as ruling out a monist account of the university’s good, they could be regarded as specifying the conditions that would have to be met for an account of the university’s good to be a possible statement of its highest good. The summum bonum of a university would have to presuppose plurality of goods and diversity of approaches for it to be the highest good of the community.

Communal flourishing as a common good In what sense or senses might this highest good be a common good of participants? Aristotle introduced the common good of the polity as that good that includes the other goods. The university flourishes only by the constitutive flourishing of each one. Its seems a clear case of the university’s good, including the goods of all and of each, as long as the relationship is understood as one of constitutive contribution. A further sense of common good is that the declared mission of the university sets a direction for the whole, and that direction structures the coordination of all of the parts. The mission is a common good, being the objective of the cooperation and coordinated action, which is the life of the university. Does this entail that each individual member endorses the mission statement and deliberately focuses on achieving it in conducting their daily work? This would be too much to expect and would be counterproductive in any case. Usually it is the case that departments and schools are required to

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review their performance in terms of the overall mission, and then adjustments will be made to accommodate the coordination of each department and school with the university as a whole. From the point of view of any individual member of a department, it will be sufficient for her to align her work with departmental direction for it to be true of her that she serves or contributes to the mission of the university. How much any individual needs to know about the corporate mission depends on her role, since those with leadership and management responsibilities will be obliged to review and revise departmental or school performance. In addition, in a third sense, the structuring of all the parts in terms of the vision instantiates the good of order. Medieval thinkers often used the example of an army to illustrate the good of order (Kempshall, 1999). This is a useful example to the extent that it illustrates the coordination of many different functions and parts and levels (because, of course, an army is typically hierarchical in structure), but it is a dangerous example because it relies on command and obedience as the linkage between the parts, and this is not the only way in which coordination is achieved. The good of order of a university is that structured coordination in which departments, schools, faculties, programmes and offices all play their part, without relying primarily on command and obedience for linkage. Relying on constitutive contribution as the nexus between parts and the whole makes it possible to see how a complex cooperative venture can pursue a highest good. Constitutive contribution is not unidirectional, but is reciprocal. This means that a further dimension to the common good can be elaborated. The well-being of the whole provides the environment and conditions within which each one and each team can pursue their own goods. To that extent, the flourishing of the university is a common good of all in providing means and conditions for their functioning. Just as the rule of law in political community provides a set of conditions for the living of life in freedom, and belongs thereby to the common good of all in the community, so the university’s success gives each one a platform from which their own achievement can be ambitioned. Shared conditions can be taken for granted as long as they are available without difficulty, but sometimes they must be secured through deliberate intervention, as when false reports jeopardizing a university’s reputation have to be corrected in the public domain. As reciprocal constitutive contribution, the university’s flourishing is a common good also as conditioning the flourishing of each individual.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have attempted to show that talk of the common good is consistent with value pluralism, and that it might be defensible to speak of the supreme good of a complex organization without abandoning value pluralism in favour of monism. Anxiety that acceptance of the notion of common good would commit one to the imposition of a single overarching goal jeopardizing the freedoms of individuals and groups leads many to avoid the term. This anxiety is multiplied when the question of global common goods is raised, awakening also the suspicion that the idea of a global common good would entail a global authority such as a world government. Such fears are not to be dismissed, considering the history of liberal political institutions that have been evolved to counter threats posed by expanding and centralizing powers. A defensible case on behalf of global common goods must take such fears seriously. The exploration of one example of a complex common good whether that of a university, or that of a university city is intended to show that the autonomies of individuals and groups are not only not necessarily compromised by the care for the common good of the whole, but are also actually facilitated and fostered. Of course, there can be abuses, failures and breakdowns, as experience shows, and part of the common good will be to construct protections against them occurring and remedies should they occur. But is it meaningful to envisage this happening at the global level? Part of the answer will be to show that, in fact, some developments at the global level either presuppose or invoke common goods. This task will be pursued in the following chapters.

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Common Goods and Public Goods

Familiarity with the terminology of economics provokes the question about the relationship between public goods and common goods. Are public goods the same as common goods? Are all common goods also public goods? The questions are not as simple as at first appears: they require a complex answer. There are a number of positions that might be taken on this question. First, it might be argued that the development of the more precise categories of private and public goods from within economics has made the Greek and medieval categories of common good redundant. Consistent with this position it might be argued that the new terms can deliver all that the older categories delivered and more. This could be either because the notions of common goods are adequately translated into public goods, or because the precision of public goods makes evident the lack of content in the concept of common good. Second, it might be argued that the two concepts are so completely different, arising as they do in different disciplines and in different contexts, that there is no basis for comparing or combining them. Third, the difference might be acknowledged and clarified, while attempting some way of integrating the two. I follow the third path. My hypothesis is that there is no easy connection to be drawn between public and common goods. The reason is that these concepts belong within classifications that are constructed for different purposes and using different criteria. When sufficient care is taken to identify these different criteria and purposes then it is possible to explore areas of overlap without confusion. The different classifications belong to the fields of modern economics, on the one hand, and to Aristotelian practical philosophy (ethics and politics), on the other. My argument will be that the economist discusses goods in terms of supply and demand, costs and benefits. On the supply side, the economist is interested in the distribution of costs in producing goods,

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and on the demand side, in the distribution of benefits in using or consuming them. The category of public good (and related categories) is needed to identify a class of good in which there is asymmetry between costs and benefits and so there are difficulties in the provision of such goods. By contrast, Aristotle discusses goods without paying attention at first to what is a very modern concern with distribution of costs and benefits. Of course, he deals with questions of distribution when considering justice, but he doesn’t require this aspect when discussing goods. This approach seems strange to modern thinkers, and many spontaneously read Aristotle through a modern lens. The contrast between the two approaches makes the understanding of common goods especially difficult. I will, first of all, clarify the notion of public good and situate it in distinctively economic concerns. I will then proceed to outline an Aristotelian account of goods and common goods, building on the work of previous chapters. The emerging contrast will enable an exploration of the possible overlap. This reveals some surprising conclusions, for example, that in some circumstances private goods can be common goods. Finally, I will clarify my position by contrast with alternative attempts to integrate the different classifications, as proposed by John Haldane and Gerhard Seel.

Economic categories of the good The economist distinguishes different types of goods, private, public, collective or club, whereby the distribution of costs of production and of enjoyment or benefit is central in each case. This is completely meaningful in terms of the orientation of the economist to efficiency: maximum benefit at minimum cost. It also fits well with the recognition that there is competition for many goods. Paul A. Samuelson (1954) introduced the concept of collective consumption goods: these are goods ‘which all enjoy in common in the sense that each individual’s consumption of such a good leads to no subtractions from any other individual’s consumption of that good’. This characterization focused on the feature of nonrivalry associated with public goods; the other feature of non-excludability is that no one can be excluded from the enjoyment of the good once it is available. The latter feature, in particular, has implications for the provision of such goods: who is prepared to carry the burden of provision when many others will stand to benefit without having to share the cost. These concerns with distribution of burdens and benefits are central to the specification of public goods.

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Public goods There are two elements that go into the specification of public goods. They are goods such that once they are available no one can be excluded from enjoying them, and that the inclusion of further consumers to enjoy the good does not diminish the quantity of the good available to those already doing so. These two elements are usually labelled the criteria of ‘non-excludable’ and ‘non-rivalrous’. A street lighting system in a town is a good example. Once it has been put in place, and all streets are lit at night, it is impossible to exclude any particular individuals from the benefit. That is the idea that the good is ‘non-exclusive’. And when such a good is in place, a growth in the population will increase the number of those benefiting from the scheme, but this does not reduce the quantity of benefit available to those already included. This is the idea that the good is ‘non-rivalrous’.

Private goods Public goods, identified according to these two criteria, are contrasted with private goods. In the pure case, these are both excludable and rivalrous. A loaf of bread is a good example. If I bake some bread, it is possible to exclude others from eating it; I can eat it myself or share it with a few others. But if I do share it, the more I give to others, the less there is for me. The spectrum of goods between these two pure cases of public goods (nonexcludable, non-rivalrous) and private goods (both excludable and rivalrous) allows for a wide range of cases in which goods exhibit some public and some private aspects. Using the two criteria of excludable and rivalrous distinctions of kinds of goods can be constructed. A third category is possible with goods that are non-rivalrous but excludable. The fourth category of goods that are rivalrous but non-excludable can be labelled scarce common resources.

Club goods The phenomena of gated communities, and the effect of city zoning in creating homogeneous populations in certain areas, draw attention to the possibility of excluding people from sharing in some goods that are non-rivalrous. David Hollenbach provides an important and relevant example in his consideration of the supply of schooling in American cities. The provision of basic schooling depends on local taxes, and as those citizens who are well resourced enough to

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be both tax payers and also capable of moving away from the city centres to the suburbs do so, they effectively create exclusive clubs while leaving the remnant community deprived of the assets needed to provide adequate education (Hollenbach, 2002, p. 35). In this case, primary education has become a club good. Club goods can be created due to the availability of new technology. The development of technology has introduced the possibility of exclusion from enjoyment of what earlier was unrestrictedly accessible. The charging of a toll, or licence, now viable because of electronics, transforms public goods into club goods. A specially illuminating example is the pay-to-view system of TV broadcasting, in comparison with ‘free to air’, where broadcast signals are receivable by anyone with the equipment.

Free goods It was at one time the case that some goods were considered by economists as neither private nor public, but free goods, being naturally and abundantly available. Air, water, sunshine, precipitation, and the like, were thought to be naturally provided and so available to all equally without any cost involved in their production. There might be cost involved in exploiting them, such as pipelines to channel water. As natural free goods there was no scarcity involved, and so no possibility of a market in relation to these goods. They were nonrivalrous in the sense that their abundance precluded any competition for them. Obviously context was important: what was a free good in one context – water in Scotland – could be a scarce good and so marketable in another – water in the Sahara. Now, however, we are used to qualifying these supposedly free goods with significant adjectives. We desire not simply air, but clean air, not simply water, but safe water. The impact of human activities over a long time has left its trace on even these goods that were once thought to be abundantly available. Clean air has meant that air has shifted in some cases from being a free good to being a public good. This is because there are costs involved in ensuring the air is free from pollutants, given the kinds of activities in which people wish to engage. Putting an end to London smog was not simply the welcome byproduct of technological development (internal combustion replacing coalfired steam engines, oil-fired central heating replacing open coal fires); it also required regulation of private activity so as to eliminate the sources of pollution. Safe water has similarly been the product both of engineering and of political regulation. Its scarcity in some places has meant that there is now competition, even to the point of resource warfare, to secure access to clean water. Processes

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of desertification, the shifting of climatic zones, with their impact on agricultural potential, require us to reconsider many natural free goods and begin to view them as public goods. This is because they are becoming scarce, and there are costs involved in securing them for the future.

Market failure and regulation The shopper gathering the week’s food supply in the supermarket definitely assumes that the goods he is to pay for are private: they are rivalrous and excludable. Because the goods in the trolley can be considered private goods, the suppliers and merchants have seen their opportunity in producing them and putting them on sale. The ‘privacy’ of goods is what makes a market possible. In a more general sense, it is the legal protection of property rights that secures a market-based economy (de Soto, 2001). By contrast, because public goods are non-excludable, the market cannot be relied upon to provide them. In introducing the concept of public good, it is convenient to identify examples that are already in place and are familiar. The street lighting system is a case in point. Once it is in place, no one can be excluded from the benefit of safer welllit streets. And because this is the case, there is the temptation to ‘free-ride’. Why would anyone bear the cost of providing the system, when they can benefit from it whether or not they pay? And each additional beneficiary who joins in the consumption of an already existing scheme points out that there is no additional cost arising, since the good is non-rivalrous. Entrepreneurs in the open market have no incentive to produce and supply public goods, because they have no assurance that the ultimate consumers, who desire and indeed benefit from the goods, will actually pay once the public goods are available. Economists refer to this phenomenon as ‘market failure’, not that an existing market has failed, but that a reliance on the market to provide the good must fail. Communities have relied on other forms of cooperation in order to produce and deliver public goods. Contemporary ideological debates may lead us to think that the alternative to the market is the state, as provider of public goods. This short-circuits the analysis. The state is indeed the outcome of cooperation, but it is not the only form that cooperation may take. For instance, agricultural practices that rely on all participants doing their share in maintaining an irrigation and drainage system give us examples of traditional forms of cooperation in generating a public good where the state as we now conceive it played no role. The famous rice terraces of Banaue in the Philippines are a

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case in point. Maintenance of the terraces, the water channels, the connecting pathways is work that is not simply ascribable to individual beneficiaries, such that each works for himself alone. A collapsed terrace jeopardizes all others below it on the steep mountain slope, a blocked channel deprives many others of the flow of life-bringing water, a broken sluice allows precious water to run away. The goods in play are (practically) public, in that no participating farmer can be excluded from benefiting from the irrigation and land control systems, and no one’s benefit is at the cost of reducing the benefit accruing to others. Traditional forms of community have managed to secure public goods for themselves. But with traditional communities there is a related form of exclusion – members cannot be excluded from the benefit, but outsiders and strangers are normally excluded, apart from the norms of hospitality. The language of costs and benefits is familiar, but it is also possibly dangerous in making us think that these categories are the natural ones for considering the situation. If goods bring benefits, costs are definitely bads. Free-riders, those who want the benefits without the costs, see the costs as bads. The work involved in putting a cooperative system in place and in maintaining it also appears as a bad to someone who might wish to spend their energy and time in some other occupation. Work isn’t seen by everyone in every instance as a burden; but there are costs associated with every work, which include the opportunity costs of alternatives foregone, and the costs incurred with the need to replenish spent energy.

Public bads Just as goods fall along a spectrum from private to public, so too bads can be private or public. My toothache is definitely private. The pollution of our local water supply due to flooding or sewage spillage is very much a public bad. The excludable/non-excludable criterion translates most easily from goods to bads. Just as there are some goods that once produced are available to all, so there are some bads from the nuisance of which none affected can be protected. The rivalrous/non-rivalrous criterion could apply in the case of goods because it is in the nature of goods that they are desirable, and so rivalry is in principle possible. There is no comparable rivalry concerning bads, in the normal case. But at least the criterion can apply to bads also in the sense that the discomfort caused by a noisy neighbour is no less for those on one side because it is suffered also by those on the other side. Victims of public bads such as pollution

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cannot alleviate their bad situation by spreading it among ever larger numbers of people. It is different with financial costs: costs are rivalrous in the technical sense, because as they are more widely and evenly distributed, they are reduced for each paying individual. It is useful to distinguish burdens and costs for this reason. The financial costs of dealing with a problem may be allocated among a population such that they become private bads; but the burden in terms of the overall impact of the problem may continue to be public. Resisting the assumption prevalent in conventional cost–benefit analysis that all burdens can be translated into financial costs, the verbal distinction is retained to highlight the fact that there are dimensions of bads that are public that resist being managed as private costs. Pollution as an example highlights a particular kind of bad to which attention is increasingly drawn. Externalities are the unintended consequences of certain activities. Usually the focus is on negative, undesirable consequences, but there are positive externalities also. In the negative case, the costs or burden of the activity are not borne by the actors themselves or the intended beneficiaries of their action, but by third parties. The burdens can be large scale or minor. The purchaser of a mobile phone pays for the instrument and its use, but fellow passengers on public transport are exposed to the nuisance and irritation of onesided conversations. The proud owner of a new BMW 1200 CC motorcycle may delight in the roar of its engine, but the neighbours experience it as annoyance. The paper mill discharging effluent from its bleaching activities into the river does not see the damage done to the water channel as part of its costs. If there are burdens and costs created, they are borne by others. These are (negative) externalities. The burdens are suffered by third parties other than the producers and consumers of some goods – in these examples, mobile phones, motorbikes and paper. Similarly for positive externalities. My neighbours may each of them maintain a colourful front garden, with the result that I have the benefit of a pleasant neighbourhood. Economic estimations of well-being that fail to take account of externalities are faulted for relying only on those measures available from the trading of goods and services and neglecting the considerable burdens of negative externalities that fall mostly on people other than the direct consumers of the goods in question. Insurance schemes attempt to anticipate some kinds of externalities, such as the accidental road injuries and deaths resulting from increased traffic. Such schemes illustrate the distinction between costs and burdens; while victims of accidents may be glad of compensation, they are left with the burden of loss.

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Commons The terms ‘commons’ labels the commonly available resources that are shared by many users. It is useful also to name those goods formerly considered free goods because of their abundance and non-rivalrous nature, but which are increasingly considered as a vulnerable resource, the protection of which entails costs. ‘The tragedy of the commons’ exposes the way in which a common resource can be depleted due to overuse. The tragedy arises because the rational calculations that a beneficiary of the commons applies to his or her own behaviour can lead to the destruction of the resource, since the calculations of a single individual are reproduced throughout the population. At one point, the cod of the North Atlantic were a free good, available for the taking by anyone who could get to them. Then, due to over-fishing the stocks were depleted and in danger of extinction. The need for control was and is recognized by many, but the individual skipper calculates in terms of his own limited perspective: if no one else respects the controls, then his abiding by the regulations won’t make any difference; and if everybody else does refrain from fishing, then his fishing will not make much impact on the stocks. His calculation leads him to conclude that no matter what all other fishermen do, he does best by continuing to fish. All participants calculating like this leads to the inevitable outcome: the cod stocks are destroyed. The model of rationality relied upon in the analysis of the Prisoners’ Dilemma and the Tragedy of the Commons is that identified by Searle as the Classical Model, discussed in Chapter 2 (Searle, 2001). Action is thought to be motivated by desires or passions, and reason has an instrumental calculative role, in directing how action can satisfy the relevant desires. As Searle has noted, this classical model excludes the possibility of desire-independent reason for action. The individual skipper can only consult his own desires, and these alone will not motivate him not to fish. Apart from legal sanctions effectively enforced, there is little hope for the protection of the commons, in this case the fish stocks. The temptation to free-ride (actually, according to the analysis of the tragedy of the commons, the individually rational requirement to free-ride) highlights the similarity to public goods in general. Commons are non-excludable goods, and appear to be non-rivalrous. However, at the limit, as the extent of exploitation endangers the common resource they become rivalrous. In such cases, naturally provided common resources become public goods, because there are costs arising in protecting and securing them, on which some beneficiaries can be tempted to free-ride.

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Externalities and private goods With any good that could qualify as private, further questions about the manner of its production and delivery can enquire whether others have had to bear some burden due to externalities for which they have not been compensated. Many mobile phone users are surprised to learn that their ‘private’ enjoyment of their equipment might be linked in a causal way to the wars that continue to disrupt life in Eastern Congo and Rwanda. The control of the mining for coltan, an essential element in the chips built into the phones, gives warlords in the area an access to wealth and power, absent viable states. Campaigners make us aware of the conditions under which the cotton used in cheap clothing is being produced. The impact on the natural environment (depletion of Russian lakes because cotton is a water-hungry crop) and on human persons and communities reveals externalities that are not paid for through the pricing of the eventual goods that arrive in London high-street stores. These illustrate the complex ways in which third parties may have been implicated in the costs and burdens involved in the production of private goods. But even if there were nothing objectionable in the production and supply of private goods, there is a further externality associated with their use and consumption. At its most extreme form in so-called conspicuous consumption, the enjoyment of private goods by some signals to others how much they lack. Analysts highlight the significance of relative poverty, which leads many, who may otherwise have sufficient means for survival, to regard themselves as poor because lacking what other so evidently enjoy (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010).

What determines whether a good is public? At first sight it seems to be the case that it is the nature of a good that determines whether or not it is a public good. The kinds of things we now call utilities often appeared as natural candidates for public goods. A defence system, a security and justice system, water supply, transport, communications, the physical infrastructure of roads, bridges, dams and harbours have all lent themselves as instances of public goods. Any product of a cooperative effort that invites free-riding can appear as a public good. A defence system that relies on a volunteer militia can find that the individual can be distracted by private business, as George Washington found when his militia army evaporated at

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planting and harvest time (Ellis, 2005). Rousseau bemoaned the lack of civic spirit revealed when citizens preferred to pay others to do their share rather than do it themselves, whether it be defence, street cleaning or participation in town council meetings (Rousseau, 1994). The willingness to pay instead of directly serving shocked him. Free-riding would horrify him even more: the attempt to benefit from the cooperative venture without having to contribute to its costs. There are good reasons why a community would treat some good as a public good and undertake to provide it in some manner independent of the market, given the failure of the market to ensure its provision. The main reasons are linked to the problems of holdout, networking and coordination (Epstein, 1998). The emergence of a market in some good might be blocked by the efforts of some group or individual to exploit their privileged position such as control of a necessary resource. A convenient ferry service to an island where there is not enough potential business to attract a market competitor, for instance, might be hindered by the single boat owner who monopolizes the berth in the harbour. To overcome this block caused by holdout, the public authorities could decide to provide a ferry with a guarantee of convenient service, balanced by the exclusive licence to operate on the route. The networking problem is similar. The costs involved in constructing a railway system, for instance, might deter commercial investors who can have little hope of recouping their investment in the medium term. Especially where only lucrative connections attract investment, the public authorities can see the benefit of ensuring a more comprehensive network that delivers service to the population, and not only in cases where it is commercially rewarding. The inefficiencies involved in having competing networks offering services highlight the problem of coordination, for which the solution can be to create a public good. Where one is created, there is effectively a coerced exchange, in the sense that consumers wishing to enjoy the service are coerced to buy it from the providers and to pay for it at the price set by them. The issue of what goods should be provided as public goods has become focused since the emergence of economics as a discipline devoted to articulating the rationality of economic action. As with the example of the rice terraces in the Philippine Cordilleras, our societies have inherited forms of cooperation and their benefits that constitute public goods. Though adopted in modern forms of state administration, they did not originate through state initiative (Cavanaugh, 2005). The systems of education, social welfare and healthcare, for instance, grew out of structures that emerged within civil society. They were

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in many cases started by people who experienced a responsibility to care for others and to provide what was needed for communal well-being. Not seldom in Europe, the sense of responsibility was linked to a religious faith, in which people felt a call to love their neighbour, and to minister in charity to those in need of whatever kind. Institutions to care for the ill and dying, to provide for the destitute, or to educate children, were founded and maintained by church bodies and organizations, and the funding did not depend on the beneficiaries paying piecemeal for the services rendered. The costs were borne through charity, patronage and the commitment of volunteers (often vowed religious men and women). At their origins, the free-rider problem did not appear as such, since in many cases free-riding was precisely the method by which beneficiaries were invited to avail of the services. The shift from charitable provision of the goods of education and healthcare to their public provision by state authorities led also to a shift in the funding of the service, from charity to revenues raised by the exchequer through taxation. These areas of cooperation show how political communities can be faced with a serious question whether it is better to allow for the provision of these benefits through a market system or through the public purse (Wolff, 2011, pp. 185–9). The recent experience in the United States is a case in point. Private healthcare and private education coexist with state provision in some countries. As in other areas of cooperation, it is no longer taken for granted that certain goods have to be public goods. The development of technology, for instance, makes it possible to bypass the traditional reasons for coerced exchanges. The networking problem, which in the past required support for a monopoly providing a public good, is bypassed, to some extent at least, by electronic technology, which makes it possible for there to be a number of providers relying on the same network but charging their own customers according to different pricing schedules. Technology makes it possible to impose tolls on roads, bridges and even city centres (e.g. London’s congestion charge) without the disadvantage of inefficient gating. Similarly, radio and television signals need no longer be seen as public goods from which no one can be excluded, because the technology ensures a filtering mechanism admitting only those who have paid. What were once treated as public goods no longer are such, and exhibit elements of private goods. It is not simply the nature of the good in question that determines its status, but also the additional factors of what the technology makes possible, and what the political community ambitions. This means that over time the way in which a particular good is treated in a given community can change, from being a public good to a private one, or vice versa. Attempts to privatize elements

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of the railways, public transport, telecommunications and water supply provide examples of such change.

Global public goods: Commons, natural and produced; global conditions The commons discussed earlier, which can be viewed as public goods when they are no longer free but acquire costs associated with their protection, are now typically global. A convenient classification produced under the auspices of the United Nations distinguishes different kinds of global public goods (Kaul et al., 1999). Natural global commons are typically our shared physical environment that transcends political boundaries. The shared physical space with its resources of water, air, biodiversity and climate, to the extent that it is non-excludable and non-rivalrous, is a public good. On the negative side, its contamination with radiation, pollutants and carbon saturation is a global public bad, since none can be protected from the harm. However, to the extent that its enjoyment is rivalrous, the physical environment is a global commons, since the depletion by some leaves less for others. There are also humanly produced global goods, which, by analogy with the physical space, constitute the shared social space. An example is the World Wide Web facilitating global communication and related telecommunications infrastructure. Perhaps a more important example is the international human rights regime, with its elements of regional conventions, and non-governmental organizations dedicated to monitoring the non-observance of human rights. A third example of a global public good is named global human-made conditions. Unlike the other two, which can be considered as ‘stock’ goods, this kind is specified as flow ‘goods’. The idea behind this term is that conditions can change quite quickly and so the emphasis is on the dynamic dimension rather than the static dimension of a state of affairs. A healthcare system can include hospitals and points of delivery with qualified personnel. This is an example of stock, put in place. But where the healthcare system has to cope with an epidemic, or a sudden catastrophe, these aspects appear more like flow. At the global level, the human-made conditions include the state of international relations at any point, whether peace prevails or wars or conflicts dominate relationships. The world economic situation is also a commons in this sense, because the markets for credit are global, and the tensions between openness to trade on the one hand and protectionism on the other exhibit the dynamics of ebb and flood.

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Summary So far the exploration of public goods has sought a classification and analysis of these goods. What they have in common is that the market cannot be relied upon to provide these public goods, and where a market of some kind becomes possible, then the good in question is no longer purely public. What the market achieves is the allocation of costs in such a way that those who bear the costs can expect proportionate compensation. Without a market, the provision of public goods depends on some cooperative arrangement between those who have an interest in the provision of the good. This is formulated very generally at this point, because formal public authorities in the manner familiar to us from modern states are not the only possibility. By analogy with the case of local public goods that require intervention from some public authority to ensure the goods will be provided and the costs of doing so met in some way other than through the open market, the fact of global public goods provokes the question as to possibility or desirability of a corresponding appropriate global public authority. The authorities that exist to date are those formed by voluntary cooperation between states in maintaining the UN and the Breton Woods institutions, along with subsequent organizations such as the WTO. Perhaps these cooperative forms are to be understood more along the lines of the traditional communal management rather than by analogy with centralized governmental authority backed up by coercive sanction. This summary non-technical discussion of the economic categories of public and private goods should suffice to clarify the relationships between public and common goods. In the following, I draw on Aristotle to understand common goods, and at the same time to explain their relationship to public goods.

Types of common goods Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition provide the background to the political philosophical concept of common goods. As noted in Chapter 1, Aristotle understands goods as ends of action: all action is for the sake of some good (The Politics, Bk I, chap. 1). Aristotle’s category of the good is much broader than the objective of agents’ deliberate action. It is metaphysical and embraces all action, including, for instance, vegetative growth and animal spatial movement. This too is action towards an end, which meets his definition of good as that towards which action is directed. The fulfilment or completion of any thing is its

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good, and things strive towards this completion as their end. As a result, there is an ambiguity, an analogical complexity in Aristotle’s notion of the good. It can mean both the deliberately chosen objective of purposive action, and it can mean the completion or fulfilment of an entity in a developmental process. The same ambiguity carries over into talk of common goods. It makes sense to focus on purposive action, since this provides the analogue for speaking of the good of completion. Common action, cooperation, is for the sake of some good in common. Aristotle makes the jump from the local forms of cooperation (households, athletic clubs, religious societies) to the highest form of cooperation (the polis), and as we saw in Chapter 3 he thinks that the good of the highest form of common action will be the highest good. He concentrates on the fact that people cooperate for the sake of some good, but he does not immediately consider questions of distribution. How the good is distributed among the cooperating parties, how the burdens and costs of cooperation are allocated among them, how the good is enjoyed and in what proportions, these might all be relevant questions with regard to some instances of cooperation for the good. Aristotle does not raise them straight away when reflecting on common goods. I presume he would want to say that the answers to various questions will vary, depending on circumstances, the good in question, and hence the nature of the cooperation. For instance, one case of cooperation might be a student with a tutor preparing for examination for a degree. The good of their cooperation might be labelled as ‘learning outcomes’, ‘knowledge’ in some field of study, or ‘truth’, or ‘transferable skill’. In this case, the beneficiary of the cooperation is primarily the student who is to grow in knowledge, skill or mastery. Their cooperation is for a common good, but the enjoyment of that good is predominantly on one side of the partnership. Aristotle relegates the questions of distribution to his discussion of justice (Nicomachean Ethics, Bk V). Distribution as such does not enter into his clarification of common goods, beyond noting that different goods are pursued in different instances of cooperation or community. So, for instance, for Aristotle the various questions that might be asked of people who cooperate in a joint project are distinguishable. His fundamental question would be: ‘What is the point of your collaboration, what good are you pursuing?’ Other possible questions, such as ‘Who will benefit in the enjoyment of that good and in what proportions?’ or ‘Who bears the cost and makes the effort and in what proportions?’ will not engage him immediately. Aristotle does not ignore the second and third

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questions, as is evident from his discussion of oligarchy, for instance, where he points to issues of distribution of outputs in proportion to inputs (The Politics, Bk III c. 9). And his discussion of eudaimonia in the Ethics underlines the distinction between the good pursued and the satisfaction enjoyed by the agent in successful achievement (Ethics, Bk I, c. v). So the question about the good, which is the purpose of cooperation, is distinguishable from the questions of distribution of costs and benefits. According to Aristotle, the primary sense of the term is to indicate the good for the sake of which people cooperate; and since people cooperate for many different purposes, there are many different goods in common corresponding to the different instances and various forms of cooperation (Riordan, 2008). Accordingly, the concept of the common good is used analogously. As an initial classification, which will be expanded in a later discussion, we can note the following possibilities for the goods that are the ends of cooperation: a specific good; a means to a good, and a system for delivering goods. a. People can cooperate to achieve an identifiable concrete good. It is not difficult to identify examples. For instance, we cooperate in arranging and enjoying a dinner party, in holding a game of tennis, in building a house, in drafting a piece of legislation. As noted in Chapter 1, about any of these goods and their corresponding activities we could ask why the good in question is worth pursuing, and in the answers we would attempt to show how each of them realizes some value. But for the sake of the classification and relevant distinctions, I focus on the example of parents seeking a school place for their child. b. Sometimes the good in common is a means to some desired goal. On occasion, deliberate action must be undertaken to put means and conditions in place for the pursuit of concrete goods. In the recent British context, parents in localities in which there is a noticeable shortage of school places have begun to collaborate to establish and build schools, so that their children will have convenient access to school places. c. The relevant common good can be a system. The present (2014) British education secretary Michael Gove has made it part of his government’s policy to facilitate such initiatives of parents’ groups and local communities, and has established the necessary legal framework.

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The government and its supporters, along with officials and administrators, collaborate in developing and administering the relevant education system. Such a system is a set of conditions for the regular and constant provision of those concrete goods for which parents collaborate: school places for their children. As examples, these are necessarily complex since the very idea of a ‘school place’ presupposes many institutional arrangements that have their histories and their rationale. It is not just a matter of a seat behind a desk in a classroom: there have to be teachers, and curricula, and relevant bodies for supervision and certification. This complexity will be considered further in the next chapter. Here the example of the threefold classification of goal, condition and system of conditions is sufficiently elaborated to serve in distinguishing public goods from common goods. A school place for Johnny for the years when he can benefit from primarylevel education is a private good, both excludable and rivalrous, as is noticeable in those areas in which schools are oversubscribed. If the last remaining place goes to Johnny as the one heading the waiting list, then the others on the list are excluded from that place; and Johnny getting it entails that others do not. Johnny’s parents collaborate to get the school place for him: although it is correctly seen as a private good in terms of the public–private distinction, it is a common good of the parents’ collaboration. What about the school built on the initiative of the local parents’ organization: is it a private good or a public good? In terms of that classification, it is likely to be a club good, with possibilities of excluding some (e.g. those from another locality), but non-rivalrous, at least up to the point of capacity. The creation of a new school suggests many new places to be filled, so that the addition of children to fill class sizes is not at the expense of those already enrolled. The system put in place by legislation tends towards being a public good since it provides possibilities in principle for any local group to take advantage of the opportunity of creating their own school. The arbitrary exclusion of any such partnership from participation in the scheme would raise questions about its just application. The danger of newly created schools undermining the intake or the status of already existing schools suggests the possibility that the system tends to being a public bad. This is the concern of those who oppose the policy, fearing that its consequences will be detrimental to the welfare of existing schools by drawing away resources and pupils. That the goods at stake – the school place, the school, and the relevant education system – are indeed worthwhile goods can be, and are, debated. Their

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intelligibility will emerge and find formulation in relevant values. All of this is consistent with the Aristotelian approach to the good, which considers why people act, and why they cooperate, without necessarily asking about the distribution of the burdens and costs, or considering how the enjoyment of the achieved good is distributed. Concerns about those distributions of costs and benefits are essential to the categories of public and private, club goods and scarce resources. Hence the languages of common goods and public goods are different, because located in different disciplines with different practical concerns. But they are not mutually exclusive languages. One consequence of this clarification of the distinction between common and public goods is that it is possible in an Aristotelian sense to speak about private goods as common goods, while it could not be meaningful to do so in an economic sense. So, for instance, the parents in our earlier example have the common good of school places for their children, in each case a private good. Similarly, collaborators in a housing association have as their common good the point of their associating, the provision of a home (a private good) for each participant. And they could also have as one of their common goods the provision of street lighting (a public good) in the housing estate. The political campaign to create the relevant regulatory framework for establishing free schools is a collaboration which has as its common good the establishment of a public good as a set of conditions to facilitate the pursuit and achievement of club and private goods. The two sets of terms of public goods, and of common goods, are generated in different contexts.

Alternative approaches to the distinctions This way of seeing talk of common goods and public goods as arising from different contexts and disciplines offers a way of relating them that is in contrast to the sets of distinctions suggested by Gerhard Seel or John Haldane. Gerhard Seel notes that goods can be distinguished according to different criteria. While he also notes the different concerns of the disciplines of economics and philosophy, he doesn’t try to keep separate their concepts of goods. As a result, public goods and common goods on his account are within the same classification. This follows from the manner in which he specifies the criteria guiding the distinctions. For the idea of public goods as introduced earlier he identifies the ‘use criterion’. This invokes the idea of ‘excludability’ as discussed earlier, following Samuelson (1954). Economists are said to ask ‘whether the

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consumption of a good by one person precludes its consumption by another person. If this is the case the good is a personal good; if not it is a common good’ (Seel, 2013, p. 29). Application of the use-criterion on its own does not allow for a distinction between public and common goods. For that further distinction, Seel invokes the relevant source of the exclusion: ‘I distinguish personal and common goods when the exclusion is natural and I use the terms “private” and “public” when the exclusion is a consequence of the law’ (2013, p. 30). The alternative criterion for identifying common goods is labelled the ‘preference criterion’. This adverts to the valuing of actors and sets a high bar for any good to be acknowledged as a common good. ‘Accordingly one can define the common good as the state of affairs that is pursued by every member of a given community, or more precisely: “x is the common good of community y if and only if every member of y prefers the realisation of x to its non-realisation”’ (Seel, 2013, p. 29). In the light of the earlier discussion, which did not make it a condition for anything being a common good that it should be recognized as such and pursued, in fact, by every participant in the collaboration, this criterion would set a high condition for the existence of common goods. Seel suggests alternative versions, which are less demanding. A comparative version, ‘the more people prefer the realization of an entity to its non-realisation, the more this entity counts as a common good’, requires a tendency rather than an achievement (Seel, 2013, p. 29). And a deontological preference criterion is also proposed: ‘An entity is a common good for a given society if all members of the society have the moral obligation to prefer it’ (Seel, 2013, p. 40). As discussed in a previous chapter, this deontic version uses the existence of an obligation to specify the goods that qualify as common goods. A combination of the use criterion and the deontic preference criterion enables him to identify the common good of a political community, and specifically the European Union. The use criterion allows the identification of the democratic and juridical institutions as qualifying as not exclusive and non-rivalrous, and the invocation of the deontic preference criterion allows him to prescribe that such institutions ought to be preferred and promoted by all whose lives are affected by them. In contrast with the distinctions I have drawn herein, it is evident that Seel abandons the Aristotelian horizon of practical reasoning, first by allowing the specification of common goods and not just public goods by the use criterion, and second by his submission to the traps of the preference criterion. The impossibility of the universal recognition specified by the original version, namely that all prefer the good in question, led

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to its modification in forms that deprived the notion of common good of its content, the comparative version sacrificing the element of ‘common’, and the deontic version sacrificing the priority of the good. I suggest that it is more in keeping with Aristotle’s approach to distinguish public and common goods as I have done, and also that this way of distinguishing allows for complementarity without confusion of the different disciplines and their respective concerns. The other possible classification suggesting a different distinction between public and common goods is proposed by John Haldane (2004, p. 141). He situates common goods alongside individual goods, collective goods, private goods and public goods. The additional categories here beyond those discussed earlier include individual or personal goods, and collective goods. Personal goods are enjoyed by individuals whose enjoyment is not conditional on others’ enjoyment, such as the sense of relief following dental treatment. But the ten o’clock dental appointment is a private good, since the dentist’s attention reserved for me is not available to anyone else. Collective goods are aggregates, as for instance the measure of a country’s wealth in terms of national product. Haldane proposes that common goods are goods that are only available to members of groups, and he gives the example of ‘the happy mood at a social gathering’. He wants to distinguish these from the private goods (my income), individual or personal goods (my sense of achievement), collective goods (the positive financial balance of my employer’s corporation) and public goods (the infrastructure that allows my corporation to function), which might also be the outcome of forms of collaboration. Cooperation for common goods, in his view, ‘. . . is a form of group activity through which bonds of community are strengthened and by which goods may be secured for members of society that logically could not be available for them as individuals. These latter benefits are what, strictly speaking, constitute “common good”’ (Haldane, 2004, p. 141). Haldane’s discussion is part of his treatment of natural law, and he emphasizes the social nature of the human which is a significant element in the natural law tradition. That membership of a community is of itself a good for persons is emphasized, not merely because collaboration allows people to achieve more with others than they could achieve alone. Social relations are constitutive of a person’s well-being and are not simply instrumental. Hence, the distinctive idea emphasized by Haldane of common goods that are only enjoyable by members of groups.

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Since Haldane’s classification is peripheral to another discussion I use it merely to clarify the position I am taking. Given the preponderance of the economic categories it might be tempting to opt for this proposal of a meaning for common good that allows it a distinctive place alongside private, public and collective goods. Then there would be no difficulty in clarifying the relationship of public goods and common goods. The goods of group membership only available to and enjoyable by members of relevant groups would be a distinctive category. It would be distinguishable also from club goods (excludable, nonrivalrous) since these are goods that might be enjoyed by individuals. Of course, the distinctions are not to be so sharply drawn that there is no overlap between categories, or no fluidity in the boundaries. How tightly is the notion of group to be drawn? Does it include only intentional groups, in which the members identify themselves as belonging to the group, or can it include the populations of states, no matter how pluralist they are in their demographic makeup? Can humanity be a group in the relevant sense? It is evident that Haldane’s discussion provides another interesting case of a common good, not already included in my classification, naming the benefits accruing to members of groups from their group activity but not accessible to individuals as such. Accordingly, my classification must be adjusted to accommodate it. However, I would not agree to a constriction of the range of common goods to this one category. There is an advantage in maintaining the Aristotelian breadth in considering the full range of goods for the sake of which people potentially or actually cooperate. The advantage is that it holds open the context of practical rationality and protects it from the dangers of reductionism and constraint that arise when the experiences and categories of one particular area of life or science are used to interpret the whole of life. The danger is particularly evident in the case of economic perspectives on goods, when the assumptions relied upon in economics are transposed into the interpretation of goods in all of life. Then the allocation of costs and benefits is primary, burdens merge into costs, and everything appears to have its price.

Conclusion Chapter 1 explored the nature of good and value, and Chapter 2 looked at the relationship between the good and obligation as preparatory to a consideration of common goods. Chapter 3 followed the denial that there could be a global common good in the form of a supreme or complete good, and explored what

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the good of a complex multi-layered and multi-dimensional organization might look like. In this chapter, the economic categories of goods, public, private, commons and club were differentiated from the categories of the common good, and their inter-connections were explored. These initial chapters are laying out the groundwork for a consideration of global common goods. More preparatory work is required in mapping the complexity of the topic of common good, and that is addressed in the next two chapters with a particular focus on the dimension of meaning.

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5

Shared Meaning as a Common Good

In the previous chapter I considered some types of goods that might be the common goods of cooperation, from concrete goals, to conditions and means, to systems of such conditions. The focus then was to clarify the differences and possible relations between common goods and public goods. In this chapter I want to take further the exploration of the complexity of the concept of common good and attempt to map the many different ways in which something can be a common good, and correspondingly, the many different forms that cooperation for goods in common can take. In particular, it will be necessary to expand the listing of forms of common good to include dimensions of shared meaning. We noted already in the previous chapter how the examples of a school place for a child, a newly constructed school and an amended regulatory system relied on many presuppositions about what is required for the education and formation of children in a complex modern society. We might use the term value in this context to refer to the intelligibility of the goods pursued, the answers to the questions of why a school place is worth having, and why a regulated educational system with relevant institutions is worth striving for. As noted in the first chapter, value does not so much evoke the sense of things being valued by the persons who value them, but much more the reasons why those things are deemed worth pursuing. Even where there is disagreement about the goodness of proposed policies, as for instance the recent British government’s policy on new forms of schools independent of local government control such as academies and free schools, the debate proceeds on the basis of many presuppositions about education, regulation and the role of government and civil society bodies. Not all of these presuppositions will be shared by the participants in the debate, but if none is shared, then the debate can hardly proceed. Debate must shift to a consideration of fundamental goods when it turns out that agreement on presuppositions is

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only verbal. All might be prepared to say that they want education for their children, but some will mean by that the achievement of levels of certification that will provide access to labour markets, while others will mean by it the development of the children in all their aspects as physical, intellectual, cultural and spiritual beings. This contrast underlines the importance of meaning as constitutive of the goods we share and pursue. In an expansion of the short list of types of common good listed in the previous chapter, I attempt to include the dimensions of shared meaning in the many facets and aspects of common goods of cooperation. In the consideration of public goods and their relation to common goods in the last chapter, the role of meaning emerged at a number of points, as for instance in the policy issues arising when some goods of cooperation are made to be club goods instead of public goods, or in the global context in the consideration of human-made global commons of the international human rights regime, or the collaboration for the care of health worldwide. The understandings and evaluations shared by the collaborators condition what can be achieved in their collaboration, and so the role of meaning in common goods deserves attention. This will also serve to illustrate how attention to the meaning itself can make it the focus of collaboration, and hence in its own right a common good. Charles Taylor is an ally in this undertaking. He has sought to recover the common good from reduction to economic categories. Taylor (1995a) asks whether there are intrinsic social goods, or do common goods ultimately reduce to individual and private goods? Taylor challenges the assumption that social welfare is an aggregate of the utilities enjoyed by individuals, and to counter this atomism he distinguishes different kinds of shared goods. He wants to show that there are some such goods that are irreducible to private goods. It is noticeable that the examples he points to are grounded in shared meaning. He identifies two kinds of irreducibly social goods. On the one hand, there are the goods of a shared culture that make possible the feelings, decisions and actions of individuals. On the other hand, there are goods that essentially incorporate shared understandings of their value. Language is an example of the former. For any speaker attempting to express herself, the language is a shared resource that makes such expression possible for her. Taylor points out that it is impossible to give an atomist account of language as a good. Similarly, culture, understood as the background of practices, institutions and understandings that makes social action possible, is irreducibly social. For the second type of irreducibly social good, he points to the shared understanding and reciprocal acknowledgement involved in certain qualities of relationships such as friendships, and just

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relationships as citizens under the rule of law. This adds another aspect to the consideration of the rule of law as a common good, as suggested in Chapter 2. The examples for both kinds of irreducibly social goods are drawn from dimensions of meaning. A shared language, a shared culture, shared expectations and reciprocal acknowledgement in the context of relationships, all belong to the realm of the symbolic. This is not surprising, since the Aristotelian tradition has always considered intellectual goods as essentially common (McCabe, 2005, pp. 36–7). This is critical for Aristotle’s understanding of political community, as grounded in a shared view of what is good or bad, right or wrong, just or unjust, lawful or unlawful (Politics, Bk I, chap. 2). In a subsequent essay, Taylor introduced another aspect that draws on the shared meanings constitutive of social life. He coined the expression ‘social imaginary’ to designate the ‘the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (Taylor, 2004, p. 23). The moral order invoked by this set of images and assumptions embraces the market economy, civil society and forms of government answerable to the governed. This is a convenient expression for the shared meaning that sustains a population’s common life. Taylor’s examples select dimensions of meaning as examples of intrinsically social goods, but this should not be read as confining all common goods to spiritual or symbolic domains. The primary sense of the term, following Aristotle, is to indicate the good for the sake of which people cooperate; and since people cooperate for many different purposes, there are many different goods in common corresponding to the different instances and various forms of cooperation. A ‘good’ for Aristotle is what can be the object or end of action, not necessarily what must be pursued on any particular occasion. One can recognize the worthiness of many goals and objects, without being obliged to pursue any of them. To identify a good, or a possible good in common, is not to issue a precept or imperative that since it is good, it must be pursued. Accordingly, the concept of ‘common good’ is used analogously. Allowing for the fact that the goods of cooperation rely on shared meanings, what are the relevant meanings for cooperation at international or global scales? How much can be presupposed as already shared, and how much must those concerned about cooperation focus on the construction of shared meaning as the prerequisite step towards building cooperation at the global scale? There is also the possibility that they may have to dismantle some established conventions

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that prevent or at least hinder the emergence of global cooperation. But before moving on to those discussions, it is important to complete the groundwork of analysis of forms of cooperation and their common goods.

Categories of common goods Without claiming to be exhaustive, the following is a list of possible meanings for the common good of cooperation. We have already identified the first three. a. People can cooperate to achieve an identifiable concrete good, realizing some value, pursued as the objective of cooperation. Examples are a school place for a child, a game of tennis, a meal, a house, a piece of legislation. b. Sometimes the good in common is a means or condition for the attainment of some desired goal. On occasion, deliberate action must be undertaken to put means and conditions in place for the pursuit of concrete goods. So we build a school, a tennis court, cultivate a garden, master the skills of legal drafting. c. Sets of such conditions appear as systems, and so we require cooperation to put in place and maintain in good working order the education system, the healthcare system, the security and justice systems. In other words, the system in its own right can be a common good of action to create and sustain it. To call a system a common good is not to remove it from critique. Precisely as a good, deemed worthwhile by those who create and maintain the system, it is subject to review and re-evaluation and reform. d. People who cooperate in constructing and operating any such complex system, a justice system, for instance, face difficult questions on which they have to take a position. What is the purpose of the law? How to determine the dividing line between issues of criminal law and issues of civil law? What is the point of punishment? How much discretion should be left to judges? Is indeterminate sentencing ever warranted? What rights, if any, are those punished assumed to forfeit, for instance, the right to vote? Any complex system will exhibit such series of questions, and it is part of the common good of those cooperating in maintaining the systems that there be a memory and mastery of the decisions arrived at, skilled professionals to deal with further questions, educators and researchers to initiate recruits into the relevant competencies and to develop the body of skills available. A brief overview of the table of contents of any textbook in jurisprudence or

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philosophy of law quickly confirms the range of knowledge and competence that belongs among the common good of co-operators in a legal system. It is part of the common good of a law-governed society to have a body of competent professionals, and accordingly, to have the means of training them, resourcing them and facilitating their functioning. To be noted here is that the common good so understood can include persons, the network of their relationships, and their competencies. e. Skilled professionals usually have to function in conflicted contexts. There are disagreements and disputes about the various courses of action open to them. Pedagogies, therapies, remuneration schemes, family support policies, child care, bank rescue measures, penal policies, are all disputed territories. It is also part of the common good of the relevant community that there be such dispute, and even conflict, so that questions are raised and clarified and experience can be gathered to determine the good, better or best options. It is not entailed by the notion of common good that the parties in cooperation already know in advance what their common good consists of in every detail. They only know that the outcome of the dispute, were it to be fully satisfactory, would be their common good. Commentators frequently presume from reference to common goods of co-operators that it must be something known by them already, but this is not necessarily the case. It is possible to use the term in a heuristic way, naming something yet to be discovered or constructed. The concept of ‘heuristic’ is borrowed from Bernard Lonergan’s Insight (1957, p. 36). Heuristic has to do with the process of discovery, and a heuristic term serves a purpose in an investigative process. I apply the notion of heuristic to the concept of the common good in A Grammar of the Common Good (2008). f. Some kinds of goods listed herein for the sake of which we cooperate are relatively specific and identifiable. Sometimes, to make sense of our cooperation, we have to rely on a vaguer and more aspirational language. What is the purpose of our educational system? What is the goal of the healthcare system, law courts and penal system? To answer these questions we rely on shorthand formulations of our values. As noted in Chapter 1, these express both the intelligibility of the goods we pursue and the quality of the pursuit we wish to achieve. And so we typically speak of these values such as love, truth, life, justice, harmony, peace and friendship to identify our ultimate purposes. A good example of this is presented by Samuel Scheffler who disputes the tendency in recent debates about equality to treat it as a matter of distributive justice (2003). Against the inclination of

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so-called Luck Egalitarians to treat equality this way Scheffler insists that the term is used in political discourse primarily to invoke a vision of an ideal. He endorses Elizabeth Anderson’s (1999) insistence that equality is ‘opposed not to luck but to oppression, to heritable hierarchies of social status, to ideas of caste, to class privilege and the rigid stratification of classes, and to the undemocratic distribution of power’ (Scheffler, 2003, p. 22). As such, equality relies on visionary language articulating moral, social and political ideals. The moral ideal insists ‘that all people are of equal worth and that there are some claims that people are entitled to make on one another simply by virtue of their status as persons’ (Scheffler, 2003, p. 22). The social ideal takes this further to consider society ‘as a cooperative arrangement among equals, each of whom enjoys the same social standing’ (Scheffler, 2003, p. 22). And equality as a political ideal ‘highlights the claims that citizens are entitled to make on one another by virtue of their status as citizens, without any need for a moralized accounting of the details of their particular circumstances’ (Scheffler, 2003, p. 22). He does not deny that the visionary language can have distributive implications, but these are unlikely to be very general, being bounded by many conditions. Other values and aspirational visions may be explored in a similar way. While we can distinguish the different values such as equality and liberty, we usually do not want to separate them, so we bundle them together and evoke a coherent vision of the kind of existence we aspire to. In doing so, we use terms at a further level of abstraction, such as happiness, well-being, public welfare, more or less as equivalent to what Aristotle labelled the good life, the point of politics. When the common good is used to name this objective of our cooperation, then it is evidently a heuristic term. It labels something to which we aspire, but which we have not yet achieved. It remains to be discovered, even as it is being constructed. This is all the more relevant when there is conflict about policies to be implemented. We speak of a common good in terms such as justice, or welfare, or freedom for all, as naming an objective of our search, even as we dispute the appropriate policy for bringing it about. g. Participation in political community is a very particular case of cooperation, and it has its appropriate common good. As discussed in Chapter 3, Aristotle thought that this would be the highest possible good, which he understood as the good life, the life of excellence in the performance of distinctively human actions, noble actions. I leave to one side the debate about how Aristotle’s description of the good life is to be understood,

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whether as exclusively the intellectual life of contemplation of ultimate causes, or as an amalgam of intellectual and practical excellences (Kraut, 2007; Ackrill, 1980; Salkever, 1990; Richardson Lear, 2004). Most today would agree that Aristotle was too optimistic, or idealistic, about the nature of political community. This scepticism about the possibilities for political community emerged very soon as Aristotle’s ideas were received in a Christian worldview. Especially under the influence of Augustine (1972), the idea that the political community was the highest form of cooperation pursuing the highest good was challenged and clarified as follows. The polis is not the highest form of cooperation to which corresponds the highest good; the instruments of political domination available to humankind are unable to make people good or excellent, as Aristotle had expected the polis to do for its citizens; consequently, the goods in common available to political community in history are not the highest goods (Markus, 1970). This Augustinian realism has replaced previous exaggerated religious idealism in the declared attitude of the Catholic Church to politics and the secular. John Rawls, in an important late essay ‘Public Reason Revisited’, acknowledges the development in the Catholic Church’s attitude to politics. He refers to the achievements of the Second Vatican Council in elaborating an ‘ethical doctrine of religious freedom resting on the dignity of the human person; a political doctrine with respect to the limits of government in religious matters; and a theological doctrine of the freedom of the Church in its relations to the political and social world’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 166, n.75). The doctrine to which he refers does not expect that the political community in pursuit of its own common good would have to acknowledge a religious vision of the good life as higher or more ultimate. Accordingly, the Second Vatican Council, in its treatment of the common good, was content to emphasize the conditions facilitating human fulfilment, both individual and social, without insisting on its vision of human fulfilment. In other words, the notion of common good relied upon corresponds to the senses (b), (c) and (d) summarized in this list. h. As a result of this clarification, it is no longer assumed that to consider the common good of a political community, whether that of a national state or that of a union of states such as the European Union, or indeed of the global community of states, is to seek the highest good. Accordingly, it is necessary to distinguish two different questions, one that asks whether there is a universal common good as a good for all humanity, and another that asks if there is an appropriate common good of national, international

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and global communities. The European Union is a particular instance of cooperation among a growing number of states. It is a complex instance of a system of systems, and, as in the cases considered in this list, its common good is disputed. That is, the good in common for the sake of which the member states cooperate, might be spoken of in the kind of abstract terms that conceal real disagreements and real conflicts. Freedom, well-being, welfare support, participation, peace and security are the sort of terms that everyone endorses and supports, but at the same time, there can be real conflict of interests in how each expects freedom to be maintained or affluence achieved. The common good of the EU is not given or prescribed, known in advance. It is in the process of being worked out, through conflict, as well as in debate and discussion. This is not about the attempt to realize some already properly conceived ideals. It is about the search for ways of conciliating conflicting interests in such a way that everyone gets something of what they look for and all together support the arrangements that enable them to achieve their goods. Summarizing the reflection to this point, we can note the distinction of different meanings for common good, the good pursued in collaborative activity: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

A concrete good Means or condition for (a) A system for (a) and (b) A system of systems A heuristic as outcome of disputes and conflict in (d) Vision of the good in inspirational language A religious version of (f) The common good of a union or federation of cooperating states, such as the European Union: a case of (f) + (e) + (d) + (b) + (a)

This listing is not yet complete, since more needs to be said about the dimensions of meaning in social goods. The discussion of a particular example may help elucidate this.

A university as an example: Dimensions of shared meaning The question ‘what is a university?’ might be asked by a visitor shown the colleges of Oxford or Cambridge, the Sorbonne in Paris, Von Humboldt University in

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Berlin, the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, the various universities in Chicago, or those of Boston and Cambridge Massachusetts. Understanding the answer given will require a grasp of many concepts and their integration in a unified idea. So, for instance, if the tour guide relied on the dictionary definition that a university is ‘a high-level educational institution in which students study for degrees and academic research is done’, the questioner would need to comprehend many different ideas. The notions of what education consists in, what kinds of institutions exist for education, and how they are ordered in various levels, what is a degree, and how academic research is distinguishable from other forms of research are all presupposed in the answer. It is difficult to see how, without prior familiarity with the practices and institutions of university education, the answer could be understood by the tourist. This is not just a matter of mastering the language: there is an intellectual achievement involved in interpreting the concepts and definition, which can be easily overlooked by those who take such distinctions for granted. Of course, there are levels of comprehension, and social scientists and educators will bring more to bear in their understanding. But the parent of a young person desirous of attending university must have some idea of what a university is for, and why it is a good thing, and what makes one better than another. All the elements of understanding and evaluation involved here illustrate what is meant by the assertion that our social and political world is mediated by meaning. To recognize a building as a university is a complex act of interpretation, it is to operate within a horizon of shared meaning, beyond what can be simply observed. To determine what kind of good a university is requires attention to that horizon of shared meaning. It is evident that a university building is valued by those who cooperate to create and maintain it for what it accommodates, namely the coming together of tutors and students, professors and researchers, engaging together in various activities oriented to discovery. Street lighting, a standard example of a public good, being both non-exclusionary and non-rivalrous, is also valued for what it makes possible: ease and safety of movement at night. That safety is valued in turn for what it makes possible – all the individual and communal projects that people pursue in the realization of their good, from social to educational, sporting to cultural. Ultimately, it is human liberty and the liberty of association that is facilitated by the available public good of street lighting. A university building serves an analogous function, in facilitating individual and communal projects. But in other respects it is not like street lighting: those who benefit from the lights do not need to share any understanding of how the

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light is generated, but for the members of a university to benefit from the use of its facilities they require some comprehension of the nature and purpose of a university and a willingness to engage as appropriate. The shared meaning that constitutes this building as a lecture hall and these meetings as tutorials is an essential component of the activity in question. Much more than a building is needed for a gathering of people to be and to function as a university. Constructing a university and caring for it goes beyond the construction of the building. It can also mean the organization of occasions on which professors, tutors and students assemble, debate and deliberate. Maintaining the university means engaging in the corresponding practices. Those practices are explicitly reflexive, in attending in a self-critical way to the very meanings that purportedly make sense of the university’s activities. The topics to be debated include those concerned with the nature and role of the university, and in the contemporary context those debates are heated and polarized. This is because universities are embedded in their larger societies, and policies with regard to the funding of teaching and research impact on them immediately. Those policies often reflect a position in relation to the priorities among a university’s many functions, but the relevant prioritization politically imposed is rarely the outcome of a process of consensus building. A society’s pursuit of its common goods will include the maintenance of shared meaning that enables all to participate in the same communal activity. A strengthening of the horizon of meaning occurs automatically in a self-reinforcing process when public life flourishes, but it becomes an object of attention and requires deliberate action in two kinds of situation. The first is the context of construction, when new practices and institutions are being introduced and operated for the first time. The founding of a university provides an example of deliberate construction. The second kind of situation is the context of crisis when there is a risk of losing what has been already achieved, or disintegration or distortion of what had been taken for granted. The politically introduced change in the method of funding students at university in the UK, for instance, has brought about a crisis of financial viability for many universities with the result that radical changes in composition of disciplines and course offerings are occurring. In both cases, construction and rescue, deliberate attention to the dimension of shared meaning is necessary, and this horizon of meaning is the common good of the cooperators. However, for several commentators (Nussbaum, 2010; MacIntyre, 2009), the long-running neglect of shared meaning has deprived both the university and the political culture of the intellectual resources for dealing with the crisis.

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Civic republicans draw attention to another dimension of the common good of public spaces, which is the civic virtue of participants in public life. Without citizens capable of reasoned deliberation and appropriate selfrestraint, there will be no public life in the relevant sense (Honohan, 2002, p. 161). Their capacities for participation in public life on the basis of respect and reciprocity are not extrinsic to the flourishing of citizens but, when in operation, constitute the quality of their participation. No one does well in these matters without others also doing well, and others doing well is not an extrinsic means to but a constitutive part of any citizen’s flourishing. One cannot engage in university life without others equally skilled and motivated, even if opposed on issues or principles. Accordingly, since civic virtue is constitutive of doing well, the virtue of the other is part of the flourishing of the whole, and so part of the common good. It is part of what any society that relies on public debate for handling its conflict would wish to sustain. Civic virtue is renewed automatically when the processes of public life are well functioning, but it requires specific attention when public life is in jeopardy, when corruption in the sense of the predominance of particular interests over the common good prevails. The discussion so far enables us to specify the different senses in which one can speak of the common good of a university. In this complexity, the common good can have several referents. A common good is a good of collaboration, a good pursued together by cooperating parties. People can work together to construct and maintain the physical plant of the university campus; they can attempt to establish, operate and improve the practices of teaching and research; they can seek a reasonable or adequate answer to some question. In each of these three cases there is a common good of the collaborators, a campus, or practices, or a specific discovery. The campus with its laboratories and lecture halls is a means for accommodating the university community of professors, researchers and students, which, however, is only a university to the extent that it is structured by practices oriented to the discovery and communication of knowledge. Those practices as common good of the parties involved are instrumental to the actual learning of particular students and to the outcomes of research. There is another sense in which common goods are common, apart from being the deliberate goal of collaboration. Just as health is taken for granted while it obtains and only illness or injury obliges one to pay attention to health, so there are many dimensions of common good that are taken for granted and relied upon in communal and collaborative life. In this way, a university relies

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upon a horizon of meaning, without always having to make it an explicit object of attention. Similarly, the practices of teaching and research are relied upon in its day-to-day working. And the concentration of researchers and the teaching by tutors are sustained by the assumption that their activities contribute to the common good of the university. From this discussion of the dimensions of shared meaning in cooperative activity, it is possible to expand the list of instances of common goods, the kinds of goods that might be the goal of common action, giving the point of cooperation. The list ran from (a) to (h), from a concrete good, to the complexity of the kinds of goods for which a federation of states might combine in cooperation. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

A concrete good Means or condition for (a) A system for (a) and (b) A system of systems A heuristic as outcome of disputes and conflict in (d) Vision of the good in inspirational language A religious version of (f) specifying the highest common good The common good of a union or federation of cooperating states: a case of (f) + (e) + (d) + (b) + (a)

To these can now be added the types of shared meaning that could become the focus of concerted action in the context of a crisis or the experience of breakdown. Three elements are distinguishable. (i) The shared meaning that sustains a practice In the example of the university, the participation in academic seminar and debate requires shared understanding among the participants of the point of the activity, and the relevant standards that ought to apply to their contribution. Alasdair MacIntyre’s analysis is helpful at this point, showing the significance of internal goods that are only recognizable and accessible to those who submit to the demands of the practice (1984). Neophytes have to be inducted into a practice and in that process the shared meaning can be the common good of instructors. The shared meaning sustaining a practice can become the focus of deliberate attention not only when newcomers are being inducted into the practice, but also and more urgently when the survival of the practice becomes an issue. The crisis faced by universities under pressure to change is a case in point.

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(j) The character of co-participants MacIntyre introduces virtues as the acquired qualities that enable participants in a practice to realize the goods internal to that practice (1984, p. 191). The flourishing of the practice and the achievement of its distinctive goods depends to significant measure on the quality of character of those who cooperate. Charles Taylor notes a similar point in pointing to the kinds of intrinsic social goods that require reciprocal recognition, such as friendship, or citizenship among those who submit to the requirements of the rule of law (1995). As noted, civic republicans also emphasize this aspect of the qualities of citizens (Honohan, 2002). In a republic guided by the aspiration that the people should give themselves the law, and that legislation should be the product of deliberation among them, it is essential that the participants exhibit the relevant civic virtues. No one can flourish in such relationships, unless others are also flourishing. When the relevant virtues are absent or in jeopardy, it can be necessary to devote energy to caring for the formation of character as a common good of the society. (k) The social imaginary Charles Taylor has introduced the notion of social imaginary to refer to the sets of meanings, values and aspirations that are shared in a society, and which enable social life in all its dimensions to go on (2004). This is the horizon of shared meaning that mediates and sustains social encounters of all kinds, from economic to cultural events. The social imaginary can change over time and it can be both facilitative and frustrating for different activities. For instance, as the acceptance of the privatization of utilities becomes more widespread, people become more accustomed to thinking of water as a commodity to be sold and bought and less as a precious common resource to be handled carefully. The images of goodness, success and fulfilment are vulnerable to change, not least through the impact of marketing and media. Marxist cultural critique has always attempted to expose the vested interests of those who benefit from the widespread acceptance of such major social ideas as the inviolable right of property, or the notion that the human individual is naturally isolated. The common good in the sense of what pertains to and constitutes the good functioning of a community and its members is always partially realized – otherwise there could be no social or political life. And it is real, even if not acknowledged as such. The common goods of a university include not only the shared goals towards which it strives in its research and teaching, but also the

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shared meanings and values, and the shared skills and practices, the social capital that sustains it. While an individual participant in deliberation might take the horizon of meaning and the civic virtues of fellow participants for granted, it is indefensible for a political culture as a whole to do so. Universities fulfil a function in caring for the shared meaning, sustaining the political community. That is one of the reasons why universities belong among the common goods of liberal democratic cultures. Unless some crisis makes it necessary to focus attention deliberately on one or other aspect of these common goods, they can remain unremarked. For instance, the density of shared meaning is particularly significant for public life, but would its absence from the list of a society’s public goods be noticed? Once it is recognized and valued then it will be included, but its neglect would not necessarily lead to an immediate experience of loss, as might, for instance, the failure of the street lighting system. The political community might continue to enjoy the social capital inherited from the past without being aware that it is being exhausted, consumed without being renewed. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, former judge of Germany’s Constitutional Court, warns that this poses a particular dilemma for a liberal state. He has formulated a paradox that subsequently bears his name (1991, p. 60): The liberal secular state lives on premises that it cannot itself guarantee. On the one hand, it can subsist only if the freedom it consents to its citizens is regulated from within, inside the moral substance of individuals and of a homogeneous society. On the other hand, it is not able to guarantee these forces of inner regulation by itself without renouncing its liberalism.

In other words, a liberal state cannot survive unless it is sustained by a political culture in which some elements are constantly at work, strengthening and renewing the civic virtues of citizens and fostering their shared meanings and values. The political common good is worked out by citizens as they shape their common life. In a sense, it is constructed through the process of deliberation. Some aspects of what is constructed, as, for instance, the social capital of shared understandings and expectations, as well as the virtuous habits of citizens, are built by the activity and the process without necessarily being the deliberately pursued goal of the process.

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Common goods are the objects for the sake of which people can and do cooperate. The analysis to date has elaborated on that statement, especially in light of an Aristotelian reading of its elements. Many kinds of objects can be goods in common and cooperation in their pursuit can take many forms. The practical reasoning of the agents in each case can be examined, and previous chapters have done that in delineating the many different instances of goods in common, from means and conditions for flourishing to goals and institutions and systems of such. In particular, the analysis has highlighted the way in which shared meaning has not only been a presupposed condition for collaborators to find ways of working together, but can be the object of their collaboration, whether to construct, or repair or maintain or expand it. Later chapters will develop this theme especially in the context of international relations and global justice. But in this chapter I want to focus on a particular analysis of the generation of shared meaning in a social context, not so much to accept the analysis in all its details, but to draw from it the endorsement of the importance of meaning for the study of social and political phenomena. As noticed in the example of a university, which might be replicated in the analysis of other complex organizations and institutions such as parliaments, hospitals and indeed markets, recognition of what they do and participation in that activity presupposes appreciation of meanings that constitute and sustain the institution and its practices. In this chapter I want to focus in particular on the way in which our social world is constituted by meaning, and on the dynamics of how bearers of meaning achieve recognition. The word ‘constituted’ in this previous sentence may give pause. Is it to be taken as endorsing some form of idealism, according to which the real is the product of some mind? Earlier chapters have emphasized the manner in which collaboration for some good in common is carried by the shared meaning among the cooperating partners. And yet the common goods of

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their partnerships are concrete goals such as the examples we have listed: school places, homes, pieces of legislation. Obviously, these goods are not the products of fantasy, they have material solidity, can be counted and weighed, and are the objects of practical arts and sciences. But what they mean, what makes them of interest to those who pursue them, is not simply observable. To understand their significance, one must comprehend the meaning by which they are constituted. An alternative formulation, perhaps less misleading, but also in danger of underplaying the point, is to say that they are mediated by meaning. To recognize an enclosed space, a room, as a classroom, or a chapel, or a courtroom, requires an insight into the relevant significance and its context. The fact that the same room, the same physical space, can function at different times as a prayer room, and a classroom, and a courtroom, makes the point that the participants, by sharing the same understanding of what is going on, constitute the space. The courtroom is not present simply by virtue of its physical structure. Its presence is mediated by the meaning shared and recognized by those who gather there. The importance of shared meaning, however, is easily overwhelmed by the imposing physical structures that are usually given to the important institutions of our societies. Given the solidity of stone, metal, mahogany and glass, it requires an act of reflective insight to accept that the constitutive ideas are more substantial in the foundation of the bank, or the court or the parliament. Their solidity carries over in the spontaneous taken-for-granted nature of institutions. In the study of institutions, the lack of a satisfactory definition is bemoaned. Especially for the study of international organizations, the relevant disciplines have not been able to develop a common definition for their various purposes. John Duffield (2007) surveys the various definitions in use and proposes his solution to remove the confusion. He suggests that international institutions be defined as ‘relatively stable sets of related constitutive, regulative, and procedural norms and rules that pertain to the international system, the actors in the system (including states as well as nonstate entities), and their activities’ (2007, pp. 7–8). In favour of this proposal he points to the combination of both ontological and functional elements, some of which are present in other definitions. The terms ‘relatively stable’ and ‘related’ are glossed as identifying conditions of persistence and durability, and integration of elements. While this definition may appear very abstract, the clarification of its elements reveals the importance laid on shared meaning. Sets of norms and rules function to the extent that they are acknowledged and respected by actors. Constitutive norms bring institutions into being, and ‘generate agents, endow them with certain capabilities and

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powers, and determine their underlying identities, interests, and preferences’ (Duffield, 2007, p. 7). Institutions are said to exist to an extent in the minds of people. They can arise spontaneously as well as be deliberately created, but their intersubjective nature is such that they are said to be ‘shared beliefs’ (Duffield, 2007, p. 7). John Searle (1995) is cited in support of the assertion that ‘the very possibility of certain activities’ is created by constitutive rules that bring both institutions and actors into being. Duffield lists examples of international institutions and actors from the UN Security Council and General Assembly, the Council of Ministers of the EU, to the IMF Board of Governors. International Courts are other examples (2007, pp. 12–13). Institutions constitute actors and types of activity, but their role in shaping the meaning of actions is particularly stressed, ‘whether a use of force is to be viewed as an act of aggression or a justifiable intervention, or whether a tariff is a violation of international law or a legitimate retaliatory activity’ (Duffield, 2007, p. 13). Constitutive rules may more clearly exhibit the importance of shared meaning in the existence and functioning of international institutions, but the regulative and procedural functions also depend on the dimension of meaning. Although John Searle does not explicitly apply his analysis of the process of the creation of institutions to the international domain, several authors including Duffield do so. Kratochwil also notes Searle’s contribution to the insight that the international system is ‘entirely artificial’, being ‘based on certain shared understandings that bring about what they seemingly only describe’ (2010, p. 446). Kratochwil summarizes the view that the international system ‘exists only insofar as actors share an assembly of practices based on institutional rules, such as treaties, diplomacy, alliances, and so on, and create and reproduce thereby the system’ (2010, p. 457). Following these hints I turn to Searle’s social ontology in order to draw from his explanation of the role of shared meaning in social reality. From his book Rationality in Action (2001), I have drawn on Searle’s account of how desire-independent reasons for action can be generated. His earlier (1995) work The Construction of Social Reality provides an account of the relationship between such desire-independent reasons and the deontic powers that enable people to create them. The recent (2010) book Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization generalizes his analysis, which he conveniently summarizes elsewhere: ‘the mechanism that creates and sustains institutional facts is always the same. It is that of the Status Function Declaration whereby we create an institutional reality by representing it as existing’ (Searle, 2008, p. 455).

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Alongside the emphasis on shared meaning as constitutive of social order, and the analysis of how such meaning is created and sustained, Searle opens up a question that leads to the notion of common goods. Having demonstrated the importance of acceptance for the sustaining of status functions with their deontic powers, he asks what reasons people might have for giving their acceptance. Along with the answers that might be translated as the interests of individuals, there are also answers that point to goods in common including the good of having an order based on meaning that is shared. As will be seen, Searle points to those answers, without exploring them further – in fact, he cautions against a too searching examination of the relevant reasons, for fear that scepticism might undermine acceptance. Critics have picked on this gap in the explanation, sketching the range of possible reasons that might be operative in people’s reasoning (Turner, 1999, p. 221). Turner complains about a certain ‘vagueness’ in Searle’s account of those reasons. My use of Searle’s analysis is to offer a complementary account, benefitting from his demonstration of the relevance of such reasons, but offering a programmatic account of goods in common that might fill the gap.

Searle’s social ontology Searle makes a case for a social ontology that underlies all the social disciplines, which he maintains should be transparent to one another (1995, 2010). He makes several strong but relatively simple claims that provide the basis for all his analysis. His fundamental claim is that all institutional reality is created and maintained by a single type of linguistic operation, which he terms a Status Function Declaration. It is the same sort of operation that functions throughout the whole spectrum of human institutions, and as the subtitle of his book claims, through civilization (Searle, 2010, p. 202). Status function declarations take the form ‘X is to count as Y in C’, as for instance, ‘This newly designed printed piece of paper with the portrait of Jane Austen is to count as legal tender to the value of five pounds sterling in the context of exchanges within the United Kingdom’. X can refer to a thing or a person or a corporation; Y refers to the status function, such as being money, or holding an office, while C identifies a context. A blue-helmeted soldier is to count as a neutral peacekeeper/cease-fire observer on the Israel–Lebanon border. So, for instance, after the next general election in the UK, it will be

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possible to say of someone (X) – will it be David Cameron or Ed Miliband? – (X) is to count as prime minister (Y) in the UK (C). Searle elaborates on key elements in his basic claims, beginning with the analysis of status functions. It is a fairly obvious feature of our social lives that objects and persons have functions that give them capacities beyond their merely physical properties (Searle, 2010, p. 7). The fact that pieces of metal stamped with certain features can be offered and taken in exchange for goods with use value enormously widens our scope of action, and we can wonder at it. Searle’s point is to invite us to wonder at the human capacity to make this be the case, to impose functions on persons or things, to create the function in the first place and then to lend or assign it to someone or something. He relies on an analysis of speech-acts and their illocutionary force, how we do things with words. Searle is definite that there are only five possible types of illocutionary speech acts: assertives such as statements and assertions, directives such as orders and commands, commissives such as promises, expressives such as apologies and thanks, and finally, declarations. Declarations make something the case by declaring it to be the case, they create the very reality that they represent. ‘Once you see the power of the Declaration to create an institutional reality, a reality of governments, universities, marriages, private property, money, and all the rest of it, you can see that social reality has a formal structure as simple and elegant as the structure of the language used to create it’ (2010, p. 16). He celebrates the human facility to create systems of symbolic representation, which is fundamental to social existence and to civilization. New possibilities of speech act and of communication are created, which can allow for rich complexities of interrelationship and cooperation. He concludes his outline with a set of equivalences and logical implications: ‘. . . all and only institutional facts are status functions; status functions imply deontic powers, and deontic powers always provide desire-independent reasons for action’ (2010, p. 23). With the assigned status functions go several powers, which Searle labels ‘deontic powers’. These include ‘rights, duties, obligations, requirements, permissions, authorizations, entitlements, and so on’ (2010, p. 9). He further notes a distinction between positive deontic powers such as rights, and negative powers such as obligations. When a status function is assigned, for example, to my laptop, declaring it to be my property, then I have powers in relation to it, while others have duties, and there can be an interplay of permissions and authorizations, and subsequent praise or blame. Again he stresses how these deontic powers go beyond the limits of the physical powers

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of the item or person in question. While someone may desire to try out a fast car, for instance, the recognition that it is the property of another gives her a reason not to take the car without permission, and furthermore, the recognition that there is a speed limit on the A40 gives her a reason not to drive too fast, once the permission has been obtained. The status functions of property and the deontic power of prohibitions provide people with reasons to do or not to do things, independently of whether they desire to do them (Searle, 2001). The analysis of desire-independent reasons for action could deliver social sciences from the dominance of the standard Humean model of rationality whereby desires or passions are basic and reason provides only guidance about the means for achieving satisfaction of desire. This is critical for explaining how common goods can provide reasons for action where the goods in common are not reducible to the desires of each discrete individual in the cooperative. It makes clear how reason, in the recognition of desire-independent reasons for action such as status functions, can be a generative source of other desires, the desire to do the right thing, the desire to uphold the shared public order.

Acceptance Declaration that something or someone is to have a function in a social context is ineffective without recognition or acceptance by the people in the relevant context. Stamped metal, coloured paper, only counts as money if it is recognized as such by people to whom it is offered in exchange. Searle uses both terms, of recognition and acceptance, to counter the misunderstanding arising from his use of acceptance in the earlier book Construction of Social Reality. The necessary acceptance does not require approval: One can accept that George Osborne is the current Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, without approving of the choice or of his policies. ‘The point is that status functions can only work to the extent that they are collectively recognized’ (2010, p. 8). Collective recognition is a key element in Searle’s analysis, therefore, and to expound it he devotes considerable attention to the phenomenon of collective intentionality. Intention and intentionality are topics of another study by Searle (1983), but in his social ontology he has to confront a widespread assumption linked with ‘methodological individualism’ that it entails reducing collective intentionality to I-intentionality. His defence of a notion of ‘we-intentionality’ requires of him to respect the differentiation and distinctiveness of each one, so that some account of

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how the intention of one individual is linked to the intentions of others with whom she cooperates. The danger to be avoided is the postulate of a common mind. Searle sees no good reason why a ‘we-intention’ need not be irreducible to the intention of individuals. ‘Of course, that we-intention has to be systematically related to certain I-intentions if the we-intention is to be able to move each body. . . . [T]he requirement that all intentionality exist in individual brains does not imply that the content that exists in the individual brains cannot exist in a plural grammatical form’ (2010, p. 47).

Collective intentionality Collective intentionality is required for collective action and depends ultimately on collective recognition of status functions. Searle defends an account of collective intentionality, which is not reducible to I-intentionality. He sees the need to do so against naturalizing projects that attempt to reduce intentionality to neurobiological phenomena (Searle, 2010, p. 42). He distinguishes between prior intention and intention-in-action, and attempts to show that these are present in collective action as in individual action. Prior intention belongs with the planning of action in advance, while intention in action is coincidental with action. Spontaneous action does not presuppose some prior intention, but as action, even though unplanned, it has some intention intrinsic to it. A person can be asked what they are doing (waving or drowning?), and they will have an answer, revealing the intention in action. Searle has to deal with a number of issues related to intention. How are actions to be described, what are basic and what are complex actions, and most importantly, how the notion of collective intentionality can be integrated with the individual intentions of collaborating agents? He accepts the fact that intentionality exists in individual human brains but insists at the same time that it does not follow from this fact that individuals can only have ‘I-intentions’. It is possible for individuals engaged in collaboration to have ‘we-intentions’ and to think in terms of what ‘we’ are doing. And yet each one can only effectively intend that which he or she can causally bring about, so there is a complexity in the intentionality of cooperation that must be respected. Searle considers relatively simple examples such as participants in a game, or in a musical performance such as a duet, ‘in which I play the piano part and you play the violin part. In all such cases there is genuine cooperative behaviour but the content of each individual’s intention differs from the content of the

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other’s intentions even though they share a common overall goal of playing the game or playing a piece of music’ (2010, p. 44). Each partner intends her own contribution, but in a context in which she takes for granted the contribution to the collaborative effort made by her partners. Seldom will one know in detail what partners in complex forms of collaboration are intending and doing, but one accepts that they share the common goal and are intending to do their part in bringing it about. To deal with this complexity, Searle draws on the distinction between the causal relation and the constitutive relation. Intention entails causation and one can only intend what one causes. In the example of the duet, his analysis of the collaboration is as follows: ‘My playing and your playing simply constitute the performance of the duet. So from my point of view, I have a collective intention-in-action that we play the duet by way of me playing the piano, in a context where I take it for granted that you are playing the violin’ (2010, p. 52). This is an example of how the action of each taken together constitutes the joint action. For an example of causation by joint action Searle invokes the case of making Béarnaise sauce by means of one person pouring and the other person stirring. The belief implicit in the idea of collective behaviour that one’s partners also have an intention-in-action similar to one’s own is not a part of the content of the intention-in-action. An important distinction is that between cooperation and collective recognition (Searle, 2010, p. 56). Both are said to be forms of collective intentionality (Searle, 2010, p. 60). Cooperation in the full sense involves collective prior intention and collective intention-in-action. When goods are exchanged for money, cooperation in this sense takes place, but it rides on a shared acceptance between the buyer and seller that these activities can take place in the market and that the conventional money can be used for that purpose. The shared attitudes in themselves do not constitute cooperation, but collective recognition. But ‘for cooperation to take place within an institutional structure, there has to be a general recognition or acceptance of the institution, and that does not necessarily involve active cooperation’ (Searle, 2010, p. 57). This implies that for an institution to exist, only collective acceptance or recognition is required, but not cooperation in the full sense. Cooperation is therefore a much stronger form of collective intentionality ‘because it involves more than the participants just having certain attitudes together with mutual belief ’ (2010, p. 60). Illustrating the various cases in which status functions are created, Searle draws on a number of basic examples. In the most primitive he describes a scenario whereby a line of stones (formerly a wall) becomes recognized as a

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boundary. The line is no longer physically capable of excluding intruders, but people can nonetheless ‘recognize that they are not supposed to cross the boundary unless authorized’. The boundary as distinct from the line of stones presupposes an institutional deontology, which in turn requires representation in language (Searle, 2010, pp. 94–5). A more complicated case is where a constitutive rule is generated, for instance, specifying who in the tribe is to count as the leader on the death of the old one. ‘“The oldest surviving son counts as the new king” is a standing Declaration. Its function is to make it the case that a certain person becomes the new king on the death of the old king. No one has to do anything to satisfy it except to accept its consequences, to count the oldest surviving son as the new king’ (Searle, 2010, p. 97). This makes something the case by representing it as being the case. The most complex type of case of Declaration creating status function is where there is no concrete individual X who is to count as Y in C. In such cases, as for instance in the legal powers to create corporations, there is a double declaration: a declaration that a declaration that fulfils certain conditions will have effect. Taking as example the relevant law in California, Searle comments: ‘The law does not say that some preexisting X becomes a corporation; rather it says that a corporation may be formed. It says that the performance of these written speech acts – “executing and filing articles of incorporation” – counts as the creation of a corporation . . .’ (2010, p. 98).

Institutions Searle explains that an institution as a system of constitutive rules, ‘and such a system automatically creates the possibility of institutional facts’ (2010, p. 10). Unlike brute facts such as the flooding of the River Thames, institutional facts are only such by agreement or acceptance. The notion of constitutive rules is familiar, but Searle’s contribution is to highlight how they are the product of status function declarations that are recognized in the relevant community. Constitutive rules create the possibility of the behaviour which they regulate. They specify what it is to count as something in social affairs (2010, p. 10). Searle presents the three basic notions of his theory as collective intention, the assignment of function, and a language that is sophisticated enough to make possible declarations of status function and the establishment of constitutive rules. These are sufficient to make sense of the creation of institutions and the deontic powers associated with them. But beyond the moments of creation,

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there is also enduring acceptance while an institution continues to be in use and is invoked. This too requires continuing recognition, but for acceptance, the relevant status functions and their powers must be represented in linguistic terms. For that an adequate vocabulary is required. Searle puts it thus: ‘Unlike shirts and shoes, institutions do not wear out with continued usage. On the contrary, the continued usage of such institutions as marriage, private property, and money reinforces the institutions, but the “usage” requires talk, and that talk functions to maintain and reinforce both the institution and institutional facts within the institution’ (2010, p. 104). Stressing the importance of the vocabulary, Searle draws attention to the way in which reformers and revolutionaries have found it necessary to change the terms in which people speak of their social existence. ‘Sir’ was to be replaced by ‘Comrade’! Persistent use of inherited vocabulary maintains and strengthens traditional status functions. Change of institutional facts requires changes in the meanings shared by participants, and that in turn requires new language, new terms. Fascinated by the power of the speech acts of declaration to create institutions that shape people’s lives and actions, Searle poses the question: How do we get away with what seems like creating a reality out of nothing? And he answers: ‘We get away with it to the extent that we can get other people to accept it’. But this simply shifts the question to the more fundamental one: ‘Why do people accept institutions and institutional facts?’ (2010, pp. 105–7). This is the question also for which the investigation of the common good is intended to provide at least the outline of answers. Searle is content to note the formal elements of the general answer to the question. Institutions are recognized and accepted because they mostly work to benefit people by increasing their powers. He mentions as obvious examples the institutions of language and money, which ‘are pretty much in everybody’s interest’. However, and worryingly in this context, he comments on how people have been misled and mistaken and even irresponsible in giving their recognition to the institutions they take for granted. He points to the acceptance of unjust social structures and practices that subjugate women, or discriminate against members of minorities. But, surprisingly, he is not advocating the enlightenment of people by educating them in the nature of social order. It is not for the sake of a more efficient functioning of institutions that he presents his analysis. He even suspects that important institutions ‘such as money and government, tend to work best when they are taken for granted and not critically analyzed’ (Searle, 2010, p. 107). Similar to some analyses

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by Marxist scholars on why it is that people accept the dominant ideology of hegemonic powers without criticism (Shaw, 1989), Searle points to the powerful dynamics involved in considering human artefacts to be part of the natural order of things. ‘They do not think of private property, and the institutions for allocating private property, or human rights, or governments as human creations.’ Also, as he notes, people despair of being able to do anything about changing prevalent and all-pervasive institutions, which actually continue to enjoy common recognition. In listing then the different kinds of reasons that people have for acceptance of institutions, he includes those based on ignorance, or false beliefs, as well as simple apathy. He summarizes them as ‘self-interest, increased power, ignorance, apathy, despair, and conformism’ (2010, pp. 107–8). His remarks are not always so sceptical. In response to the question ‘Why have institutional reality at all?’ he suggests the ‘blunt’ answer can be given: ‘we are better off than animals in countless ways by living a civilized life’, that is, a life structured by enabling institutions, giving us ‘enormous sets of powers that we would not otherwise have’ (Searle, 2010, p. 143). As noted previously, critics such as Stephen Turner bemoaned the ‘vagueness’ in Searle’s (1995) account of those reasons as presented in the earlier work (Turner, 1999, p. 221). Searle’s almost casual treatment of the reasons in his later work (2010) is no less prone to criticism. However, it indicates that the content of the reasons is not the focus of Searle’s attention, but rather the principal building blocks of his social ontology, language, assignment of function, and collective intentionality. His concession that false beliefs or prejudice might be among the reasons people have for acceptance of status function declarations and the institutions they create is reminiscent of Aristotle’s remark that while all action is for the sake of some good, and all cooperation is for the sake of some good in common, it can still be the case that actors and collaborators are mistaken about their good. The possibility and occurrence of error does not obviate the rationality of action or cooperation.

Government and power Searle applies his analysis of social ontology to the sphere of politics and governmental power. In this context, he reiterates the observation made earlier about the unwillingness or inability of people to challenge what is conventionally accepted. Even though political power is a matter of deontic power, dependent

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on collective recognition, and therefore given from below, so to speak, most people believe themselves powerless in the face of political authorities. The power that is exercised from above is analyzed as subject to two constraints: the intentionality constraint, specifying that the one wielding power does so intentionally, and the exactness constraint, that the attribution of power in any case can specify precisely who is able to require whom to do what. ‘The core notion of power is that A has power over S with respect to action B if and only if A can intentionally get S to do what A wants regarding B, whether S wants to do it or not’ (Searle, 2010, p. 151). The power is exercised through speech acts with the illocutionary force of directives, including standing directives. Also in this context, Searle is not particularly normative in his explanations, since he points to the possibility of someone exercising power intentionally by manipulating another. One way of doing this is to conceal from people the actual options open to them, giving them instead the impression that they are obliged to choose between presented alternatives. This power is the ability to set the agenda, and it can be manipulative: the ‘power wielder gets people to see only certain options as available and gets them to want things they would not otherwise have wanted if they had been aware of other options’ (Searle, 2010, p. 150). While Searle admits that the reality of governmental power lies in status functions created by declarations and recognized collectively, he misses an opportunity to press this further in his commentary on sovereignty. While he analyzes government as an institution having the same kind of social ontology as all other institutions, he points out that government . . . ‘is not just another institution. There is a sense in which in most organized societies the government is the ultimate institutional structure’ (2010, p. 161). With this he refers to the power of governments ‘to regulate other institutional structures such as family, education, money, the economy generally, private property, and even the church’. Sovereignty is the term traditionally used to identify the location of the ultimate system of status function: there is no higher institution in some hierarchy of institutions from which the government derives its deontic powers. And yet according to Searle’s social ontology the status function of governmental power is generated from the collective acceptance of those subject to it. There is a standing declaration, the recognition of which constitutes government as the ultimate repository of deontic power. Potentially, this recognition could be revoked in the case that the legitimacy of government is seriously called in question. But what does ‘legitimacy’ mean in such a sentence? It has already

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been clarified that there is no higher institution to the laws of which the state must conform. And yet the idea of legitimacy suggests there is some law in terms of which a government can be held accountable.

Human rights as deontic powers In our modern world, people might spontaneously assert that the table of human rights provides such a law according to which a government might be legitimate. But the notion of universal human rights also provides a limit case for Searle’s analysis. Insofar as rights are deontic powers, like all other deontic powers in human affairs, they are linked to status functions in institutional contexts: they are institutional facts. Human rights appear to differ from the usual categories of rights and obligations associated with being a member of some institutional order, whether as citizen, shareholder, university student or family member. One is said to possess human rights in virtue simply of being human, not as participant in any particular social system. How can that be? On Searle’s analysis of the language of human rights, it is this paradox that is at the root of the heated polarization between those who hold human rights to be either self-evident realities, on the one hand, or fictions (MacIntyre) or nonsense upon stilts (Bentham), on the other. Searle applies his basic analysis to universal human rights, describing them as status functions: ‘they are deontic powers deriving from an assigned status’. As assigned, they are human creations, and so their reality and existence is relative to intentionality. This is typical of his analysis of all institutional facts. But there is the additional step: ‘They are deontic powers that are imposed on people and can function only by collective recognition or acceptance’ (2010, p. 176). Just like other declarations of status function, they are only effective if they meet with acceptance. But in principle there is no reason why human beings might not be recognized as possessing certain deontic powers just as a piece of metal or paper might be accepted as having the function of money. There is more to it, of course, and Searle admits that: he points to two anomalies. Where the justification of institutional rights follows from the purpose of the institution, might there be a parallel structure in justifying human rights? But in that case, what purpose is to be invoked? The second anomaly is that in the case of human rights there is no pre-existing institution and so there is an asymmetry with the other kinds of institutional rights (Searle, 2010, p. 182).

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The complexity of human rights as status functions can explain the ambiguity that leads to the disputes about their nature. They can be said to be non-existent, and existent but not recognized. The contrast can be seen in the example of the following apparently contradictory sentences (Searle, 2010, p. 177): 1. The universal right to free speech did not exist before the European Enlightenment, at which time it came into existence. 2. The universal right to free speech has always existed, but this right was recognized only at the time of the European Enlightenment. Searle maintains that the contradiction is merely apparent. He invokes his basic model of declaration to deal with this complexity: Some X is declared to count as Y in context C. He clarifies the seeming contradiction by noting the recognition conditions of the X and Y elements (Searle, 2010, p. 182). In other words, it was only with the European Enlightenment that the concept of the human individual simply as a member of the species was formulated, to be the X term in the declaration of status function. Hence the first sentence can be upheld. And while the existence of human beings before the Enlightenment cannot be denied, it was only at that point in history that the status function was ascribed to human beings of being possessors of natural rights. Accordingly, the second statement can also be upheld. Hence the apparent contradiction is dissolved.

Conclusion John Searle’s social ontology provides an analysis of the generation of shared meaning in a social context. He also cites a university as an example of a complex institution, which is sustained by recognition and acceptance of the declaration of status function. Participation in such institutions presupposes appreciation of meanings that constitute and sustain the institution and its practices. Searle’s analysis, while endorsing the emphasis on social meanings, also opens up a question that leads to the notion of common goods. Having demonstrated the importance of acceptance for the sustaining of status functions with their deontic powers, he asks what reasons people might have for giving their acceptance. Along with the answers that might be translated as the interests of individuals there are answers that point to goods in common, including the good of having an order based on shared meaning. Searle notes the fact, for

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instance, that the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw pact was the effect of the evaporation of recognition. This point about reasons is central to the pursuit of goods in common, and underlines how Searle’s own position is not exhaustive. The following chapters will contribute to complementing his analysis by exploring the reasons that might be operative in the recognition and acceptance of institutions on a global scale.

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7

The Common Good in Current International Relations

John Searle’s claims for his social ontology are anything but modest. He offers an analysis of how institutions can exist and come into being and possess deontic powers that provide people with desire-independent reasons for their actions. The explanation is not confined to local or national institutions, but, if it is correct, it should also enable us to make sense of global and internationalscale institutions. What are the goods at a global level for the sake of which people – and communities – throughout the world might cooperate? This question cannot be addressed adequately without also asking about the shared meanings that constitute and carry the collaboration. What are the shared meanings sustaining their global interaction? Are they adequate meanings, or do they carry with them distortions and mistakes? And a third question asks about the perspective from which the agents of cooperation are regarded. As noted in the previous chapter when considering the intention of cooperating agents, there is a difference between the third-person perspective, which reports on what others think and say and do, and the first-person perspective of those who are the thinkers, speakers and actors in their own histories. While the first-person perspective can often make use of what is reported by third-party observers, its primary focus is to direct the agents’ own action in pursuit of the good. In the following consideration of the common good in international relations, this will be the preferred stance, with a ‘we-intentionality’ considering options for action, even if at times in a hypothetical mode. The author’s voice then identifies with those who in whatever way wish to advance the forms and opportunities of cooperation at a global level.

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Whatever anyone will want to achieve on a global scale, they will require institutions to do it. Development, peace-building and peacekeeping, environmental protection, moderating the impact of climate change, poverty eradication, refugee provision, global health, financial stability and so forth indicate the kinds of issues for which global responses are required. In many of these areas, structures are already taking shape, not of government in the strict sense, but of global governance. An ever-expanding list of acronyms provide the labels for this dimension: IOs (International Organizations), INGOs (International Non-governmental Organizations), MNCs (Multi-National Corporations), TNCs (Trans-National Corporations), academic and journalist and media networks, and so forth. However, at the global and international levels, there are debates about the possibility and the necessity of institutions and there are also debates as exemplified in the discussion of human rights whether moral duties depend on the existence of relevant institutions. Just as in political philosophy, the legitimacy and authority of the state are thought to be fundamental to the issues of political obligation and justice, so in the larger scale, parallel questions are traditionally raised. Is there a necessity for a world government so as to ensure justice and peace on a global scale, just as Hobbes in Leviathan considered a Sovereign was needed at the national level to provide a secure and harmonious existence? Or is it the case, by contrast, that at the international level, anarchy prevails in the technical sense of anarchy as the absence of rule? In that case, nations find themselves relating to one another as in a state of nature, without a common authority to which they must submit. The Hobbesian model of the transition from the state of nature to civil society under sovereign government has provided the terms of the debate: either world government, or global anarchy. In the contemporary field of the study of international relations, the inherited tendency to set up a dichotomy between the alternatives of world government and global anarchy is challenged and rejected. Scholars can recognize the validity of analysis in terms of power-balance and coercion, while at the same time identifying instances of authority located outside of the modern state. An influential direction in this discipline is known as the English School (Buzan, 2010). In particular, the English School attempts to avoid the ‘either/or’ framing of realism versus idealism and the explanatory versus interpretative dichotomy. ‘In place of these dichotomies the English School purports to offer an account of International Relations that combines theory and history, morality and power, agency and structure’ (Dunne, 2010, p. 268).

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Legitimate authority in an anarchic world Ian Hurd has pursued a line of research into structures of authority in international relations to illustrate the thesis that although the international system might be formally anarchic, that is, without a common governmental authority, it does nonetheless exhibit dimensions of authority (Hurd, 1999). He maintains that theories of the state can accommodate a locus of authority outside the state. He challenges the prevalent assumption that international society could exhibit only two structures of order, namely coercion and self-interest, while it is accepted that domestic societies can have three such structures, with legitimate authority in addition to coercion and self-interest. Reformulating this claim in Searle’s terms, it is the assertion that there can be and are desire-independent reasons for action in global cooperation, made possible by the emerging institutions that enable people and states to create these reasons for themselves. Granted the absence of government at a world level, there is nonetheless an order in the system, which participants consider to be authoritative. The challenge is to explain the nature of order in the absence of government. Hurt argues that if legitimate authority does in fact exist, at least in parts of the system characterized by a sense of community among states, then the system cannot be described as an anarchy in the traditional sense. His work finds and presents examples of those elements of legitimate authority and so he concludes: ‘The advanced industrial states at the end of the twentieth century constitute an international community of unparalleled depth and breadth, and the norms they follow, from the fundamental rules of sovereignty to the complex rules of commerce and regulation, are evidence of the ordering power of that community’ (1999, p. 404). In countering the predominance of coercion and self-interest as exhausting the motivation of international players, Hurd must offer an account of legitimate authority and look for empirical evidence of its operation in the international system. He introduces his concept of legitimacy as follows: ‘Legitimacy refers to the normative belief held by an actor that a rule or institution ought to be obeyed. It is a subjective quality, relational between actor and institution, and defined by the actor’s perception of the institution’ (Hurd, 1999, p. 396). There is an obvious difficulty in identifying instances where compliance with common arrangements is neither because the costs of non-conformity are prohibitive (coercion) nor because compliance is beneficial (national self-interest), but because the actor acknowledges the legitimacy of the arrangements. He distinguishes between self-interest in the usual narrow sense and a broader sense

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of interest. With this distinction available, he maintains that the behaviour of states at times reflects an interest in the persistence of a relationship that reveals a valuing of that relationship itself apart from whatever immediate benefits it might bring (Hurd, 1999, p. 386). He argues further that the behaviour of states is not always only self-interested and so instrumentalizing in the attitude to others. There can also be loyalty to the system and its rules that goes beyond what can be calculated as beneficial merely to the actor. Care for the relationship as such, and not primarily for the benefits that accrue from the relationship, is essential to Hurd’s thesis. Loyalty to the system and its rules reflects a recognition of legitimacy. A study of the United Nations Security Council provides evidence of such legitimate authority evoking loyalty at times from member states, even though there is no evident coercion or self-interest in play; simply the desire that the system should be in place and should work. ‘It is not too much to say that the Council has power when it is seen as legitimate and loses power as that perception recedes’ (Hurd, 2007, p. 2). Legitimacy is a source of power, and for the most part this is the only kind of power that the Security Council has. Hurd argues for three theses. The first is that the behaviour of states is conditioned by states’ perceptions of the legitimacy of international institutions. The second thesis is that states in the pursuit of their interests in international relations can make strategic use of the powerful symbols created by the perception of legitimacy. The third thesis is that symbolic power, as exemplified by the symbols of legitimacy, does not correlate with material power. And so it can happen that seemingly strong states can be defeated by weaker ones when they fight over symbolic stakes (Hurd, 2005, p. 495). A study of the example of Libya serves to illustrate this point. Libyan diplomats and lawyers succeeded in undermining the accusations brought by the USA and the UK to the UN Security Council following the Lockerbie attack by highlighting the failure of the American and British authorities to abide by their self-declared standards (Hurd, 2005). In response to the sanctions imposed by the UN in 1992 and 1993, Libya’s negotiators presented themselves as the defenders of liberal internationalism and claimed for their own side ownership of the relevant symbols. They made the case that ‘the sanctions regime violated norms of procedural justice recognized in international law’ (Hurd, 2005, p. 509), instancing that punishment had been imposed before the matter was fully judicially investigated, the evidence supporting accusations against her had not been provided to Libya, and most tellingly, the UN resolution bypassed relevant law. They claimed that the Montreal Convention on Civil Aviation

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(1971) had established the method of dealing with unlawful interference with aircraft, and also specified methods for handling disputes between states, but the United States and United Kingdom as accusers and the UN Security Council ignored the existing law. Hurd draws the conclusion from this study that not only does legitimacy serve as a powerful symbol in such conflicts but also that the use of the symbols by powerful states gives opportunity to weaker states to adopt the same symbols and use them as weapons in their own interest. ‘Once hitched to the rhetoric of due process and community support, the sponsors could not ignore Libya’s statements and actions that appealed to these same principles but interpreted them differently’ (2005, p. 523). To support his case emphasizing the power of symbols, Hurd cites Searle’s early (1995) book on The Construction of Social Reality. He draws on Searle’s analysis of symbols as institutional facts to explain the functioning of legitimacy: ‘The legitimacy of the institution of sovereignty, for instance, creates a set of symbols with which states can be associated and which bring them some strength: a flag outside the UN headquarters, an ambassador inside it . . . The legitimacy of an institution can be transferred to any other actor authorized to deploy its symbols’ (Hurd, 2007, p. 54).

International cooperation for common goods There are two aspects of Hurd’s work that invite an interpretation in terms of the common good. First, the aspect analysed in terms of the motivation to uphold a system because of its perceived legitimacy allows one to identify that system as a common good of cooperation among international agents. And second, the symbolic aspect highlights the dimension of shared meaning and allows one to identify the meaning shared by the cooperators as a good in common that they would wish to sustain. Bruce Cronin has recognized this connection to the common good and made it explicit in his study Institutions for the Common Good (2003). An earlier book Community under Anarchy. Transnational Identity and the Evolution of Cooperation (1999) published his research into the history of relations between states in which he challenged the predominant assumption that anarchy is the determinant characteristic in international relations. Proper to the account of anarchy is a description of the pursuit of security through a state’s maintenance of military strength, as the preparedness to defend itself and its interests. Evidence from history shows that the pursuit of security in international relations is more complicated than assumed. On Cronin’s reading

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of the evidence, different forms of security arrangements have been developed within an anarchic context. Anarchy appears as permissive rather than restrictive, allowing for the formation of international community. Cronin’s thesis is that ‘. . . international anarchy does not constitute a single form with relatively fixed features but rather is a condition within which many variations can be arranged. This allows for the formation of transnational communities without a prior transformation of the anarchical environment’ (1999, p. 8). His survey of international relations in Europe in the nineteenth century leads him to conclude that various forms of community emerged with a view to providing security. In each case, the significant variable was the recognition of a shared transnational feature that allowed the acknowledgement of a common interest (Cronin, 1999, p. 125). His later book extended the argument by considering evidence from international protection regimes in the twentieth century as examples of institutions that emerged to serve common goods. ‘International Protection Regimes (IPRs) are multilateral institutions designed to protect clearly defined classes of people within sovereign states. They are initiated by either international organizations or coalitions of states, whose members make general commitments to defend the target population against violations either by their governments or other segments of their societies’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 3). The regime to safeguard the rights of refugees is a case in point. The states that commit to protecting the rights of refugees cannot be understood to be pursuing their self-interest in this matter; nor are they caring for their own citizens thereby, but for the citizens of other sovereign states, whose rights are in jeopardy and threatened by their own governments. The emergent practice of IPRs is not adequately explained by the dominant theory in IR, since ‘most of the benefits from a multilateral protection system are not enjoyed directly by the participating states or their domestic constituents, but by the collectivity of states as a whole, and more specifically, by the protected population’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 9). Such phenomena challenge the dominant orthodoxy in IR: ‘It is not clear from neoliberal theory why states should be concerned with the welfare of foreign populations. The institutionalist emphasis on expected utility and reciprocal benefit eliminates the need to consider questions of obligation or justice’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 9). Alternative explanations appealing to obligation or justice are crowded out by the predominant models. But the limitations of those models appear in such instances as Cronin surveys, since the neoliberal theories are unable ‘to explain any common interest that cannot be reduced to the sum of individual interests’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 9).

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To make sense of a phenomenon such as an IPR, Cronin argues, it is necessary to postulate actors in international relations who are concerned both to preserve the international order itself and to maintain a certain quality in that order. Such agents must calculate that ‘while these institutions may not provide direct benefits to participating states, they help to advance the broader goals of an international order by helping to maintain a preferred social or political framework through which states can cooperate and compete on the international stage’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 4). The shared interest in supporting a particular style and quality of international order is a common good of the cooperating states. Cronin introduces the term deliberately to account for this kind of behaviour by states, which is not reducible to pursuit of self-interest (Cronin, 2003, p. 12). As with the study of the earlier cases of security regimes, the emergence of community among states and the socialization in the relevant norms follows on the recognition of the communality of interest and the realization that this communality is worth preserving and strengthening. Cronin is realistic in qualifying such emergent common goods of international cooperation: in any case, it depends on the perspectives and values of the partners and there is no guarantee that the common good of their partnership will be fair, just, or as good as it might be. The approach is empirical in identifying not an ideal set of values, but only the dominant or prevailing values of the collaboration (Cronin, 2003, pp. 13–14). However, the point is that, without a shared conception of what is worthwhile, however limited or inadequate, the collaboration of states in such IPRs is not intelligible; it cannot be explained purely in terms of self-interest. Cronin proposes a robust use of common good language in the international context. ‘I consider any regime that is created primarily to promote, preserve and/or extend the principles of a regional or global political order or collectivity (as opposed to providing direct benefits to its members) to be an institution for the common good’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 20). Among modern examples of such institutions he lists the International Criminal Court, United Nations specialized agencies such as that for refugees, and UN peacekeeping missions. These also exemplify what he means by the principles of a collectivity, since human rights, humanitarian assistance and peaceful resolution of disputes identify core values linked to the purposes of these institutions. Again, paralleling the earlier acknowledgement that security regimes fostering communities of states could emerge within the anarchic framework without radically revising it, Cronin here emphasizes that the commitment to

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the common good of an international order capable of protecting categories of vulnerable persons is compatible with the persistence of aspects of an Hobbesian anarchic state of nature, as also with dimensions of Kantian cosmopolitan world community (Cronin, 2003, p. 21). In other words, his proposal of a common good in international order is not a rejection of either realism (coercion-compliance) or liberalism (self-interest-benefit), since these continue to be relevant to explaining aspects of international relations. The aspect of common good of community adds a dimension, which, if overlooked, deprives IR theory of the possibility of adequately explaining important elements of actual practice. This brief consideration of the work of two theorists in IR calls into question the adequacy of the traditional analysis in polarizing the perspectives of anarchy and the common good. Both Hurd and Cronin want to challenge the predominance of Realism with its emphasis on anarchy within the discipline. But they do not wish to deny the relevance of the concept or the corresponding reality. On the contrary, Hurd advocates a better understanding of anarchy as permissive, even of the emergence of new forms of legitimate authority. And Cronin’s work also explores how anarchy might accommodate community so that in place of a juxtaposition of realism and the common good, there might be a complementarity of approach.

International order as a common good The dominant strand in traditional IR is variously named as Realism, or Anarchism in the work of Cronin and Hurd. Another contemporary scholar of IR, Andrew Hurrell, names this strand as pluralism, highlighting its recognition of a plurality of centres of power and authority (Hurrell, 2007). Working independently of Hurd and Cronin he develops an account of global order as a rival to pluralism, in which shared meanings and shared values play a fundamental role. He is even willing at points to suggest that the international order that he analyses should be seen as a common good. Hurrell is director of the Centre for International Studies at Oxford University. His book, On Global Order: Power, Values, and the Constitution of International Society (2007), gives a clue to the question he pursues in the subtitle: Is the order of international society constituted primarily by power, or by values? Like Cronin and Hurd, he does not deny the significance of power and the corresponding explanatory models, but he counters the predominance they have enjoyed in the discipline. He rejects the view that the international system can be understood solely ‘as a

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decentralized, anarchic structure in which functionally undifferentiated states vary only according to the distribution of power’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 16). As an alternative view he suggests the international system be seen as a ‘structure of common understandings, rules, norms, and mutual expectations’. Shared understanding and norms have evolved historically, and continue to change, so that the study of this order requires attention to these dimensions of meaning. Even the advocates of the material power view must account for the fact that actors in IR appeal to concepts of sovereignty, just war-making and legitimacy, which are not given directly with the power system. The concepts and norms that now play a significant role in the relations between states include human rights, the rejection of slavery, and of military aggression. These and others like them have not always played this role, but have emerged in history and have come to shape the arena in which states relate to one another. Even those players who are inconvenienced by the ideas of rights and so would wish to ignore them cannot do so: they are obliged to factor them into their calculations about the likely consequences of their actions and policy choices. Hurrell appeals to Quentin Skinner for support for his conclusion that ‘[e]ven if we suspect that appeals to political ideas, to legal principles, and to moral purposes are no more than rationalizations of self-interest, they may still affect political behaviour because of the powerful need to legitimate action’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 19). There are significant implications arising for the discipline of IR from this view of the reality it studies. Since normative ideas are seen to play a major role in the practice of politics, the discipline must be prepared not only to understand those ideas and their origins and implications, but must also be willing to engage in critical assessment of them. That will open up the possibility of engaging also in the debates about the adoption of values and principles of global justice. The discipline is faced with a challenge concerning normativity, and Hurrell advocates embracing the challenge (Hurrell, 2007, pp. 19–20). At the same time, he warns against a naïve assumption that there already exists a worldwide community united in acceptance of values and sharing principles to regulate disputes. He accepts that a pluralist may address valid questions to a proponent of liberal solidarism concerning the adequacy of her position. One question seeks an account of the organization of power in the emerging institutions of global governance. Another asks about the mechanisms to ensure that the interests that are secured in the new institutions are not simply those of a single state or a group of states. A third refers to the tension between value-based approaches, namely those oriented to mediating between different values, and those oriented to promoting a single set of values. In other

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words, the concerns with power and its limitation typical of the pluralist view continue to have validity in a postpluralist international context (Hurrell, 2007, pp. 55–6). The plausibility of these concerns about power makes the pluralist position continually attractive, but Hurrell advances five reasons why a retreat to pluralism is not a reasonable option. The first concerns the complexity of the challenges that have to be faced. Social, environmental and technological changes require responses that cannot be left to the initiative of individual states. Climate change, water shortage, computation and communication technologies, genetic manipulation and security issues are just some from a long list of concerns that require coordination (Hurrell, 2007, pp. 292–3). A second concern points to the increasing unreality of the assumption behind the pluralist predication of a world made up of national states. Migrations and dislocations mean that the world is not composed of homogeneous societies, nations each in their own states. Identity politics and struggles for cultural recognition are not matters for individual states alone (Hurrell, 2007, p. 294). Pluralists rightly resist the idea of a world state, and point to the dangers of centralized power, but the emergent need for some combined power required for the maintenance of order and for the promotion of common moral purposes nonetheless demands attention (Hurrell, 2007, p. 295). This was his third reason. A fourth cites global inequalities, and the fifth points to the growing demand for justice. People are increasingly aware of inequalities and injustices and seek responses that are coherent. There is no going back on the enormous changes that have taken place in the ‘normative structure of international society as it concerns human rights, humanitarian intervention, and the responsibilities entailed in the idea of sovereignty’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 296). Accordingly, Hurrell distances himself from the kind of division of labour that would have restricted concern with the ‘good life’ to the internal politics of discrete societies, while seeing international politics and diplomacy concerned only with survival, ‘life itself ’. He identifies this position with the work of Martin Wight (1966). Even the concessions made by thinkers such as Terry Nardin are deemed insufficient. Nardin is prepared to consider states as collaborating in joint ventures, but basically, he continues to see international society as a practical association in which states participate to pursue their interests (Jones, 2010, p. 119). Those states remain ‘independent and diverse political communities, each devoted to its own ends and its own conception of the good’ (Nardin, 1983, p. 9; Hurrell, 2007, p. 298). Echoing Wight’s confining of the good life to the agenda of national politics, Nardin suggests that sharing a conception of the

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good can be a feature of national politics alone and not of international order. But this is precisely the point that Hurrell disputes. Developments to date have made it irrevocable that involvement in international institutions entails a sharing of values and commitment to common norms. This does not mean that there is only agreement: the terms of continuing cooperation have to be negotiated, but those terms are not only minimalist. As Hurrell formulates it, if ‘there is no viable retreat to pluralism and to a world in which each group can sit undisturbed under their own fig tree, then negotiating the terms of limited coexistence is no longer adequate. We are condemned instead to negotiate the terms of ongoing and evermore extensive forms of collaboration and active cooperation’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 299). Beyond what is needed for limited coexistence, cooperation in international affairs takes ever more extensive forms, and for that the agreement sought must go beyond the particular issues of concern to explore common meanings and potentially shared values: ‘the changing character of governance increases the importance of reaching agreement on the common purposes and common values which influence how problems within issue-areas are to be understood, how issue areas are themselves constructed, and how they are linked’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 299). Hurrell is willing to use the term ‘common good’ in referring to these common purposes and common values on the agenda of international negotiation. They seem to comprise a common good in a double sense. There is the common good that is already achieved, already realized in the practices and shared expectations that have emerged in international relations. And there is the common good naming that which is striven for, which is still being sought, as the objective of deliberation and negotiation. In the first sense, Hurrell points to how the institutional structure of international society has established practices of governance beyond the state. Not only institutions and practices, but also ideas, values and principles have become established in IR. It is in relation to these that Hurrell suggests we can speak of a world common good: ‘the post 1945 period has seen the emergence of a range of internationally agreed core principles – respect for human rights, prohibition of aggression, and self-determination – which may underpin some notion of a world common good and some broader base for evaluating specific rules’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 304). But in a second sense of common good, the openness to discovery is sustained by the heuristic nature of the concept of an objective common good. ‘Thus, the density, scope, and complexity of the agreements, norms and rules in which states and societies are already enmeshed provide some basis for positing a community interest or an agreed set of purposes and values against which

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new substantive norms may be judged – the idea of an objective community interest or of the common interest of global society’ (Hurrell, 2007, p. 304). This heuristic as a guiding principle will be required because the admission of the importance of shared meanings and shared values should not obscure the reality of conflict, difference of value commitments, and tensions arising from disputed distributions of power. Hurrell advocates an approach that both takes seriously the constructivist point about the role of ideas in shaping political and legal affairs, and also sees it as part of its task to engage in the battle of ideas and negotiation of solutions to conflicts. Its core intuition is ‘that in an international society characterized by deep and fundamental value conflict and by the constant difficulty of managing unequal power, a viable and stable international legal order must be built around shared processes and procedures, accepted understandings of legal sources, and a commitment to diplomatic negotiation and dialogue’ (Hurrell, 2007, pp. 312–3).

Contested Meanings Andrew Hurrell, like Ian Hurd and Bruce Cronin, advances a notion of the common good. Can the concept fulfil the functions identified directly or indirectly by these authors? Is it sufficiently robust? The fact that we can name the agenda as an attempt to find the common good does not entail that we know already what the outcome of the debate should be. Institutions are not just instruments: they also generate their own goals and agenda, and can wander from their founding identity, purpose and ethos (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004). Working with institutions requires attention to meanings: purposes, values and ethos. Meanings are the shared experiences, understandings, judgements and values in a community of persons, and they normally find expression in legal constitutions, statutes, regulations, vision and mission statements, logos, mottos, websites and other media. Not every articulation is successful: there can be incompleteness, anachronism, distortion, deception and self-deception. Accordingly, care for the common goods that institutions both are and serve requires persons who pay attention to those meanings and their expression and undertake the necessary work of community and team development, formulation and implementation. Care is needed, not only because shared meanings are fragile and liable to erosion, but also in particular because they are controverted. This is a battleground, and care for the common goods of communities requires

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competence and willingness to engage in dispute and conflict. Two words: ‘dispute’ meaning disagreement about ideas and judgements; ‘conflict’ meaning incompatible goals and purposes, persons and groups with differing ends that are incompatible and mutually frustrating. There are many debates at the global level in which shared meanings are contested. A prior debate concerns the language to be used in dealing with global issues. To take one example: Is it always appropriate to use the word ‘international’ to refer to global issues? Casually we might spontaneously use it in this way, but some familiarity with contemporary debates would warn us to be careful, and where necessary to be precise in use of terms that are acquiring technical meanings. Peter Jones reports on the distinction drawn by Hedley Bull (2002, pp. 9, 13) between a ‘system of states’ and a ‘society of states’. An international system presupposes a measure of contact and impact upon one another. But states ‘form an international “society” only when they are “conscious of certain common interests and common values” and conceive themselves as “bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions”’ (Jones, 2012, p. 112). Bull’s distinction is between two ways of understanding the relations between states. But there is another usage of the notion of world community, which does not presuppose that the participants are primarily or only states. World community as a term embraces much more than the relations between states, and includes individuals, NGOs and IOs. Does ‘international’ mean a society of states, or global community? The significance of these distinctions appears when the problem of Guantanamo Bay, and all that is associated with that place – detention without trial, torture, extraordinary rendition – is addressed. Lawyers for the United States defended its treatment of detainees in terms of its preferred vision of the international arena as inter-state relations, rather than world community. Our language of human rights has been shaped through the historical processes of protecting subjects against their rulers, citizens against their governments. Tom Bingham’s book on the Rule of Law (2010) summarizes the history. John Locke’s influential arguments had to do with the protection of people’s rights against the encroachments of state power. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent Conventions are public promises and commitments of the minimal standards to which States will bind themselves in their treatment of their people, subjects or citizens. This background of the protection of individuals’ rights allowed American lawyers to argue that people have rights

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against their state (and by extension against other states) by virtue of being subjects/citizens of a state. This was indeed the common understanding of rights in the period after World War II when the human rights regime with its conventions was being shaped. ‘The post-war political order was still rooted in the primacy of state sovereignty, and liberal theory viewed human rights as being derived from citizenship’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 178). It was part of the reason why the United States ‘refused to support any of the work of the UNHCR until 1956’ (Cronin, 2003, p. 183). On this reading offered by the American lawyers, combatants in war are due the protection of the Conventions to the extent that they fight on behalf of their state or an alliance of states. Al Qaeda terrorists do not wear the uniform of any state, they do not fight on behalf of a state, and so, it is claimed, are not covered by the relevant Conventions. To the extent they lack a citizenship that would entitle them to protection by a state, they also lack the protection normally secured by Conventions on human rights. This stance is consistent with the aforementioned view of IR as inter-state, a society of states. These are legal arguments, to be countered by arguments from the alternative position, advocating a world society, in which individual human persons as such count, not just as being citizens of some state. The alternative position might be labelled universalism, or cosmopolitanism. This example demonstrates that the much-celebrated language of human rights does not reflect meaning shared. The meaning of human rights is disputed and the domain of action to secure rights is conflicted – people involved want different things, and they can’t all get their way. If there is a global common good to be secured, it will require care that when it is spoken about, all involved use the terms in the same way. Without a shared meaning for terms such as international society, these concepts will not be a resource for the handling of the relevant conflict. But this is only one example of contemporary conflicts: other disputes, about the International Criminal Court (ICC), and about preventive war are also linked to the polarization in opposed positions, a society of states, international society, versus global society, a world community. Both of these cases of the ICC and preventive war exhibit a curious phenomenon. For all the problems with international collaboration and use of institutions, we do not expect cooperating institutions to embrace double standards. It is commonly accepted that universalizability will be a necessary characteristic of justified norms. But in international affairs at present there seems to be an explicit espousal of double standards. This is not just an anomaly, but reflects a fundamental dilemma at the heart of international relations. It has

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to do with real tensions in how we describe and interpret our world. It is the contested terrain of shared meaning. The United States attempted to have an exemption for itself, its citizens and officials including soldiers written into the constitution of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The United States opposed the ICC because it refused to create a special immunity from prosecution for US nationals. It viewed the creation of the court as contributing to the construction of world society, and so having a measure of authority and sovereignty beyond that of individual states. It had two reasons for opposing the Court. First, the Court can exercise jurisdiction over citizens of states who have not consented to the Rome Treaty, and the act of resisting the Court on these terms allows US nationalists to sustain the image of America as the example of an independent self-governing republic that is to be imitated by other states; and second, when criminal justice is exercised through the institutions of International Society – and not of a world community – the United States can control the constitutive processes in ways that are consistent with its identity and its particular interests (Ralph, 2007). Other ad hoc Courts such as those in Sierra Leone or the Balkans are more to America’s liking – they do not have any sovereign authority other than that conferred by the contracting states. A similar exceptionalism is noticeable in the discussion of the proposed doctrine of preventive war. The notion of pre-emptive war is already familiar: a country aware that it is about to be attacked does not have to wait for the attack to happen to be justified in taking military action to defend itself. Pre-emptive war-making presupposes an unmistakeable imminent threat. Preventive warmaking does not assume an imminent threat, but rather a remote, longer-term strategy of arming and preparing for war. Is a country that sees itself as the potential target of such preparations justified in military action to prevent the escalation to full war-making? The debate regarding preventive war ‘revolves around the question of whether a generalized permission to wage preventive war sets the threshold for warfare too low’ (Luban, 2004, p. 241). If we tolerated preventive war as permissible, wouldn’t that lead to more frequent outbreaks of war-making? (Rengger, 2008, p. 958). But in the discussion it turns out that American proponents of preventive war are not advocating that any country that felt itself a potential target could permissibly take preventive military action. They make the case only on behalf of the United States. ‘The American exceptionalist argument rejects the assumption that a doctrine of preventive war needs to be

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general. It is . . . a doctrine that the US is entitled to wage preventive war, not that every state is’ (Luban, 2004, p. 241). Americans are nationalists who jealously guard their own sovereignty, and from their point of view, Europeans are willing to relinquish or subordinate their sovereignty to secure a ‘Kantian paradise’ of perpetual peace and dispute resolution through legal rules. But, from the American point of view, Europe relies on the protection provided by American military might. This gives the United States the entitlement to see itself as exceptional. It is the sheriff, keeping the peace on the frontier, who is for that reason more likely to be targeted by the outlaws. And so, it is claimed, permissions are possible for the sheriff that are not possible for those enjoying the protection of the sheriff. The sheriff is not to be bound by the same pacific rules he is trying to enforce. We face a startling dilemma. There is a tension between a perspective that considers the world as made up of independent, autonomous states, of which the United States is one, and a perspective that regards the United States as a sheriff keeping order because it is effectively the single superpower. Which direction will the United States move in its self-understanding? Nicholas Boyle sees this tension as potentially disastrous for our world. ‘A world in which there is a hyperpower cannot be a world of nations: America cannot be a nation, because it has no equals; there is nothing else like it in the world, and you cannot be a nation on your own’ (Boyle, 2010, p. 40). According to Boyle, the United States and we are victims of an obsolescent fiction that the world consists of self-determining nations (2010, p. 51). While holding to the view that the United States is the finest example of a self-determining nation, and so a model for others, the United States at the same time interprets its own role as exceptional, entitling it to a mode of action appropriate to its super-power status. Which way will America jump in the increasing tension between these two options? Boyle suggests that ‘in the course of the historical process either the American religion will finally evaporate in the conflict with reality or it will prove so deeply rooted that rather than abandon it America will condemn the world to disorder, violence, poverty and environmental degradation’ (2010, p. 82).

Conclusion The shared meanings that mediate our social and political existence can both constrain our possibilities, and facilitate extraordinary feats of cooperation.

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The work of Hurd, Cronin and Hurrell demonstrates the importance of shared ideas in generating and sustaining cooperation beyond the level of the nation state. But then the disputed areas of human rights, international justice and preventive war-making illustrate the fragile nature of the meaning shared, and the importance of addressing shared meaning itself as a common good. The realm of ideas about the nature of global relationships, whether interstate, or world community, is a more ultimate battleground than those of the legal cases or even the military contests. How we shape the common good of shared meaning will condition possibilities for future international order. As recent history has made clear, we must be cautious about what we can claim to know. New situations arise, such as Guantanamo Bay, which generate rival interpretations of what previously had seemed to be a matter of consensus, namely human rights. We thought we were in agreement, we thought we had a good in common, shared meaning in the understanding of and commitment to human rights, sustaining our cooperation. The dispute shatters our complacency and we find we need to work again at finding agreement on the meaning of human rights to be the basis of our cooperation. We are once again in a struggle to find the common good. There is no higher instance to which we can appeal in order to construct the desired consensus. We might be able to announce that we seek the common good, but that does not tell us what the common good in any disputed matter requires. In this case, the ‘common good’ is heuristic, referring to what we have yet to discover (Lonergan, 1957; Riordan, 2008). Where does the common good lie in this debate between the society of states view and the world society view? We don’t know what is the global common good, whether it entails a society of states, the American position or world community. But, in fact, there seem to be other options on the table. Hurrell and others of the English School continue to rely on a state-based position, but not one presupposing pluralism or anarchy, but rather a shared horizon of meaning and value in which expectations, and actions, are shaped. So there would seem to be at least two possible state-based positions, corresponding to Bull’s distinction. There is a system of states (which the United States would seem to favour), and there is a society of states in which participating states share an understanding of the common interests for the sake of which they collaborate. Depending on the interests involved, there can be several such societies of states. In contrast to all state-based perspectives, there is the universalist, or cosmopolitan position, which discounts the role of states, seeing instead a community of individuals. In Chapter 10, I will review the position of those who would wish to espouse

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‘universalism’, world society, the global, over against the state-based position. But for now it is sufficient to have identified this fundamental issue on which there is an absence or deficiency of shared meaning. In the next chapter I will review some experiences of successful international and global cooperation, and considering the manner in which game theory has enabled understanding of these successes, I will ask whether the pursuit of shared meaning as common good is necessary.

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Collective Action for Global Objectives

The debates surveyed in the previous chapter point to the need for a conception of common goods when attempting to explain the behaviour of states that cooperate in creating and maintaining international institutions. While the traditional categories of coercion and self-interest continue to be relevant, experience shows that the notion of interest involved must be more comprehensive than simply an interest in receiving some benefit to itself. Revealed here is a common misconception, that self-interest is identical with selfishness. Admittedly, there is an ambiguity in the term self-interest: it can mean the interest that someone (a self) wishes to pursue, and it can mean the interest anyone (a self) has in receiving some benefit to itself. The dominant tendency in the culture as noted earlier in the first chapter to reduce value to valuing has its counterpart here in the psychologizing of interest. Anyone who pursues an interest is presumed to be personally gratified when that interest is realized. And this experience of gratification is precisely the benefit that even public-spirited persons are assumed to want when they work for the benefit of others: they realize their own interest at the same time. This position is sometimes known as psychological egoism. Applied to the actions of states, the assumption that states act in their own interests entails that those interests benefit themselves. This seems to be the position taken by Karl Sigmund who understands selfishness as self-interest and explores how far cooperation in human populations can be explained in terms of self-interest. He is sceptical of the possibility of explaining cooperation in terms of a common good: ‘It is hard to understand how self-interested agents cooperate for their common good’ (2010, p. vii). Opposed to that are the views of Cronin and others presented in the previous chapter who argue on the basis of empirical studies that cooperation for a common good is not only possible, but also that it does occur. Having an interest in international

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stability motivates the cooperation of states in maintaining some institutional order, which is deemed useful for that stability. It is not necessarily the case that any one cooperating state derives an immediate benefit to itself from its cooperation. The regime for the protection of refugees was a case in point. Hence the argument pointed to the usefulness of a conception of common good to explain the cooperation of states in maintaining such regimes. Indeed, they have an interest in upholding the regime of refugee protection, but it is not necessarily a selfish interest.

Game theory’s explanation of cooperation This perspective on the common good in international relations might be challenged from the game theoretic analysis of collective action. Much has been done to explore the rationality of cooperation in terms of game theory, which relies on a postulate of self-interest. Can game theoretic explanation alone suffice to account for the examples of cooperation adduced in favour of common good analysis? If so, is talk of the common good superfluous? And if not, what exactly does it add to the analysis of collective action provided by game theory? As will be noted further, international cooperation is often for the provision of public goods. The discussion in Chapter 4 explored the differences between the categories of public good and common good, and also the possible ways in which the different categories might be related. Following from that discussion, it will be possible to formulate the position as follows: international actors have as their common good the provision of a public good. Will such a position exhaust the role of common good in international cooperation? It is also possible to formulate the question in the other direction: What does the game theoretic analysis of collective action add to our understanding of common goods? Perhaps also it is necessary to query the assumption that states know what is in their interests. Do states need instruction as to where their interests lie? Is it useful for them to be informed of common goods in which they have or might have interests? Would a more complete comprehension of their own interests necessarily include such common goods as are necessary for successful achievement of those interests? It is standard practice in various disciplines to attempt a bottom-up explanation of social cooperation without having to presuppose altruism or some normative basis. This has been fruitful, in particular, in socio-biology,

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in explorations of the possibility of the evolution of cooperation. Axelrod and Dawkins are familiar authors whose works in this area have been fruitful (Axelrod, 1984; 1997; Dawkins, 1989). This approach has been generalized in social science under the label of methodological individualism, and consists of the attempt to explain complex social interaction and coordination in terms of the interests of the individuals involved. What is significant about such attempts, in themselves valid and informative, is how they must abstract deliberately from what participants in forms of cooperation say about themselves and about what they do. The self-understandings of cooperators are left to one side, neither denied nor affirmed, in the attempt to explain their activity. In this chapter I do not enter into a debate on this point, but instead seek to learn from what the modelling of cooperation in terms of self-interested actors has revealed about forms of collective action. This is fruitful in its own right, and significant for my broader question about global common goods. Instead of a guiding question of the form: ‘to what extent can international and global cooperation be explained in terms of the self-interests of the actors?’ my question seeks to identify the goods in common for the sake of which the partners in many forms of collaboration undertake joint action. The discussion begins with public goods. Collective action is required in many contexts, but in particular for the supply of public goods, which of their nature cannot be provided by means of markets. No one is thought to have the incentive to bear costs in providing goods or services for which they will not be remunerated: the non-rivalrous and non-excludable features of public goods means that beneficiaries cannot be made pay their share. Where systems are in place to provide the relevant goods and to extract payment in some form from beneficiaries, there remains the possibility of free-riding. This is the temptation to enjoy the benefit without bearing a fair share of the cost. Commonly in game theoretic analysis of these problems, the Prisoners’ Dilemma game is used to illustrate the difficulties. This has been very useful in illuminating certain problems, especially in collective action involving many people who are strangers to one another. Where collaboration has a cost, it is assumed that people are motivated to attain the benefit of collaboration without having to bear the cost. There is then a dominant strategy on the part of each participant. This affects both a decision to cooperate initially, and a decision to abide by agreed-upon systems for handling the problem. An example, already introduced in Chapter 4, is where the representatives of national fishing industries meet to agree on limitations on fishing so as to secure dwindling fish stocks. Each participant calculates that if all the others agree to cut back on their planned catch, then her

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community or fishing crew can afford to continue fishing, since one exception won’t jeopardize the outcome. In fact, they recognize that whatever the others do, each one does best by non-compliance. If all the others refuse to cut back, then one country or crew achieves nothing by cutting back alone; and if all the others agree to cut back, then the lone country or crew can afford not to cut back since their single exception will not be noticeable in the overall outcome. However, if each participant being individually rational thinks this way, then the result will be tragic, leading to the destruction of the resource that was to be saved. This has become known as the tragedy of the commons, a tragedy in a double sense. First, as a regrettable loss of a valued resource; but second, in the dramatic sense of tragedy, the loss comes about as a consequence of a fatal flaw in the character of the protagonist who inevitably brings about destruction for herself or her country. The fatal flaw in this case is the limitation of individual rationality by which interacting individuals, by each calculating in terms of costs and benefits to themselves, bring about a worse outcome for all of them, even though a preferable outcome was achievable. The significant points in this analysis of the game known as the prisoners’ dilemma are the dominant strategy linked to individual rationality, and the tragedy of the commons. As an analysis, it is popular among some political philosophers who see in it a version of Hobbes’s argument for the need for a sovereign to enforce agreements. In his memorable phrases, Thomas Hobbes had remarked that ‘nothing is more easily broken than a man’s word’, and that ‘words without the sword have no strength to bind a man’ (1996, p. 88). Any agreements such as non-aggression pacts that people might make with one another could not be a basis for trust, since the temptation presented to a possible aggressor by the defenceless trust of another would count as a positive provocation in the absence of a fear of consequences. This was the rational core of the argument in favour of the MAD (mutually assured destruction) strategy of the nuclear deterrent in the Cold War and against any unilateral disarmament. And so Hobbes argued for the need for a powerful sovereign who would enforce the mutual non-aggression pacts of covenanting persons by the threat of punishment in the event of violations of the covenants. Hence the sword that alone would make words a basis for trust. It is debated whether the prisoners’ dilemma accurately replicates Hobbes’s analysis, but that is not my focus here (Hampton, 1986). At least it overlaps in acknowledging that the initial problem is not resolved but simply transposed by the creation of agreements or regulations. The question for the individual shifts from ‘do I have reason to cooperate?’ to ‘do I have reason to abide by the agreement to cooperate?’

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For those who follow Hobbes in recognizing that the solution to coordination problems in cases like the prisoners’ dilemma requires an executive authority with power to enforce regulations, the comparable international coordination problems inevitably lack a solution to the extent that there is no international sovereign capable of enforcing the rules. As a result, it is to be expected that where there is no effective joint authority, problems exhibiting the form of the prisoners’ dilemma will not be resolved at the global level. Game theoretic analysis is not confined to the exploration of the prisoners’ dilemma, however. Other forms of interaction are modelled in games theory and these may reveal that problems are inappropriately identified as instances of prisoners’ dilemma. Also, the experience of successful coordination at the international level suggests that analysis of the rationality involved must rely on more sophisticated models than that presented by individual rationality.

Successful coordination Commentators point to significant cases of successful international cooperation in the solution of shared problems. One notable success story in recent years is the achievement of a worldwide ban on chloroflourocarbons (CFCs) in the Montreal Protocol on Ozone Depleting Substances. The CFCs used in pressurized spray cans and other products such as refrigeration had been identified as a significant cause of the depletion of the ozone layer. Since all were vulnerable to the dangers, all participants had an interest in achieving a solution, but that in itself would not be sufficient to ensure the effective collaboration of all. In this case there was no opportunity to free-ride, since a convenient and cheap alternative to CFCs was available, and so no country had the opportunity to benefit by continuing to rely on CFCs in their exported products. Roger Scruton warns against taking the success story of the Montreal Protocol as a guide to what might be possible in limiting greenhouse gases (GHGs) (2012, pp. 305–307). The contrasts between the two situations are considerable. In the case of CFCs the benefits were immediate, but with GHGs the impact from action would not be felt for decades. Also the alternative technology to CFCs was available, there was no major change of lifestyle required, or other significant costs to be borne. Scruton highlights the differences, not to dismiss the possibility of further treaties, but to learn some important lessons about what kind of treaties are possible and enforceable, and what can be gained from them. He is particularly vehement about the waste of resources and international

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goodwill in attempting to bring about international treaties that are in principle unachievable. However, the Montreal Protocol is not the only example of successful international collaboration. Other instances of effective and successful collaboration have been in areas in which the adoption of agreed standards facilitates international trade and travel as well as health and safety. Examples include the adoption of new standards for the regulation of international banking, the standardization of norms and signals in air traffic control, agreement on conventions for measurement of time and space (Barrett, 2007, p. 150). So much of what has been achieved is taken for granted and hardly noticed, although the crises or catastrophes that gave rise to the need for regulation have often been headline news. A case in point is the agreement on standards for the design of oil tankers securing their hulls in the event of collisions or groundings, preventing the kind of oil-spill catastrophes such as those caused by the grounding of the Torrey Canyon in the English Channel in 1967 and the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989. The existence of global standards is itself a transnational public good, and indeed, one that is inexplicable without reference to shared meaning. While success stories are taken for granted, the pressing need for coordination in relation to problems such as the prevention of further nuclear proliferation, the control of threatening pandemics and the mitigation of the effects and possibly also the causes of climate change remain in need of solutions (Barrett, 2007, p. 1). The problems are of various types and they require different forms of collaboration in response. Todd Sandler (2004) offers an in-depth analysis of the various models. He wants to draw attention to the variety and complexity of forms, reacting against the over-simplification that would see all collective action failures in terms of the single model of the prisoners’ dilemma. He does allow himself one generalization, namely that ‘collective action failures associated with public goods and other scenarios, rest on a single basic premise: individual rationality is not sufficient for collective rationality. That is, individuals who abide by the tenets of rationality may make choices from which the collective is left in an inferior position’ (2004, p. 18). His formulations here are nuanced and careful: there is no suggestion that individuals, whether persons or states, always or necessarily rely on individual rationality (calculation of pay-offs to self in proportion to costs to self). Neither is there an implication that individual rationality is the only relevant form. But exclusive reliance on individual rationality leads to undesirable outcomes for groups and for the whole.

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A range of model games An example of an alternative situation and model of collaboration is given with the case of two countries that suffer a major forest fire on their common border. Neither party has sufficient resources to deal with the crisis, so there is no way in which one country can free-ride completely on the contribution of the other. At the same time, neither is willing to commit resources without the collaboration of the other, since to do so would be extremely wasteful. To deal with such a problem they have to cooperate. This form of cooperation is labelled an assurance game, and it can be a model of collaboration in relation to some problems of security or pollution (Sandler, 2004, p. 27). Sandler underlines the difference between this scenario and that of the prisoners’ dilemma: there is no dominant strategy specifying what any player should do, regardless of what the others do. It is still possible for there to be a failure of collective action, but not because one party was being rigidly rational in calculating their interests. Another feature of assurance games of this type is that they require a threshold of contribution for the required effect, but neither party alone is in a position to supply the threshold quantity. A familiar image of this kind of situation is of two oarsmen in a boat, which is so designed that it cannot be rowed by one alone: each requires the contribution of the other, and any one’s efforts alone are futile. Another model labelled the coordination game offers a contrast in that the only contribution that is required is the first effective intervention. Sandler gives the examples of research teams attempting to find a cure for some illness such as cancer, or isolating bacteria or identifying viruses. Once one team is successful, the efforts of others with regard to solving the same problem are useless. This is not to deny the value of confirming findings by reproducing experiments, or extending the research, or discovering further applications, but even as these possible counter-examples are explored it becomes clear that once a given step in a process has been completed there is no further advance in the process to be gained by repeating the step. In terms of global public goods such as public health, the significance of this situation is evident, but perhaps more so in relation to tackling international terrorism, or discovering relevant intelligence. Once one country has been successful in identifying and eliminating a common threat, others can have no reason to contribute, and any prior efforts must count as wasted. As with the assurance game with which it has some similarities the coordination game has no dominant strategy. We have seen an example of this model in operation in Luban’s discussion of the role of the United States

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in security matters. He draws attention to the perception of the United States as sheriff in the world and European countries as living under the protection afforded by the sheriff (Luban, 2004, p. 241). The contrast between the assurance and the coordination games can be drawn as follows. The assurance game has a contribution threshold that no collaborating party alone can provide. By contrast, the coordination game requires only one contributor, but there is no certainty which of the contributing parties will be successful. In a fourth game, the chicken game, continuing from a coordination scenario in which it is clear that any of the contributors alone can provide what is required and the contribution will be sufficient to succeed. In this case, the temptation facing each participant is to sit it out and wait for the other or another to make the necessary move. This is a risky strategy, and hence is called the ‘chicken game’. Should no one act in time then the loss ensues for all concerned. An example given by Sandler is the certain threat of flooding posed to a city on a river bank. It is known that sandbags piled sufficiently high on the river bank will protect the city. Who is going to do the work? This is the familiar scenario recounted in the aphorism: ‘Somebody should have done it; anybody could have done it; but nobody did it.’ When nobody acts, all lose out, but the one who takes it upon himself or herself to act bears costs from which all benefit (Sandler, 2004, p. 28). Sandler emphasizes that the four models surveyed are not exhaustive and all types allow of exceptions. ‘Although general principles of collective action encapsulate useful rules of thumb, the richness of underlying game forms means that any general principles must have many exceptions. The study of collective action permits far less generalization than usually presupposed’ (Sandler, 2004, p. 29).

Types of global coordination problems Where Sandler surveys the models of collaboration, Scott Barrett classifies the kinds of problems for which collective action solutions are needed. This complements the study of the games and facilitates the task of matching the model to the situation. He provides a classification of the ways in which global public goods are supplied. Some global public goods can only be supplied if every country cooperates; there are many global public goods that require participation of certain key countries only; and there are some such goods that require only a single best effort. As regards the provision of the resources, some

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can be achieved simply by mutual restraint, whereas most require financing (Barrett, 2007, p. 2). Corresponding to these types of goods, Barrett notes the various forms of participation. As an example of a ‘single best effort’, Barrett mentions the science fiction scenario of a threatening asteroid, which might be diverted from its collision path. Only a well-resourced country with sufficient weaponry would have a chance of success. He suggests that such a country would be prepared to defend the world all by itself, even if other countries did nothing. The consequences of doing nothing where something and enough could be done to avert the crisis are horrific. By contrast, with the single best effort scenario requiring just one country to act, there are other global public goods that require the contribution of every single country. In such cases the success of the whole depends on the performance of the weakest. Barrett refers to these as weakest link cases. Examples are smallpox eradication, and other public health projects, which require total coverage, including that of the least well resourced. Where countries lack the necessary means they can be provided with incentives or assistance. This is not just a matter of motivating the weakest: the collaboration of all others depends on their being assured that all will participate. ‘Each country had an incentive to play its part in eradicating the disease once assured that all other countries would play their part’ (Barrett, 2007, p. 3). The list of examples of public health challenges is familiar: malaria, SARS, HIV/AIDS, TB, polio. In the challenge of eradicating Guinea Worm disease Sudan qualifies as the weakest link. Barrett provides ‘weakest link’ examples in the case of the emergence of resistant strains of malaria, originally in areas of low transmission such as Cambodia and Columbia, but now prevalent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Appropriate combination therapies to deal with the new strains are more expensive, and so less attractive to individual sufferers. ‘Given that preventing resistance offers essentially no benefit to the single user monotherapy will be the treatment of choice to individuals. Indeed, it is already being used in Asia, which is also where . . . resistance is most likely to emerge’ (Barrett, 2007, p. 175). The weakest links are identifiable and so it is clear what must be done. But who is to do it? Barrett is in no doubt that leadership will have to come from ‘big, rich and powerful states’, but he wonders about the incentives that such states might have to benefit weaker and poorer countries. What would motivate the effort required? Barrett concludes by speculating about a wider range of motivations than are normally presupposed by game theory. He suggests that ‘the motivation for intervention by the big, rich and

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powerful states must change – to reflect compassion rather than self-interest’ (Barrett, 2007, pp. 188–9). With these remarks Barrett seems to be taking a stand in the debate mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: ‘How much cooperation can be explained in terms of the interests of the partners?’ In suggesting limits to the motivating power of self-interest he resorts to a normative appeal, briefly labelling it ‘compassion’. This seems to be a resort to a different kind of reason or motivation. Perhaps there is another way of looking at this, without having to juxtapose self-interest – considered the domain of the rational – and compassion – in the domain of the passions. The notion of interest can be expanded, so that the interests of partners in collaboration need not always be understood simply in terms of pay-off to themselves. The argument of the chapter on common goods and public goods above made the case for such expansion.

Conclusion This survey of the literature on collective action has provided two sketches that are useful for a study of global common goods. On the one hand, relying on Sandler, there is an overview of the forms collaboration can take, as modelled in various games. These different scenarios reveal the different possible stances of participants, who are in a position to calculate the most appropriate contribution for themselves. On the other hand, relying on Barrett, there is an overview of the kinds of problems arising at a global level, which require international cooperation. These two sketches are evidently complementary, but not exactly correlated. The different kinds of problems require different forms of collaboration, but there is no convenient one-to-one correspondence between problems and forms of collective action to solve them. Barrett’s hypothetical scenario of the threat of an asteroid approaching the earth imagines every country in jeopardy, the strongest as well as the weakest, and it requires ‘the single best effort’ solution provided by the country with the resources to make it. That country’s motivation is clear, since the threat affects it as much as any other. The threat posed by Guinea Worm does not affect all equally, and while it cannot be removed without contribution from the countries resourced to make it, their motivation to do what is needed is unreliable. That is because, as seen from the perspective of the assumptions of game theory, their own interests are not in jeopardy. And yet, as Cronin’s analysis of International Protection Regimes

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showed, such collaboration does take place in international relations, when wellresourced countries collaborate to maintain forms of cooperation to manage problems without expectation of direct benefit to themselves. Consideration of the forms of rationality operative in such collaboration requires expansion of the concept of interests guiding states in their international relations. Cronin’s suggestion was that the discipline required the concept of common good to explain these phenomena. Game theory can not only contribute clarity to the analysis, but it can also constrain the analysis if its assumptions about the nature of interests in collaboration are adopted without criticism. The more critical stance appeals to a broader perspective in which goods irreducible to the narrow interests of participants can be considered and relied upon in explanation. John Rawls’s treatment of the Law of Peoples discussed in the next chapter exemplifies this more expansive approach.

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The Law of Peoples

In Chapter 6, I surveyed some debates within the study of international relations (IR) to illustrate how the concept of common good can play an important role in the analysis of global politics, freeing the relevant disciplines from domination by the bipolar model of chaos or contract. Realists assume that states relate to one another in terms of their interests, so the creation of order between states each of whom is pursuing its interests, depends on contractual agreement between them, entered into and maintained to the extent that they foster those interests. Work by Cronin and Hurd and others suggested that while the Hobbesian state of nature analysis will always have its place, there are also occasions when states cooperate for the sake of some good in common, which transcends a sense of their own exclusive good. This was one pathway to conceiving of global common goods. John Rawls’s publication of The Law of Peoples (1999a) stimulated debate in IR as much as in political philosophy. It warrants attention in its own right, but for my purposes it is doubly interesting because of its explicit use of the concept of common good in relation to the analysis of global order. On first reading, Rawls’s use of the notion of common good poses a challenge for my project of conceiving of global goods in common, because his analysis of ‘the common good idea of justice’ seems to relegate this idea to a secondary or less-thanadequate status. On further consideration, however, Rawls’s work is found to be useful, and relevant to the discussion of global common goods in two senses. The first is in the way his vision of global order provides us with a conception of a possible global political good. But the second is in the use of the notion of common good in characterizing certain peoples as having a common good sense of justice. This implies a distinction between liberal notions and common good notions that needs to be challenged. But first it is necessary to introduce The Law of Peoples and outline the subsequent debate relevant to the global common good.

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Not individuals but peoples What shocked many of his liberal and cosmopolitan interpreters was Rawls’s rejection of their project of extending his ideas in A Theory of Justice (1999c) from the national to the global scale. In his first proposals of justice as fairness, Rawls considered the kinds of principles of justice that might be chosen by rational individuals to regulate how the major institutions of a society would distribute fairly the benefits and burdens of social cooperation. The rationality of the choosers was assumed, but in addition it was secured by assuming them to be placed behind a veil of ignorance, removing from them every element that might introduce prejudice into their choice of principles. Rawls could then postulate that whatever principles were chosen by such choosers in the original position, being freed from bias, and acting rationally in pursuit of interests of which they were ignorant, would be guaranteed to be the principles of justice. And as many commentators remarked, by means of his ingenious hypothetical device of the original position, Rawls succeeded in affirming the standard liberal values of liberty and equality. His first principle, the liberty principle, ensured that the same set of liberties and rights would be secured for each member of the society and that the set of rights would be as large as possible. The second principle accepted that some inequalities might be tolerable, but only on two conditions, first, that the additional rewards (status, wealth, income, etc.) were attached to positions open to everyone under fair conditions of equality of opportunity, and second, that the existence of the inequality redounded to the benefit of the worst-off in society. Rawls’s justice as fairness provoked a lively debate with the result that Rawls’s thought became paradigmatic for liberal thought in general, even if more libertarian critics such as Robert Nozick (1974) challenged the assumption that the second principle (equality) could be compatible with the priority of the liberty principle as advocated by the theory. Communitarians wishing to take issue with the individualism of liberalism in particular focused their challenge on Rawls’s work. Michael Sandel and others queried the assumptions of the theory that rational choosers might be capable of choice of justice principles in abstraction from their belonging to some society, stressing how the very capacity to choose is formed by education in a set of relationships in which one is enabled and empowered to discriminate between options with reference to an appreciation of the goods at stake (Sandel, 1982; Gutman, 1985). The point here is not to follow once again the long-drawn-out debate between liberals and

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communitarians – summarized and concluded by contributions such as those of Taylor (1995b) and Walzer (1990) – but to underline how Rawls’s theory was taken as typically liberal and indeed paradigmatic for liberalism (Mulhall and Swift, 1996). Cosmopolitans had relied on the liberal credentials of Rawls’s theory to extrapolate it from the local, national scale, and apply it to questions of global justice. If the members of a society could be imagined as represented by choosers behind a veil of ignorance in the original position, then why not also representatives of all humankind faced with a choice of principles for global justice? Deprived of the knowledge of their racial, ethnic, national, cultural, religious or indeed social and economic background, such choosers could be relied upon to choose principles fair to all. As will be discussed later in the chapter on cosmopolitanism, this application of Rawls’s theory generated obligations to ensure liberty and equality to all fellow human beings. Stressing the individual human being and not the individual citizen as the agent and recipient of justice, duties of justice were deemed to be owed to all. In Pogge’s case, this style of argument focused, in particular, on the role played by western and northern societies in creating and maintaining a set of global institutions that kept many in poverty, and so the duties formulated by Pogge gave pre-eminence to the negative duties not to harm, and then to redress the harm expected, or already caused by one’s actions (Pogge, 2005). When Rawls eventually turned his mind to the questions of global justice, he did not follow the line of his disciples by applying the elements of his theory on the larger scale. While he retained the device of the original position, he did not imagine it populated by individuals representing other individuals, but by representatives of peoples. This surprised many who expected the paradigmatic liberal would have to take individuals as his basic units for considerations of justice. Another surprise followed when it became apparent that Rawls was not confining the matter of global justice to relations between liberal societies according to shared liberal principles. His application of theory to the global scale was not in a series of steps, from first showing what is involved in becoming a liberal society (on the criteria of the two principles of justice), to then establishing just relations between liberal societies, again according to liberal principles. Rawls was not making liberalism a pre-condition for inclusion in global just relations: he included in the ambit of global justice non-liberal societies. He called such societies that were not based on liberal principles ‘decent societies’. This dismayed many liberals on discovering that Rawls was prepared to tolerate illiberal regimes, and that he did not declare it an obligation of global

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justice to establish and implement liberal principles, especially the securing of the full range of human rights in every regime. Philip Pettit argues, however, that to understand Rawls’s position it is important not to focus on his apparent anti-cosmopolitan stance, but to appreciate his social ontology, his account of peoples, as framing his discussion (2006, p. 54).

Peoples and societies, not states Why does Rawls not write immediately about states and the relations between states? One reason is that he does not consider states to be moral agents, at least as they are traditionally understood in the post-Westphalian settlement (Reidy, 2004). States are assumed to have the twin powers of sovereignty, ad intra in being free from interference from other states in relation to their treatment of their own citizens, and ad extra, in being entitled to pursue national interests, by war against their neighbours, if necessary. The traditional doctrine of sovereignty entails that sovereign states are subject to no higher power, and that they are autonomous in how they deal with their population. On both counts, with regard to the possibility of limiting the entitlement to make war and enabling humanitarian intervention, Rawls seeks to subject the powers of states to the law of peoples, and so states as presently conceived are not the appropriate participants in an original position designed to generate that law. Peoples, assumed to have a capacity for moral agency, to be exercised through the institutions of their states, are internally united by shared sympathies based on whatever reason, whether shared history, or cultural or racial identity. The distinction between states and peoples is drawn in terms of Rawls’s familiar concept pair of rational and reasonable. ‘How far states differ from peoples rests on how rationality, the concern with power, and a state’s basic interests are filled in. If rationality excludes the reasonable . . . then the difference between states and peoples is enormous’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 28). The reasonable has to do with conformity to the criterion of reciprocity in dealing with other societies. ‘A difference between liberal peoples and states is that just liberal peoples limit their basic interests as required by the reasonable’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 29). The distinction drawn by Rawls here is relevant to the consideration of the meaning of self-interest when explaining cooperation between states, as discussed in the previous chapter. Some peoples are capable of imposing limits on their interests as to be pursued by their states in relationship with other states, and the limits in question confine the state to acting within the bounds of reciprocity. That is,

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non-exploitation and non-domination should characterize the relationships of such states. In appealing to the reasonable, Rawls draws on his work in Political Liberalism (1996). Where the cosmopolitans draw from Rawls’s early work in A Theory of Justice for the application of his thought to global justice, Rawls himself most often draws parallels with the later work of Political Liberalism (1999a, p. 67). For instance, he compares the respect owed to citizens’ comprehensive doctrines within reasonable pluralism, provided that those doctrines support the political conception of justice, with the toleration of non-liberal societies, provided that those decent societies uphold the law of peoples and meet certain conditions of respect for rights (1999a, p. 59). Alastair Macleod stresses this parallel, drawing attention to the legitimate role of comprehensive doctrines in the non-political domestic context and suggesting that the acceptance of the self-understandings of hierarchical decent peoples is equally legitimate in the context of the relations between peoples in the global context (2006, pp. 139–40).

Well-ordered peoples: Liberal and decent Rawls relies on a basic distinction between well-ordered peoples and those who are ill-ordered or badly ordered. There is a parallel distinction between ideal theory and non-ideal theory. Among those peoples who are not well ordered, there are benevolent despotisms, some others are outlaw, outside the international society of states, and in relation to these the non-ideal theoretical consideration of the justice of war-making is relevant. Burdened societies are such as are unable to provide for the basic needs of their members. In their case, non-ideal theoretical considerations of distributive justice arise. Among the category of well-ordered peoples, liberal peoples succeed more or less in institutionalizing the respect owed to persons as free and equal, and incorporating this respect in legal and political arrangements. They acknowledge the broad range of human rights and include these in their legislation. The second group in the category of well-ordered peoples are labelled decent peoples. These differ from liberal societies in that, while they show respect for persons, and institutionalize that respect in their law and government, the respect for persons is not based on the liberty and equality of all, but is given in accordance with an understanding of the dignity of persons corresponding to a conception of their common good. As Rawls

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sees it, principles of justice in decent societies are derived from a common good sense of justice, but that would not include the broad set of rights, for example, to freedom of conscience, freedom of speech or other valued liberal rights (Nickel, 2006, p. 265). Similarly, equality in a liberal sense would not be achieved, but equality according to some other standard. An example used by some commentators points to the role of women in certain traditional societies, in which they receive a measure of respect, but not equality of opportunities for participating in public or commercial life.

The original position Rawls distinguishes between the use of the original position device in the domestic case, and in the case of the law of peoples. For liberal societies, the device can ground an argument in both instances, but for decent societies it does not apply to domestic justice, but only to the law of peoples (Rawls, 1999a, p. 70). At the global level, Rawls imagines two applications of the original position. In the first case, the participants are representatives of liberal democratic peoples who are charged with determining the principles that should regulate their relationships. This they do behind a veil of ignorance, without knowledge of the particularities of the society they represent, but sharing the conviction that peoples are free and equal as members of the society of peoples. Just as with the outcome of the original position in justice as fairness, there is no great surprise in the content of the principles generated. They are as follows: 1. Peoples are free and independent, and their freedom and independence are to be respected by other peoples. 2. Peoples are to observe treaties and undertakings. 3. Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them. 4. Peoples are to observe a duty of non-intervention. 5. Peoples have a right of self-defence but no right to instigate war for reasons other than self-defence. 6. Peoples are to honour human rights. 7. Peoples are to observe certain specified restrictions in the conduct of war. 8. Peoples have a duty to assist other peoples living under unfavourable conditions that prevent their having a just or decent political and social regime. (Rawls, 1999a, p. 37)

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These principles are recognizable as standard elements of the international legal order as it presently exists. However, Rawls’s point is that they are the principles that free and equal peoples would willingly agree to in an original position behind a veil of ignorance. The second case of the application of the original position is when Rawls discusses extending the law of peoples to decent societies. He has to show ‘that they accept the same Law of Peoples that liberal societies do’ so that it can be the regulative basis of the relations of liberal and decent non-liberal peoples with one another. His strategy is once again to rely on the original position as a strategy of representation, imagining the case in which representatives of decent societies (decent hierarchical peoples) behind a veil of ignorance have to choose principles to regulate their relationship with one another (Rawls, 1999a, pp. 63–4). They would end up choosing the same law of peoples that the representatives of liberal societies chose, since their substantial interests are best achieved under such conditions as are guaranteed by those principles. He summarizes his arguments as follows: ‘decent hierarchical peoples do not engage in aggressive war; therefore their representatives respect the civic order and integrity of other peoples and accept the symmetrical situation (the equality) of the original position as fair’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 69). Care for protection of human rights, and the well-being of their members, assurance of their security and independence, interest in the benefit of trade and in forms of assistance between peoples will be among the interests that motivate them to endorse the law of peoples. In answering objections that there is an inconsistency in liberal peoples tolerating illiberal, though decent, peoples Rawls emphasizes the importance of toleration and concludes: ‘The Law of Peoples assumes, however, that decent hierarchical peoples exist, or could exist, and considers why they should be tolerated and accepted by liberal peoples as peoples in good standing’ (1999a, p. 79). Peter Jones comments that ‘both types of people can belong to the same international society and can recognize the same law of peoples. In particular, even though decent peoples do not accord a free and equal status to individuals within their societies, they can accord a free and equal status to peoples’ (Jones, 2010, p. 123). These uses of the original position device seem to presuppose occasions when representatives of liberal peoples and representatives of decent hierarchical peoples separately deliberate about the principles of their foreign policies. However, Rawls also suggests possible occasions when representatives of both types of well-ordered peoples might be imagined in an original position, for instance, when setting up unions of states such as

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the European Union. ‘It is natural to envisage future world society as in good part composed of such federations together with certain institutions, such as the United Nations, capable of speaking for all the societies of the world’ (1999a, p. 70).

A common good idea of justice A decent society is said to have the following features: It has a common good idea of justice that assigns (some) human rights to all its members; it has a hierarchical structure including channels of consultation; there is a form of representation in this structure such that the grievances of those whose rights are denied or violated can be communicated and acted upon; its judges and administrative officials in the legal system act on the belief that the law incorporates the relevant idea of justice (Rawls, 1999a, p. 88 et passim). But what is this relevant idea of justice that is qualified with the notion of common good? Rawls elaborates on it in just a few paragraphs, but it is best understood by contrast with what is assumed in a liberal understanding of justice. The common good idea of justice is said to secure human rights for all members of the people, but it is noticeable that Rawls restricts the list of rights secured. Commentators have added the qualifier ‘basic’ to mark this restricted list. Rawls himself writes of ‘human rights proper’. Rawls is at pains to spell out a list that will not appear politically parochial, in some way linked to the Western tradition, and so many of those rights that appear in familiar lists such as that of the Universal Declaration are omitted. Liberty of conscience is secured, but only to a sufficient degree to ensure freedom of religion and thought (Rawls, 1999a, p. 74). Rawls remarks that this might not be ‘as extensive nor as equal for all members of society; for instance, one religion may legally predominate in the state government, while other religions, though tolerated, may be denied the right to hold certain positions. I refer to this kind of situation as permitting “liberty of conscience, though not an equal liberty”’ (1999a, p. 65 n.2, and §9.2). Rawls asserts that decent hierarchical societies can take many forms, and he attempts to imagine one such society with his description of ‘Kazanistan’. Such societies he imagines are corporatist or associationist: ‘members of these societies are viewed in public life as members of different groups, and each group is represented in the legal system by a body in a decent consultation hierarchy’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 64). This is a crucial point of difference to liberal societies, in which persons are seen as citizens first and as possessing equal basic rights as

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equal citizens. In decent societies, persons are viewed first ‘as responsible and cooperating members of their respective groups’ (1999a, p. 66). A common good idea of justice is said to take into account the fundamental interests of everyone in society. It is noticeable that those interests are not what individual persons declare to be their interests, but as these interests are identified by the society (Rawls, 1999a, p. 67). In contrast with a liberal conception of justice, the common good idea of justice is said to be a minimal idea, but sufficient so that societies so regulated can be deemed to qualify as members of a reasonable Society of Peoples (1999a, p. 68). They qualify, because they are well ordered in terms of their own conception of justice that accommodates basic human rights and provides some degree of participation through consultative structures in the government of the people. With this ‘common good idea of justice’ Rawls does not want to invoke some common aim or project of a people. This is an important qualification. He explicitly distinguishes between a common aim (and does not assume that decent peoples have one) and the common good idea of justice. A common aim or end ‘is what the society as a whole tries to achieve for itself or its members. The common aim or end affects what persons receive and their well-being’ (1999a, p. 71). Justice is concerned with the manner in which this end or aim is pursued. But whatever the policies or special priorities of the government may be, justice qualifies with its requirements the pursuit of that policy, which must be consistent with the steps of the consultation procedure and the protection of the rights and duties of the members. To repeat the point: with the notion of a common good idea of justice, Rawls is not invoking some assumed shared aim of a decent people. What then does he mean by the expression? In a telling footnote, Rawls seems to add a further distinction, between a liberal conception of political justice and a common good idea of justice, but his remark at the same time seems to dissolve the distinction he is making: ‘Well-ordered societies with liberal conceptions of political justice also have a common good conception in this sense: namely, the common good of achieving political justice for all its citizens over time and preserving the free culture that justice allows’ (1999a, p. 71, n.10). This use of ‘common good’ as applicable to liberal societies reveals a complexity if not equivocation in Rawls’s thought. At one point he seems to say that all well-ordered societies, including liberal ones, have a common good conception of justice, in some sense. Consistent with this, he qualifies the common good conception of justice in liberal societies as being concerned with political justice, while that of decent societies is concerned with what are regarded as ‘the important

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interests of all members of the people’. The contrast then is not so much between a common good conception and a liberal conception, but between two instances of common good conceptions, one that applies criteria based on respect for certain rights and inclusion in consultation and the other whose criteria are liberal principles of justice. How representative is this passing remark made in a footnote? Since Rawls more usually attributes a common good conception of justice only to decent peoples, perhaps his generalizing remark is a momentary lapse? Which is the more defensible usage of the term? It seems to me that the more inclusive meaning is preferable, and is not to be read as a lapse of concentration, because it is actually consistent with Rawls’s thought. It is noticeable that Rawls insists that there is no intrinsic connection between the existence of a common aim or shared purpose, and what he has labelled a common good sense of justice. With the clarification that the common good idea of justice in the narrow sense is not about achieving the common aim (should there be one), but rather about how the pursuit of the common aim conforms to requirements of respect for persons and for methods of consultation and representation, then it is clear that this is where the contrast with liberal conceptions of justice and liberal societies lies. Accordingly, the restricted meaning is actually unhelpful. The important contrast is between the different requirements of justice, and in decent societies, the relevant requirements of justice do not derive from a common aim. This is underlined by Rawls explicitly recalling his earlier remark when outlining his hypothetical decent society ‘Kazanistan’: ‘Here I reiterate that a consultation hierarchy does not strive simply to maximize achievement of the common aim. Rather, it tries to maximize this achievement consistent with honouring all the restrictions enshrined in the procedure of consultation itself. This is what distinguishes a just or decent society from others’ (1999a, p. 77, n.20). The contrast is elaborated further in comparing democratic institutions based on ‘one citizen one vote’, a principle of democratic equality of citizens, with the type of consultation typical of a decent consultation hierarchy. ‘Persons as members of associations, corporations and estates have the right at some point in the procedure of consultation (often at the stage of selecting a group’s representatives) to express political dissent, and the government has an obligation to take a group’s dissent seriously and to give a conscientious reply’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 72). The rational interests of persons in decent societies are represented by their groups, and Rawls recalls Hegel’s preference for such a form of representation that would be more protective of the bonds of community and

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represent broader interests of political life over the atomistic perspectives of democratic individualism. In a liberal society, one is represented as an individual citizen; in a decent society, one is represented as a member of some group or association or corporation. The more inclusive reading is supported also by Rawls’s use of the term ‘common good’ elsewhere in his writings. Although he has never addressed the topic directly to make it a substantive part of his thought, he has many passages in various texts, even from A Theory of Justice, in which he remarks on the common good. For instance, in a telling interview in the American journal Commonweal (1998), reproduced in John Rawls: Collected Papers (1999b), Rawls was asked how he understood the common good, and how it might be spoken of in a liberal constitutional democracy where pluralism is a fact. His answer to this and related questions is marked by care to avoid adopting any theological or philosophical position that would put him at odds with other thinkers. He answers nonetheless that all who support a liberal constitutional democracy can be said to have a common good, no matter what comprehensive commitments they otherwise have. ‘Different political views, even if they’re all liberal, in the sense of supporting liberal constitutional democracy, undoubtedly have some notion of the common good in the form of the means provided to assure that people can make use of their liberties, and the like’ (1999b, p. 622). He even went on to suggest that this might provide one definition of the common good. Such a definition would be broad enough to allow for the affirmation that liberal societies have a common good. Rawls directly addressed the common view that liberalism excludes a common good: You hear that liberalism lacks an idea of the common good, but I think that’s a mistake. For example, you might say that, if citizens are acting for the right reasons in a constitutional regime, then regardless of their comprehensive doctrines they want every other citizen to have justice. So you might say they’re all working together to do one thing, namely, to make sure every citizen has justice. (1999b, p. 622)

He stresses this point in repeating that while citizens have many different interests, as citizens of a liberal regime they strive together for a single end, justice for all. This is more a prescriptive than a descriptive account, relying on a strongly normative account of what constitutes being a citizen of a liberal constitutional regime. The relevant normative demands on citizens and the officers of such regimes are spelled out in Rawls’s discussion of public reason, on which I will say more subsequently.

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Continuing to explore what Rawls has to say about the common good, I draw attention to a few passages in A Theory of Justice (1999c), first published in 1971. In Chapter IV on ‘Equal Liberty’, Rawls devotes a section to possible constitutional restrictions on participation in political life, in the course of which he refers to the common good in a way that is echoed in the later writings. Government, he writes, ‘is assumed to aim at the common good, that is, at maintaining conditions and achieving objectives that are similarly to everyone’s advantage’ (1999c, p. 205). In light of this perspective, he suggests, John Stuart Mill was prepared to envisage limitations on political liberty in favour of securing equal liberty of conscience or liberty of the person. Since such limitations would have to be justified to those in the disadvantaged position, Rawls is interested in what might serve as such a justification. He follows Mill’s consideration of the possibility of giving greater weight to those with superior wisdom and judgement, since their competence and expertise will be of greater benefit to the common enterprise, which is securing justice and the common good (1999c, p. 204). He returns to the topic of the common good in a later paragraph discussing the priority of liberty. Once again, in passing, he offers a definition of what he means by the term: ‘The common good I think of as certain general conditions that are in an appropriate sense equally to everyone’s advantage’ (1999c, p. 217). These passages are consistent with the more inclusive reading of the remarks in The Law of Peoples, and allow that the notion of a common good conception of justice cannot be ascribed solely to decent peoples. Liberal peoples also have a common good conception of justice. The difference between the two consists in the different views of what would be to everyone’s advantage, what are the different conditions and arrangements to ensure justice that are striven for in both kinds of societies. In liberal peoples, the common good will include liberal principles and the full range of liberal rights, based on the understanding of what is to the common advantage of persons as free and equal. In decent peoples, their common good will include respect for persons as members of their groups and associations and as entitled to the enjoyment of a range of human rights, including rights to have one’s views and grievances represented. The inclusive reading suggests that there is a common good of international society and it is the common good secured by the Law of Peoples. The Law of Peoples is presented as ‘a realistic utopia’. With this expression, Rawls signals that while his proposal is built on a philosophical analysis that formulates principles and standards and that therefore tends to be idealistic, it is also calculated to deal with a world in which there are various degrees of reasonableness, and so it

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is a practical project to achieve a peaceful and just coexistence. The inclusion of decent peoples as acceptable partners in the community of peoples because they can be seen as moral agents represents a move away from an idealized utopia, which presupposes that all participant societies are fully liberal. He writes of a reasonably just society of peoples, not a perfectly just society of peoples, reflecting his view that there are degrees of reasonableness, and the lacking of some aspect of reasonableness in a society’s order is not sufficient reason to dismiss that society from partnership in the global project. Rawls is not claiming that a reasonably just society of peoples already exists, or that it is likely to come about any time soon, but he presents it as a possibility that might motivate the efforts to realize it. This is his reason for outlining the law of peoples as a possibility, so that these ideas might be adopted and shared by participants in global affairs, and the diffusion of these ideas and their adoption by people will increase the probability of their implementation. ‘For so long as we believe for good reasons that a self-sustaining and reasonably just political and social order both at home and abroad is possible, we can reasonably hope that we or others will someday, somewhere, achieve it; and we can then do something toward this achievement’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 128). Towards the end of his argument in The Law of Peoples, Rawls appeals for a fostering of shared meaning as a precondition to achieve and sustain a reasonably just global order. What people actually believe to be possible will condition their action and participation in politics. While his discussion has raised the question of the possibility of a just global order, he acknowledges the gap to implementation. ‘Rejecting the idea of a just and well-ordered Society of Peoples as impossible will affect the quality and tone of those attitudes and will determine our politics in a significant way’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 128). The negative case makes the point most clearly: participants in a world of foreign relations who expect that those relations will always be a matter of power play will both create the situation they expect by behaving in terms that must call forth corresponding reactions of defence or aggression in the power game and so they will find their expectations confirmed in reality. Rejection of the idea of a reasonably just global order will block its realization because of how ideas shape and determine practice. Rawls underlines the importance of shared ideas of the possibility of a reasonably just society of peoples. Along with his conviction of the importance of shared meaning, his specification of the task of political philosophy is crucial – to contribute to the articulation and dissemination of the ideas that will make possible the reasonably just social order. ‘By showing how the social

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world may realize the features of a realistic utopia, political philosophy provides a long-term goal of political endeavour, and in working toward it gives meaning to what we can do today’ (1999a, p. 128). In concluding an early response to Rawls’s work, Charles Beitz adverted to the dynamic operative in Rawls’s argument. Contrasting positions based on the assumption of agents’ self-interest with positions based on the assumption of principle, Rawls is positioned with the latter. Beitz interprets Rawls as arguing against ‘the skepticism of the self-designated realists. The argument proceeds, not by exhibiting the philosophical errors of the skeptics, but by bringing forward a substantive vision and showing why this vision is both attainable and worthy of our support’ (Beitz, 2000, p. 696). Beitz’s identification of the substantive vision confirms the argument I present here that Rawls is operating with a vision of the good, which emerges at times, but is never explicitly acknowledged or defended. It is valuable, however, in identifying what might constitute the common good of global collaboration.

Global common good In his elaboration of the standards of justice applied by decent peoples, Rawls relied on a notion of a common good conception of justice. In the discussion of this earlier usage, I have pointed out how unhelpful this term is for distinguishing between liberal and decent peoples. On Rawls’s own admission, both types of people rely on a common good conception of justice; however, they express their different conceptions in different requirements of justice as elaborated, for instance, in terms of differing lists of basic rights. Common good conceptions were not derived from a supposed shared aim. Still they articulated a shared standard of what would be appropriate and not appropriate in the treatment of persons to whom respect is due. With the conclusion of his argument, Rawls can be read as proposing a common good in a different, more expansive sense. The vision of a reasonably just society of peoples where their foreign relations with one another are based on acceptance of the law of peoples captures the common good of well-ordered peoples and their citizens. The sharing of that vision, the acceptance of the standards corresponding to it, must be a major part of the good in common, which those concerned with sustaining good order would have to make the objective of their deliberate action and interventions in the relationships between peoples.

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The earlier discussion in Chapter 3 of the possibility or impossibility of a political supreme good, a summum bonum, provoked by the comments of William Galston, now receives a new contribution and from a surprising source. The flourishing of a world society of peoples cannot be mapped out in detail in advance of its achievement in some form, but the structures and forms of government that are obstructive and destructive of good order can be identified. By contrast, as Rawls has attempted in The Law of Peoples, it is possible to imagine what would be necessary to ensure a reasonably just society of peoples so that each can pursue its own vision of the good in freedom and security, while at the same time allowing its neighbours the same opportunities. This reading of a more comprehensive understanding of a global common good is supported by a number of critics who discuss Rawls’s vision. Catherine Audard (2006, pp. 60–62) suggests that the desire to avoid the elevation of a local conception of justice and the good life to a universal standard is what motivates Rawls’s approach in The Law of Peoples. The accusation of cultural imperialism is frequently made against liberal political theories, and critics have also argued that Rawls’s late work has also succumbed to the same error. Audard points to the ‘liberal illusion’, which is inclined to exaggerate liberalism’s achievements, and the associated danger of intellectual domination, which she sees as closely linked with political domination. On Audard’s reading, Rawls is aware of the danger and is conscious that an imposition of liberal standards on the relations between states would be a violation of liberal principles. In particular, the principle of reciprocity that plays such an important role in Rawls’s Political Liberalism, when transferred to the relations between peoples, requires respect for cultural and national identities. In the national context, reciprocity requires of public officers and citizens that they generate reasons for their proposals that are accessible to fellow citizens, regardless of the comprehensive doctrine they may espouse. Being reasonable requires the willingness not to insist on one’s own convictions, but to appeal only to reasons that belong in the political conception of justice, the content of the overlapping consensus. Similarly, for liberal peoples engaging in the pursuit of peace and stability in international affairs, they will avoid insisting on liberal principles out of respect for the moral status of the other peoples. This is the global version of reasonable pluralism (Audard, 2006, pp. 67–70). Rawls remains a liberal in his thought, and so he does not adopt a particularist or nationalist position, but at the same time he is reluctant to be completely universalist. Audard suggests that Rawls’s path between the two poles of universalism and particularism is ‘to define a conception of international justice

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from the point of view of peace and stability, not from that of the creation of a just world order’ (2006, p. 72). The overriding values to be attained are those of stability and peace, and it is for the sake of these that the respect for the moral status of decent non-liberal peoples warrants acceptance of lower standards of justice and human rights within the corresponding states. As David Boucher formulates it, liberal peoples recognize that it is not always reasonable to be rational: ‘Unlike states, “liberal” peoples limit their rational self-interest to what is reasonable’ (2006, p. 22). Peace and stability between peoples as the overriding concern places these values as the common good of global order. Rawls’s theoretical work provides an intellectual support for what Cronin and Hurd have established on the basis of empirical and historical study, namely that the creation and maintenance of regimes of international order function as a common good of the participating peoples.

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Global Justice as a Global Common Good

At the conclusion of the previous chapter, Rawls’s vision of a global common good as a world characterized by peace and harmony was contrasted with a vision in which the achievement of justice would be the overriding goal. Global justice is cosmopolitanism’s main focus of concern, and so in this chapter I will consider it as a global good in common. It would seem to be obvious that justice on a global scale must be a good for all, but it is worth recalling the issue identified in the first chapter about the abstract language of value in comparison with the concreteness of goods to be pursued in action. A value like justice may be articulated in principles and norms, but ultimately it must translate into specific goods being provided to specific people in a certain manner. The universal of global justice becomes controversial when the entitlements and obligations of particular people have to be specified. The reference to obligations provokes a challenge about the consistency of focus on goods as distinct from norms. Is the project of counterbalancing the dominant emphasis in global ethics on obligations by analysis of global goods in common compromised by the survey of global duties? The cosmopolitanism debates are largely about obligations, so how do they fit in the discussion of goods, and specifically global common goods? While much of the material of this chapter is concerned with the obligations of justice beyond borders, the link to goods is found in the nature of the difficulties exposed in the debates. Concern with global justice leads to questions about the appropriate institutions to deliver goods. Which are the goods to be distributed in global justice, and what institutions would be appropriate means and conditions for delivering the goods? Suggested concrete goods are listed as follows: the satisfaction of the minimum needs of every human being; the securing of the basic rights of everyone on the planet; the achievement of justice in the reparation for damage done by those who exploited the resources of others or continue to benefit from past exploitation;

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the creation and maintenance of appropriate institutions to ensure the delivery of those goods; and so on. Also there are valuable insights of relevance to global common goods from the reflection on the identity of the ‘we’ for whom the goods are goods in common. So while the review of cosmopolitanism is largely concerned with obligations the chapter contributes further clarification about goods in common at the global level. Cosmopolitanism can be seen as a response to the challenge posed by Peter Singer in 1972 in addressing our obligations towards others in need: ‘If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it’ (1972, p. 235). Singer’s key idea is that each human being has equal moral worth and that equal moral worth generates certain moral responsibilities that have universal scope. Famously, Singer is utilitarian in his basic approach, so that, crudely put, obligations are to increasing the good and reducing the bad in the world. What constitutes good and bad is also simply determined, in terms of pleasure and enjoyment on the one hand and pain and suffering on the other. Accordingly, Singer has no hesitation in claiming that, since evidently death and suffering are bad, and it is in our power to prevent death and suffering without thereby sacrificing anything else morally significant, we ought, morally, to do so. The moral norms arising from such an ethical stance would be very demanding and would require significant sacrifices from the wealthy peoples of the world. That the response to Singer’s challenge has been so limited raises further questions, not least about the motivating power of any moral theory as such, and about the adequacy of Singer’s analysis in the first place. Cosmopolitanism is a response to Singer’s challenge, and also to the further questions about the requirements of adequate theory. This movement in moral and political philosophy highlights the obligations we have to those whom we do not know, and with whom we are not intimate, but whose lives touch ours sufficiently that what we do can affect them. As the name suggests, its focus is on ‘the content and weight of obligations beyond national boundaries, relative to the content and weight of those obligations to which national and state boundaries give rise’ (Brock and Brighouse, 2005, p. 3). Different positions are taken on the content and weight of the relevant obligations. Commentators distinguish between strong and weak forms of Cosmopolitanism. In the strong form, it is claimed that there are no society-wide principles of distributive justice that are not also global principles of distributive justice. Whatever we owe in justice to our fellow citizens we owe in principle at least also to all fellow humans, no matter how distant or different from us, presuming that our actions can in fact affect

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them. If I have a moral obligation to come to the aid of my immediate neighbour whose house has burned down, I have the same obligation to an inhabitant of Sumatra who has also lost her dwelling in a forest fire, on condition that there is something I can actually do to assist her. If aid and relief organizations such as the Red Cross create the necessary channels for the flow of aid, then the condition is met. Weaker forms of cosmopolitanism are content to affirm that there are some extra-national obligations that have some weight, but of weaker content and weight than the obligations owed to fellow nationals. For instance, while in certain circumstances I would have the moral obligation to allow my neighbour and her family to move into my spare room if they have nowhere else to go in the immediate aftermath of the fire, my obligation towards the Sumatran victims might be covered with a small donation to the Red Cross collection.

Types of cosmopolitanism Another method for classifying types of cosmopolitanism is offered by Simon Caney. While acknowledging that the key idea of cosmopolitanism is the fundamental equality of persons, all are equally citizens of the world, different authors focus on different implications of this basic insight. One group focuses on the scope of principles of justice; a second group provide accounts of the nature of the good life; and a third group is mainly political in considering what institutions would be appropriate for global citizenship (Caney, 2010, p. 146). Thomas Pogge is an example of the first approach. Because they are global citizens, persons are understood to have entitlements and responsibilities under universal principles of justice. Pogge’s thought will be explored in more detail, but his three basic elements illustrate the point of Caney’s classification (Caney, 2010, p. 149). This position is characterized by individualism – human beings or persons, and not societies or states, are the ultimate units of concern; universality – every person matters without exclusions; and, third, generality – the approach advocates concern for everyone (Pogge, 2008, p. 175). The second approach might be understood in contrast to multiculturalism, which might be thought of as pointing to the entitlement of each person to pursue fulfilment according to the terms and visions appropriate to her own culture. The cosmopolitan vision of the good life, however, must draw on and combine ideas from different cultures. Caney identifies Appiah, Waldron and Hollinger as exemplifying this approach (2010, p. 157). The third political or legal cosmopolitanism explores the kinds of global political and legal institutions

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there should be to realize its key insights. Debates focus on the desirability or possibility of world government and on the various institutions that might realize global governance. David Held with his discussion of a global parliament fits in this group (Held, 1995). Nationalists such as David Miller are provoked by these debates to defend their distinctive values (Caney, 2010, p. 150). The debates are lively and acute, because the same principles on which citizens of states claim their rights are now being invoked on a global scale. Caney provides a telling example in the argument from democracy: the principle invoked in favour of democracy is that ‘where people’s lives are determined by social, economic, and legal processes, then they have a democratic right to take part in the governance of those processes.’ And given the fact that these processes are now global, it follows that appropriate democratic global institutions are needed if people are to have democratic control over their own lives (Caney, 2010, p. 160). Cosmopolitans want to reverse the usual order of question. Normally people begin with an acceptance that duties are owed to their fellows (in their family, tribe, society, state), and then enquire why they should also have duties to others with whom they enjoy no common bond other than a common humanity? The question reversed begins with the assumption that duties in justice are indeed owed to every human being, but goes on to ask why particular or distinctive duties should be owed to compatriots. Robert Goodin accepts the latter challenge and asks what is so special about our fellow countrymen (1988). Formulating the question in terms of universalism and particularism, something of a paradox emerges. It is widely accepted that special duties of particular people to other particular people, parents towards their own children, for instance, are supposed to be strong enough to override our general duty to aid strangers. But isn’t universalism, impartiality, a defining feature of morality itself? Goodin resolves the paradox by interpreting special duties as assigned general duties. He uses the example of a lifeguard at a beach to illustrate the point. Everyone has the duty to go to the aid of someone in difficulty, as for instance a swimmer overtaken by cramp. But it is convenient to appoint someone to exercise this responsibility on behalf of everyone on the beach. This is more efficient and potentially more effective, since the many individuals who could in principle rescue the drowning swimmer might all fail to notice the need, but might also be indecisive in responding, each waiting for another to make a move. Too many responding together is also

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inefficient and confusing. Creating the post of lifeguard designates one who has the special duties of attention and response, but those special duties are simply the general duties that all had, now assigned to a particular individual. The appointed individual continues to have general duties along with the assigned special duties. Goodin acknowledges that this understanding works well for special positive duties, understanding them as ‘distributed general duties’. Some devices such as Searle’s status function declarations will be required for assigning the moral community’s general duties to particular agents. The political and legal institutions that operate within a jurisdiction, as for instance within national boundaries, can be thought of as such devices, assigning special responsibilities to state agents to act in certain ways towards citizens. The assigned duties are specifications of general duties. Goodin notes that this way of understanding the nature of special duties is preferable to models based on seeing society as a mutually beneficial arrangement, in which there is expected to be reciprocity between contribution and benefit. In a mutual benefit model, the assumption is that responsibilities arise from the commitment each makes to contribute in return for benefit. Its weakness is that it can only accommodate as anomalies or exceptions such individuals as members of society who are unable to contribute but are dependent on assistance (e.g. due to some disability). The assigned duties model begins with the assumption that the moral community has general duties to assist those in need, for whatever reason, so the distribution of the general duties to assigned agents is intelligible for reasons of effectiveness and efficiency. Goodin posed the question, ‘what’s so special about our fellow countrymen?’ but his answer seems to amount to both ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’: everything, because they are the beneficiaries of assigned special duties; also nothing, since the special duties are distributed general duties that are owed to everyone. Just as devices such as borders and citizenship were instituted to identify the agents and the beneficiaries, so other and wider devices can be instituted to embrace even more than the narrow remit of compatriots, and include ever more categories of fellow humans. This provides a means for understanding the elaboration of universal human rights and the construction of devices to ensure that the assigned special duties are fulfilled. This is no small matter, of course, and it becomes the focus of debate with cosmopolitans, the extent to which the existence of obligations towards the poor of the world depends on the existence of institutions within which those obligations can be focused and directed.

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Pogge on global poverty Thomas Pogge points to the existence of institutions which have created and perpetuate poverty, and from which people in the rich part of the world continue to benefit. These institutions are the focus of his attention (Pogge, 2002; 2005). His claim is that citizens of affluent countries are responsible for most of the poverty in the world. ‘By shaping and enforcing the social conditions that foreseeably and avoidably cause the monumental suffering of global poverty, we are harming the global poor’ (Pogge, 2005, p. 33). He rejects a number of criticisms made against his position. He denies that he is guilty of a conceptual mistake by labelling as harm what are really failures to aid and protect. He denies that he makes an error of fact (regarding causal explanation or counterfactuals), and furthermore he rejects the suggestion that he presents excessively demanding moral requirements as minimal moral duties. He distinguishes positive, negative and intermediate duties. By contrast, Singer propounds positive duties to alleviate pain and suffering, and therefore also to overcome poverty, but Pogge distinguishes his position from this stance. He concentrates instead on the negative duties not to harm, and on the intermediate duties that follow from them, to avert harms that past conduct may yet cause. Pogge’s view that ‘negative and intermediate duties are more stringent than positive duties’ drew a lot of criticism, but his central point survives: the duty not to harm is clear and demanding, and in comparison with a general positive duty to alleviate pain it is evident when the duty has been breached. But when harm has been caused, there are additional duties to prevent the ongoing harm resulting from the initial damage, and to repair the damage and make amends for the harm done. Pogge insists it is not a matter of the good we might do but of the harm we have caused and are causing. He does not appeal to the compassion or altruism of the citizens of wealthy countries, but he points to their responsibility to remedy the harms they have been complicit in causing, and from which they continue to benefit. He believes that they have more stringent duties to reform the social institutions that produce deprivation, and mitigate the harm, than any possible positive duties to care for the poor and needy. Pogge underlines the extent and depth of poverty and inequality in the world, and this is not likely to be disputed. Of course, there can be disputes about the extent to which the dynamics of globalization are contributing to improving or worsening the situation of the poor (Wolf, 2005), and also about the direction of causality in relation to poverty and inequality (Wilkinson

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and Pickett, 2010). His general assertions about the causes of world poverty are more controversial, even if there can be no disputing the relevance of the causal factors he lists. The history of colonialism and associated exploitation will be part of the explanation of the imbalance in the world. It has resulted in the uncompensated exclusion of the poor from a proportional share of global resources. Nor is it possible on Pogge’s view to appeal to an imaginary history to justify the actual distribution we find in the world today. A fictional history can justify the status quo only if the changes in holdings and social rules it involves are ones that all participants could have rationally agreed to. But no such fictional history could succeed in the face of the implausibility of rational agreement to grossly unfair distributions. So Pogge concludes: ‘There is a shared institutional order that is shaped by the better-off and imposed on the worseoff. It is implicated in the reproduction of radical inequality.’ And further, ‘We are upholding a shared institutional order that is unjust by foreseeably and avoidably reproducing radical inequality’ (2005, p. 42).

Unjust global institutions We are harming the global poor if and insofar as we collaborate in imposing unjust social institutions upon them; and social institutions are certainly unjust if and insofar as they foreseeably give rise to large-scale avoidable underfulfilment of human rights. Pogge attempts to make the case that there is a feasible alternative to the present global institutional order that perpetuates poverty. This is required if he is to carry through his project of demonstrating responsibility for harms caused: that responsibility to desist, redress and repair only arises from the failure to conform to negative duties if it was possible to do so, if there was and is an alternative that meant the harm is avoidable. Most severe poverty worldwide was and is avoidable through institutional reform. As a concrete example for the reform of global institutions, Pogge proposes a Global Resource Dividend. He argues that following Lockean principles we should acknowledge an ‘inalienable right to a proportional share of the world’s resources or some adequate equivalent’. To implement this right, those involved in exploiting natural resources could be obliged to set aside a small part of the value of any natural resources used for those who would otherwise be excluded from a proportional share. He calculates that a Global Resource Dividend could raise one per cent of global social product for poverty eradication, which could amount to US$ 320 billion per annum. The moral failure of the world’s wealthy

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people in the face of world poverty is a mere failure to aid only if they really are morally entitled to the huge advantages they enjoy, from birth, under present institutional arrangements. Pogge denies this moral entitlement. Andrew Dobson’s distinction between thin and thick cosmopolitanism reinforces Pogge’s concern with negative and intermediate duties (2006). On the one hand, he notes the ineffectiveness of some cosmopolitan principles in motivating action to change the situation of poverty and inequality in the world. He echoes a question that Pogge had already posed: ‘How does world poverty continue despite economic and technological progress and Western moral norms?’ If Singer’s arguments had found purchase, and given the technological progress that had made effective action possible, then the problem of poverty would not have persisted, or at least not as such an urgent problem. Dobson suggests that there is a motivational problem with cosmopolitan principles insofar as they appeal to the solidarity required of a shared humanity. This is too insubstantial to motivate action (Dobson, 2006, p. 169). His proposed solution strengthens Pogge’s espousal of negative duty. Dobson suggests that nearness has a bearing on our motivation to respond to the prompts of obligation. Cosmopolitanism requires nearness to vulnerable, suffering, disadvantaged others, and the recognition that we are all members of a common humanity seems not to bring such others near enough. We are more likely to feel obliged to assist if we can be shown to be responsible for the problem, if there is some identifiable causal relationship between our action and their situation (Dobson, 2006, p. 171). He uses the example of the notion of an ecological footprint, introduced in the context of global warming to make people aware of their own causal responsibilities. This can bring home to people in a way that appeals to their care for the plight of suffering others that they each individually have a responsibility to respond. This is precisely the path taken by Pogge. But Dobson pushes the question further: ‘Is there enough causal responsibility around to reach cosmopolitan levels of universalism?’ Can obligations to care at the global level be transformed into obligations in justice? Can the weaker motivations rooted in sympathy or beneficence be replaced by the stronger motivations of responsibility arising from guilt?

Global justice without a global sovereign Thomas Nagel addresses another major difficulty with the cosmopolitan project, which can be linked to the foregoing in the following ways. If cosmopolitanism

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is concerned to articulate the obligations owed in justice at a global level, how does it understand justice in that context? The analogy between domestic and global justice does not hold, according to Nagel, because there are no comparable institutions at the global level, and the existence of appropriate institutions is integral to the understanding of justice. This is the theoretical point, but there is a linked practical point also. Even if the motivations were as strong as Dobson and Pogge might wish, corresponding action would be ineffectual in the absence of appropriate institutions to do justice at the global level (Nagel, 2005). Nagel invites a comparison of domestic and global theory and asks whether there is any global institution comparable to the nation state that is the primary locus of political legitimacy and principal agent for the pursuit of justice. He follows the classic analysis offered by Thomas Hobbes, which proposed the essential link between sovereignty and justice, and concludes: Without ‘enabling condition of sovereignty to confer stability on just institutions, individuals however morally motivated can only fall back on a pure aspiration for justice that has no practical expression, apart from the willingness to support just institutions should they become possible’ (Nagel, 2005, p. 116). Here he explicitly addresses the question of motivation, and follows Hobbes in thinking that, ultimately, only the pursuit of one’s own interest can be relied upon as the engine of social order. The Hobbesian insight is that justice and law are a set of rules and practices that would serve everyone’s interest if everyone conformed to them. Each must have assurance that others will conform to the rules if he does. Such assurance of the compliance of others is only available if there exists a centralized authority to determine the rules and with a monopoly power to enforce them. The existence of such sovereign power with effective coercive capacity is a necessary condition of domestic justice, which Nagel terms political justice. But, on the global scale, there is neither a centralized authority nor a reliable power of enforcement. Justice on the global scale, comparable to political justice, cannot be achieved. If this is conceded, it seems then that the cosmopolitans’ aspirations that the duties owed to the marginalized of the world be considered as duties of justice are misguided. Those duties might qualify as humanitarian, according to Nagel’s understanding. He acknowledges that there are two conceptions of justice in play in these debates. The cosmopolitan conception is that demands of justice derive from an equal concern or duty of fairness that we owe in principle to all our fellow human beings, and institutions are instruments to that. The absolute levels of need of people in the world, whom we could benefit by our action, determine our duties in justice. By contrast, the political conception

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that Nagel presents sees a different relationship between institutions and justice. In this view, sovereign states are not merely instruments for realizing the pre-institutional value of justice among human beings anywhere in the world. Instead, the existence of such sovereign states is precisely what gives the value of justice its application. It is through the legal, social and economic institutions made possible by sovereign power that citizens have duties in justice towards one another. Those institutions specify what exactly is owed to whom, by whom and when (Nagel, 2005, p. 121). Accordingly, he affirms that justice is an associative obligation, and in the absence of the relevant associations, there can be no justice, at least none comparable to what is made possible within sovereign states. The requirements of justice do not apply to the world as a whole, until the world comes to be ruled by a unified sovereign power. So he concludes that anyone holding the political view of justice will not find the absence of global justice a cause for distress. Nagel must concede, however, that the distinction between the two conceptions of justice is not watertight. Even on the political conception, some conditions of justice do not depend on associative obligations (Nagel, 2005, p. 126). He acknowledges that some negative human rights set universal and pre-political limits to the legitimate use of power. So he seems willing to concede negative rights to the domain of cosmopolitan justice. The so-called positive rights, however, specifying what is owed within an economy and a polity, are associative in the sense explained as political justice. The rights that citizens enjoy in political society, to participation, equal citizenship, non-discrimination and equality of opportunity, are positive rights, to which correspond the duties of the authorities in their societies, but not duties of the citizens of other states. He writes: ‘The state makes unique demands on the will of its members – or the members make unique demands on one another through the institutions of the state – and those exceptional demands bring with them exceptional obligations, the positive obligations of justice. Those obligations reach no farther than the demands do and that explains the special character of the political conception’ (Nagel, 2005, p. 130). Adding to his distinction between political and cosmopolitan justice, Nagel insists that morality is multilayered. He does not claim that the obligations of justice exhaust all moral obligations. Within political justice there can be gradations depending on the voluntary commitments and relationships of individuals. This is compatible with the requirement ‘to accord equal status to anyone with whom we are joined in a strong and coercively imposed political community’ (Nagel, 2005, p. 133). Acknowledging and respecting the equal

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status of all fellow citizens does not preclude anyone from giving preferential treatment when appropriate to family members or those to whom they have contractual obligations. Accordingly, morality is to be viewed as multilayered. At the most general and universal, a minimal humanitarian morality governs our relation to all other persons. The existence of the obligations does not depend on the existence of any institutional context. But, as in the case of human rights, it is difficult to see how it could be realized without some institutions. Nagel supports the demand for the creation and maintenance of some appropriate institutions, first, for the protection of human rights, second, for the provision of humanitarian aid, and third, for the provision of global public goods that benefit everyone such as free trade, collective security and environmental protection. These separately or together would not comprise a global sovereign authority. They typically rely for enforcement on the power of the separate sovereign states, which cooperate in creating and operating them, not on a supranational force responsible to all. In terms of the distinction noted in Chapter 7 between global community and a society of states, Nagel is definitely on the side of the latter. He notes, ‘there is a big difference between agreements or consensus among separate states committed to the advancement of their own interests and a binding procedure, based on some kind of collective authority, charged with securing the common good’ (Nagel, 2005, p. 145). While he is correct in thinking that there is considerable resistance to creating a kind of global authority like a world government, we should recall the evidence from Chapter 7 that collective authorities have emerged spontaneously in history and have guided the behaviour of otherwise sovereign states whose compliance was not explainable simply in terms of coercion or self-interest.

Nationalism: Social justice or global justice? Nagel had insisted that morality is multilayered. But do the obligations that arise on different layers compete with one another? Do humanitarian obligations jeopardize the duties that belong within political justice? This question is addressed by theorists of nationalism such as David Miller who provides a defence of the particular in opposition to the predominance of the universal in standard accounts of global justice (2013). Do the general duties owed to everyone override the particular duties of special relationships? At the same time, he disputes Nagel’s view that obligations of humanitarian care are not obligations of justice.

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Miller does not exclude the possibility that principles and norms could be universally applicable, but he generally expects that the complexity of situations will defeat attempts to apply principles uniformly. Hence his typical approach of distinguishing situations and cases so as to explore their differences and map out the peculiarities of each. He emphasizes the plurality of principles of justice, the varied circumstances to which they might apply and the potential for conflict between different values. He labels this approach ‘contextualism’. This is opposed to universalism, but the distinction between universalism and contextualism is not to be confused with the contrast between monism and pluralism, on the one hand, or with the contrast between objectivism and relativism, on the other hand. Also to be avoided is the confusion of contextualism with conventionalism. Miller does not wish to deny the existence of some context-independent principles of justice, but insists that universalism alone is insufficient (2013, p. 69). Advocates of justice beyond borders often attempt to develop the same principles of justice that are applied to matters of domestic social justice and apply them to matters of global justice. Miller queries the legitimacy of this move. He reacts to the tendency to extrapolate from what has been clarified about social justice and apply it to global justice, on the assumption that while there may be a difference in scope they are fundamentally the same. He raises two questions: first, are the same principles being applied in the different contexts, so that the difference of scope is all that distinguishes the domestic from the global? And secondly, is there a potential conflict between social and global justice so that people might be obliged to favour one over the other? (Miller, 2013, p. 166). In the first question, he examines two possible arguments in defence of the conceptual identity of social and global justice. The first argument conceives of justice as contextually invariable, ‘a universal value whose substance is always captured by the same principle or set of principles, no matter where and to whom or what it is being applied’ (Miller, 2013, p. 167). As an example of such a position, he considers the libertarian conception of justice as the non-violation of personal and property rights. There is no conceptual difference between the achievement of justice in this sense within a particular political community, and the achievement of justice globally. Refining this as a proposal about distributive justice, he queries whether the same principles, for example, of equality, are appealed to by people faced with choices. Referring to experimental results from such exercises as reported in his book Principles of Social Justice (2001), he concludes that there is no context-invariant principle of justice that passes

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the test. The complexity of matters and situations to which notions of justice in distribution apply cannot be reduced to a single master principle or set of principles (Miller, 2013, p. 169). The second argument admits that justice is contextually variable, but that the variations are the same on both scales, domestic and global. For instance, distributions to be just should be equal or proportionate, depending on circumstances and other factors, but this would apply equally to the local and the global. In this view, ‘there is nothing special about societies that distinguishes them from the world as a whole as far as distributive justice is concerned’. Addressing this argument, Miller seeks to clarify what is meant by ‘society’. There are four grounds for considering the nation state as the relevant site of justice. As systems of economic cooperation, having shared submission to coercive political power, whose members bear a common identity in political community and exercise democratic responsibility for distributive policies, states are the appropriate fora for social justice. Those who see no distinction between social and global justice point to the occurrence of these four features on the global scale as well. Miller, in response, argues that there is no similar convergence of many features at the transnational level similar to what occurred in the development of social justice in nation states (2013, pp. 170–2). He offers an account of justice for the global context that identifies a minimum, ‘a set of human rights that people everywhere can claim as a matter of justice’. These are rights ‘to those freedoms, resources and bodily states that allow basic human needs to be fulfilled, and basic needs in turn are defined as the conditions that must be met if a person is to have a minimally decent life in the society to which he or she belongs’ (2013, p. 173). The obligation to secure the rights for their own citizens falls on individual states in the first place, but when they are unable to meet their obligations, other states or international bodies must take up the slack. With this view of a global minimum defined in terms of human rights, Miller manages to clarify the difference as he sees it between social justice and global justice. Social justice is comparative, striving for adjustments to inequalities and imbalances within a society even if everyone is guaranteed the minimum for a decent existence. Global justice is absolute, requiring that ‘everybody should be brought to the point where he or she securely enjoys rights to bodily integrity, subsistence and so forth’ (Miller, 2013, p. 173). Beyond the necessary minimum are concerns about the distribution of freedoms and resources, but these would be matters of social, domestic justice.

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Miller upholds the distinction between social and global justice, but not such as to deny the significance of global justice responsibilities. He recognizes that wealthier states ‘may be subject to quite demanding obligations of global justice, either to intervene to protect human rights outside of their borders or to forego some part of their bargaining advantage in international negotiations in the name of transactional fairness’ (2013, p. 174). In this he notes the difference between his own stance and that taken by Thomas Nagel. Miller recognizes that there are obligations of justice beyond the borders of a state, though distinguishable from those of social justice, while Nagel argues that justice obligations presuppose the existence of the sovereign state with powers of enforcement. Hence, for Nagel, the duties of care beyond borders are humanitarian, not obligations of justice. Beyond the conceptual question there is the normative question about the relative priority of social and global justice. He assumes global justice, on the one hand, demands ‘the universal protection of human rights and fair terms of interaction between nation states’. Social justice, on the other hand, is understood to embrace ‘comparative principles such as equality of opportunity and equal access to medical care for those with similar needs’ (Miller, 2013, p. 175). So understood, the two values will frequently be in conflict. Given that social justice as a goal is not satiable, that it will always be possible to devote more resources to those who are disadvantaged, tensions will arise, such that trade-offs between social and global justice are necessary. Beyond the competition for resources, he points also to the different motivations that can be mobilized in democratic support of policies. Willingness to assist will depend on the sense of identity, and that in turn can be fostered by deliberate policy, fostering equally or differentially national or cosmopolitan senses of identity. Miller makes three claims about the relationship between social and global justice. His first echoes John Rawls’s point about justice being between peoples. The norms of social justice that have grown within political communities are unlikely to be transferable to the relations between independent political communities. The second concerns the agent responsible for justice. The state is responsible in the case of social justice, but there is no equivalent single agent at the global level. International order is based on agreement, but ‘there is no authority with the power to enforce what has been agreed against a recalcitrant state’. And third, Miller notes a tension between social and global justice to the extent that increasing interest in cosmopolitan justice might further weaken the sense of solidarity and commitment to egalitarian policies, already undermined by the culture of liberal individualism. Will a strengthening of

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cosmopolitan concern always be at the expense of local solidarity? Miller wonders if it can be possible ‘to strengthen national citizenship but then make it a part of citizenship so understood to be active in pursuit of global justice’ (2013, pp. 180–182). Similar to the question by Goodin, what is so special about our fellow countrymen, Miller asks about the anonymous distant needy: ‘Are they my poor?’ The possessive refers to a time when it was possible for people to identify the poor for whom they had particular responsibility, namely the indigent of the parish, or the beggar at the door. But in a world of strangers, the problem of altruism becomes acute: Who owes what to whom? Miller asks: ‘Why is it my responsibility to look after these particular needy people?’ For although there may be many people in need, there are also very many who would be able to offer relief if they chose. So how can I decide where to direct my efforts and how much of the burden should I shoulder? Previously, those in need were assigned by various mechanisms to the responsibility of particular persons. Obligation was localized. In a society with a fairly immobile population with limited opportunities to encounter strangers, there was no need for altruism understood as concern for unknown others. ‘Altruism becomes appropriate and relevant in a world of strangers, in a world, that is, where we regularly encounter, either directly or through the media of communication, unknown people who nevertheless we might be able to help if we so chose’ (Miller, 2013, pp. 184–185). Miller suggests a more restricted definition of altruism, seeking to exclude ‘actions that are performed in order to comply with institutional rules, even in cases where the motive for compliance is a sense of obligation or duty’. His suggested definition is that altruism be understood as ‘behaviour that is intended to meet the needs of others, where there is no immediate self-interested reason to help and where there is no institutional requirement that one should’ (2013, p. 186). This definition assumes that altruism applies in cases of need; its exclusion of self-interest is not to be read as ruling out cases of mixed motivation, nor should the exclusion of compliance with social or other norms be interpreted as declaring that altruistic behaviour is not obligatory. ‘Acts are both altruistic and obligatory when there is no institutional requirement to perform them, so my rescuing the drowning child is altruistic, while the lifeguard’s rescuing her is not, at least in standard cases’. Miller adds the fourth specification that the performers of altruistic acts must bear some costs (2013, pp. 186–8). With the clarification of his meaning, Miller can then ask: When should I be altruistic? ‘How much responsibility for meeting the needs of others can we be

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asked to assume in a world of strangers?’ (2013, p. 194). He argues for the need for institutions that specify who is responsible for meeting the needs of particular others. The creation of public institutions comparable to those of the sovereign state that take on the general altruistic obligations on behalf of everyone is only one possible path of development. Miller attempts to explore other ideas, as for instance ‘Bad Samaritan laws’, which would sanction failures to assist in certain circumstances, and structures of partnership linking charitable organizations with needy recipients. Miller remains realistic: he accepts that people’s altruistic capacities are limited, and that it is morally justified to place some limits on one’s response. He accepts also that there is a collective responsibility on everyone to help those in need, but maintains that the resulting burden should be shared as fairly as possible (2013, p. 205).

Conclusion This survey of discussions of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, universalism and contextualism, has not explicitly considered the notion of the common good in relation to these terms, and it is now time to draw out the implications for the theme of this book. Recalling the remark borrowed from Roger Scruton in the introduction, whenever there is a good in common there is some identifiable ‘we’ for whom the good in question is in fact their good. This good can be asserted from a first-person perspective, singular or plural, whereby the speaker(s) represent(s) the shared goal or aspiration of some identifiable group who share the sense of ‘we’. The good can also be asserted from a third-person perspective, when the speaker does not necessarily represent the consensus of a group, a ‘we’, but presents his or her own view of what is or would be good for the group in question, either as a statement of fact, or in advocacy in an attempt to persuade the audience of the worthwhileness of the good. In the surveyed discussions, there are evidently goods at stake that might be summarily labelled as global justice, but as noted in Chapter 1, the good is always concrete, and the summary label must be translatable into particular goods pursued or realized for specific individuals or groups. Those concrete goods might be listed as follows: the satisfaction of the minimum needs of every human being; the securing of the basic rights of everyone on the planet; the achievement of justice in the reparation of damage done by those who exploited the resources of others or continue to benefit from past exploitation; the creation and maintenance of appropriate institutions to ensure the delivery of those

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goods; and so on. It is evident that the discussion is not always conducted in terms of goods, but more commonly in terms of obligations, duties owed, and responsibilities. However, the duties are always about some good that is owed by someone to someone else. The source, nature, urgency and stringency of the duty are of interest, but for my purposes I leave this aside for the present and concentrate on the goods at stake. There is a further point of variation in the conversations surveyed, and that concerns the persons involved. To whom are the goods owed, and by whom are they owed. To the latter question, we can note the clear divergence spelled out in differing ways by Goodin, Nagel and Miller. They note the clear referent of the ‘we’ of political justice, and of national identity. ‘We’ French, ‘we’ Canadians, ‘we’ Europeans are bound within political and legal relations whereby we are subject to the laws of the relevant entity, which can burden us with obligations of compliance (to pay taxes, do military service, etc.). Along with the burdens go the benefits of political and legal incorporation. Those outside the boundaries of our states do not share in that ‘we’ of rights and duties arising from membership in a sovereign entity (or in the case of the EU of a union of sovereign entities). However, the cosmopolitans rely on a ‘we’ predicated on shared humanity rather than shared citizenship, and the sense of sharing an endangered and fragile planet. Within that sense of ‘we’ there are those who cannot deny their relative privilege in comparison with others who are impoverished or excluded from sharing in the benefits of the world’s economic and political orders. The privileged ‘we’ are addressed as obliged to assist those of us in poverty who are the needy ‘we’. The debate between the two positions reveals that the ‘we’ of political justice is not reproduced on the global level. The sense of belonging to a sovereign state is reinforced by all the paraphernalia of compliance and coercion. By contrast, the sense of solidarity with the human other is often fragile but rarely strong enough to be an effective motivator of large-scale coordinated action, and so in the absence of comparable global institutions of enforcement is not reliable in sustaining a corporate action. (I leave aside at this point the absence of the relevant instruments for coordinated global action, bearing in mind Nagel’s point that institutions should not be seen merely as means but also as constitutive in shaping identities.) So Pogge addresses his argument to a ‘we’, which is already constituted by the shared cultural space of liberal political philosophy, advocating that a broader sense of ‘we’ be fostered among the recipients and beneficiaries of political thought, reminding them of their responsibilities rooted in guilt

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(arising from violations of negative duties and/or benefits enjoyed from harms caused by some in violation of negative duties). This broader sense of ‘we’ as the sharers of responsibility is not as broad as the ‘we’ of humanity. Whether the ‘we’ in question is capable of being the subject of action, that is, agent, in pursuit of or realization of some good is relevant to the topic of common good. The distinction between pursuit and realization in the previous sentence is important. ‘We’ can enjoy some good without it being the case that the same ‘we’ pursue or pursued the good in question. A simple example can illustrate this: we can all now enjoy a smallpox-free existence, a very definite good that can be shared in by everyone on the planet even if they are unaware of it. This good was achieved by the coordinated efforts of many people, but most importantly their governments. The ‘we’ who achieved the virtual eradication of smallpox, can be rightly proud of their success, but it is enjoyed by many others besides the campaigners. The common good in question here can be distinguished as the common good of the actors and campaigners, and the common good of the beneficiaries. There are distinct identities in play corresponding to the different goods. Those who collaborate in the campaign to eradicate the disease will do so at different levels; obviously those directing and coordinating cannot do so without deliberate attention to what is done and why. Others will require less knowledge and deliberation, such as those enforcing quarantine areas or filing paper work, but willing collaboration will be required. Others again may be unaware of the nature and extent of their contribution, such as the control group patients in ‘blind’ clinic tests who are given the placebos. Allowing for the gradation of knowledge and deliberateness, however, there is a group of collaborators who are the agents bringing about the desired goal, the eradication of the disease, and for a significant proportion of that group there is a shared sense of ‘we’, a common identity. Nevertheless, the beneficiaries of the campaign will not have a shared identity, a sense of ‘we’, except on the rare occasions when they might be reminded of the gratitude they and humankind owe to the benefactors. This absence of consciousness of a shared identity does not undermine the fact that they enjoy and benefit from a good made available to them. To have a common good in this sense does not presuppose either a shared identity or an awareness of the good in question. As noted in earlier chapters, and again in this one in the context of global justice, there are many common goods (including some which are public goods) that are the objects of deliberate policies and campaigns (eradication of malaria, assurance of basic minimum of human rights) whereby the present campaigners

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share a common good as a goal of their action, but the intended beneficiaries will possibly not be aware of bonds of communality that link them with others in needing or having the common good in question. So for cosmopolitans, the dream of global justice identifies a common good that is a good for all humanity; but to date the group of those committed to achieving this dream is not sufficient to bring it about, as is clear from the counter-arguments of those who doubt the suitability of the means, even if they also admire the goal and deem it a worthy aspiration. Debates focus on the institutions appropriate for delivering the goods at stake, but as noted, these institutions are not simply means towards the goals. They also contribute to the development of the sense of shared identity and the shared meaning that carries the project. In fact, in the case of Pogge and colleagues, the fostering of shared meaning in the consciousness of responsibility for inherited and continuing poverty and inequality is the immediate common good of their campaign and instrumental towards the more ultimate good of global justice. The envisioned global justice might be a common good that would be to everyone’s advantage, and all might wish to enjoy. But the strategy of engaging responsibility and motivating cooperation focuses instead on concrete goods and the alleviation of concrete bads.

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A book devoted to global common goods might be expected to discuss human rights and the international human rights regime as examples of global common goods. On the face of it, the expansion of recognition of human rights and their incorporation in international conventions and treaties, and in institutions and practices, would appear to exemplify in a pre-eminent way the collaboration in pursuit of common goods at a global level. Closer examination, however, reveals that the story is not so straightforward. There is indeed a success story to be told, but there is also a complexity of unresolved disagreements and disputes, which suggests that the communality of shared purpose at a global level is not yet achieved. In this chapter, I will attempt to survey both stories and illustrate the common good agenda in terms of both what has been achieved and what remains as challenge for the global community. As in other chapters and discussions, the intention is not to attempt to resolve ongoing debates, but to provide a new perspective on them in terms of common goods, which will enrich the appreciation of the matter under discussion. Perhaps the headline example of human rights can provide a lesson about what can be expected from the identification and pursuit of global common goods. Exaggerated optimism or idealism should be deflated by the encounter with the complexity of still-open debates that reflect the reality of reasonable pluralism. The discussion of global common goods will also be characterized by the same pluralism. In the following I will situate the discussion of human rights in the distinction between norms and goods. Rights can appear as either norms, or goods, or both, and clarity is required to avoid confusion. The story of the development of the contemporary human rights regime reflects further distinctions and persisting tensions, and these will be briefly surveyed. Rights seen as goods raise questions of grounding and of meaning, and these in turn affect the view of rights as norms.

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Rights: Norms or goods? I began this study with a contrast between the dominant strand in ethics, which is to consider the justification of norms, and the broadly Aristotelian perspective, which considers the goods of action and collaboration along with the flourishing of actors and collaborators. The point has not been to replace one with the other, but to restore a balance and support the attempt to bring a philosophy of the good back into the heart of ethics. With the notion of rights, and human rights, we find immediately the tension between norms and goods. Are rights ‘norms’, or are they ‘goods’? As they become formulated in tables of rights they appear as norms: ‘No one shall be deprived of . . .’ But in the formulations of John Locke who so influenced the development of the language of rights they appear as goods, as the properties of persons (Locke, 1970). And that remains as the spontaneous way in which people speak of their rights: something they have (Ingram, 1994). The issue has its academic counterpart in the debate about the meaning of rights, whether they are to be understood as powers or benefits (Hart, 1984, pp. 87–88; Raz, 1995, p. 49). It also appears in the way in which the history is narrated. I will consider that history first of all, and then review some of the disputes about the grounding and meaning of rights, and about the relation of moral to legal rights norms.

The development of human rights In the chapters on International Relations and on Rawls’s Law of Peoples, we found widespread agreement both that the global international situation had changed and that the disciplines devoted to understanding the situation had changed. A significant factor in the change is the recognition of human rights as a key element in how states actually consider their relations to one another. The weakening of traditional state sovereignty with the development of humanitarian intervention as possibly permissible overriding the strict non-intervention rules associated with sovereignty gives human rights a preeminent place in the shared understanding of international order. Grievous and persistent violations of human rights now warrant international action, although as Samantha Power (2007) in her study of genocide has shown, international actors are sensitive to the triggers that might commit them to multilateral or even unilateral action. While genocide would be such a trigger, states have succeeded in denying the reality on the ground, lest admission of the

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facts would commit them to an expensive intervention. However, perpetrators of abuses are well able to read the signals of state actors as to their willingness to back up their words with deeds. Christian Reus-Smit (2010) offers a convenient overview of the various stages in the development of a rights regime in the study of International Relations. He identifies five significant stages marked by ‘recurrent rights struggles’ whereby peoples have challenged the legitimacy of empire and looked to the sovereign state as a ‘liberating, protective institution’ (2010, p. 37). The assertion of rights has been a force effecting change in the political ordering of the world. The first stage is that created by the Westphalian settlement (1648) with the emergence of sovereign states free from dominance by church or empire. The second stage is marked by the independence of the Americas, which achieved autonomy in the name of rights. The settlement of Versailles (1918) following the First World War marks a third stage. The fourth sees the period of decolonization following the Second World War (1945–1970), and the fifth is marked by the break-up of the Soviet empire and of Yugoslavia within Europe along with the shift from a bipolar world. Reus-Smit traces through all these changes a continuous thread in the demands for various rights, from freedom of conscience to the right to political representation and freedoms from state interference (2010, p. 45). He suggests that in at least four of these cases (he excludes the Versailles 1918 settlement from this conclusion) ‘rights served both as mobilizers of political action – constituting actors’ identities and interests in distinctive ways – and as rhetorical resources, normatively powerful principles that could be invoked to delegitimize imperial political structures, justify resistance politics, and license the creation of new political units’ (2010, p. 45). Reus-Smit is concerned to counter the widely accepted notion that rights played a significant role in shaping world order only following the Second World War. His position is tenable to the extent that he is writing about rights language in general, including moral and natural rights. But in the specific case of human rights it seems fair to say, as Beitz does in his short overview, that ‘the contemporary international doctrine of human rights . . . is principally a legacy of World War II’ (Beitz, 2008, p. 147). This point is incidental to Reus-Smit’s main concern, however, which is to draw attention to the paradoxical position of the sovereign state in the rightsshaped order that has emerged. The role of the state is paradoxical because it is seen as both the principal threat to individuals’ rights, and as the principal agent charged with upholding and securing those rights. This paradox is familiar from

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John Locke’s identification of natural rights as the source of legitimacy of state power while at the same time providing the basis of limitation of state power. This is the conceptual source of the paradox, perhaps, but Reus-Smit draws attention to the distorted perspective resulting from the historical emergence of the paradoxical situation as it now obtains. Sovereign states, traditionally since Westphalia understood to enjoy sovereignty – subject to no other – and therefore to be free from interference from outside, as a result of the development of human rights rhetoric, are now questioned as to their unconditional entitlement to sovereignty and non-intervention. Standard accounts considering the emerging human rights regime as effecting a civilizing and limiting function on pre-existent state power fail to see the paradox in the situation. Those accounts concentrate on the function of rights as ‘power mediators’, specifying the appropriate relationship between individuals and states. This is central to the notion of rights, indicating what may not be done to people without their consent. Insofar as this is the main understanding of the function of rights then there is nothing paradoxical in seeing the human rights regime as civilizing state power. But, Reus-Smit maintains, this is not the only aspect of the meaning of rights. Drawing on the work of Henry Shue, he argues that rights require an institution to enforce, secure and implement them. He notes three different ways in which rights are institutionally referential: they are institutionally ambitious (seeking to establish social norms and expectations when asserted in the absence of such institutions), institutionally presumptive (when appealing to existing social or legal norms) and institutionally dependent (for effective implementation and enforcement) (Reus-Smit, 2010, pp. 29–30). Without corresponding institutions, there is little possibility of rights-talk shaping the social and political order. Traditionally, the institution charged with the task of securing and enforcing human rights is the sovereign state. This is the element in the meaning of human rights, which, when combined with the power mediating role, makes it paradoxical. The sovereign state is to be limited in its power by the rights of individuals, but yet when it comes to upholding or vindicating the rights of individuals it is the sovereign state that is allocated the responsibility. ‘Our two dimensions of rights thus have contradictory impulses: the institutionally referential dimension encouraging the constitution of sovereign states, the power-mediating dimension encouraging the compromising of sovereignty’ (Reus-Smit, 2010, p. 45). The paradox, in his view, has not been destructive, but generative of new understandings and new institutions. Institutional referents beyond the sovereign state have been sought and attempted in

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the construction of a variety of international human rights institutions. The process of construction is ongoing, as exemplified earlier in the case of the International Criminal Court, and in the unwillingness of some states to relinquish elements of sovereignty by subscribing to International Conventions. The role of shared meaning in this account of rights and the paradox of current rights discourse is not neglected by Reus-Smit in his account. He stresses the dimension of shared meaning when explaining the power mediation of rights. Invoking human rights against a stronger opponent involves appealing to inter-subjective meanings that are sources of power, ‘different in form from the material resources my oppressor brings to bear, but sources nonetheless’ (Reus-Smit, 2010, p. 41). Similarly, when describing the institutional referential nature of rights, Reus-Smit highlights the shared meanings and social acceptance of norms and expectations that are constitutive of the institutions of rights: ‘the political veracity of rights depends on social recognition: to claim a right in a social universe in which there is no recognition of that right is to claim a right that is without social purchase’ (2010, pp. 34–5). Accordingly, the construction of institutional referents beyond the nation state is the construction of shared meanings, both understandings and norms, across cultures and languages. The recognition of the role of shared meaning is expanded by means of the term ‘global ecumene’ in another work by Reus-Smit (2011). In this essay, he expounds his basic thesis that human rights have been asserted in the context of struggles for deliverance from oppression of one kind or another, and it is this feature that enables them to be part of a global horizon of shared meaning. This frees them from an overemphasis on the particularity of an engendering culture as also from an exaggerated universalism. He develops this thesis as he celebrates one of the pioneers of the English School of International Relations, John Vincent. Vincent’s contribution (1986) was to find a way of bridging the stances of universalists and particularists, and Reus-Smit attempts to build on this achievement. The expansion of the horizon of shared meaning associated with the establishment of the international human rights regime was complicated by disputes between universalists and particularists. The form of universalism in question was not tied to an assertion of a common human nature, or other shared moral foundations. It was more empirical, pointing to the outcome of negotiations in which nations and cultures from around the world were able to sign up to the human rights asserted in the Universal Declaration and in various Conventions. The fact of this almost universal normative consensus

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is relied upon by the universalist side of the debate. On the particularist side, human rights are seen as the product of one culture, and the widespread agreement on international human rights reflects not a moral consensus but the hegemony of one culture dominating others with fewer and weaker resources to enable them to resist. Vincent’s response was to resist the ‘either-or’ dilemma and articulate a position in which both points of view were represented. In his account as presented by Reus-Smit, the ideas of human rights appear first in a Western context, ‘but their globalization is the result of protracted processes of international and transnational political and cultural engagement, and the results of this process are not easily reduced to either simple negotiation or western cultural imposition’ (Reus-Smit, 2011, p. 1206). Reus-Smit attempts to build on the solution offered by Vincent, but in such a way that underlines the inadequacy of each of the poles. The argument about the parochial origins of human rights is criticized for a naive understanding of world cultures, which imagines them as hermetically sealed from one another and so impacting on each other only superficially. The opposite pole is criticized for its lack of an appreciation of the dimensions of culture, so that the official endorsement of norms is read as acceptance of the meaning of rights. For ReusSmit the emergence of the global ecumene, the shared horizon of meaning, was not through diffusion or imposition. He underlines the complexity of Western modernity, which did not present itself to non-Western cultures as a monolith. It was internally variegated, and was interpreted and adapted through the myriad cultural lenses of the receiving cultures. None of those who object to the Western origins of human rights refuse to assert their national sovereignty, the sovereignty of countries being also a Western idea. In line with his overview of the history of rights struggles summarized earlier, Reus-Smit insists that the worldwide recognition of rights did not begin with the twentieth-century post–Second World War settlement, but emerged through the struggles for religious and political freedoms over several centuries. Accordingly, the plausibility of rights language appeared in the context of political struggles whenever they were successfully exploited by subordinated groups to fight practices of domination and exclusion. It is this usefulness, their power, that makes the language of rights attractive for all who struggle to overcome some exclusion. In his memorable phrase, rights may not be universal, but they are universalist. They are capable of being adopted and adapted by people in very many different situations of oppression. Linked to that is their inherent communality: it is not possible coherently to claim for oneself or one’s group rights that one denies to others at the same time (Reus-Smit, 2011, p. 1214). The global ecumene is an emerging horizon of shared meaning continually enriched

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by the successful struggles for liberation of individuals and groups in different cultures and contexts. To that extent it is a heuristic, identifying something striven for but not yet achieved, which is not yet fully known because still in the process of construction, but the direction of development permits projection forward to the nature of the goal. And that heuristic is a common good, sustaining struggles and making sense of the efforts to construct and to understand the international human rights regime. Even if Reus-Smit is correct in his insistence that the concern with rights in international order has a long pedigree and did not begin at mid-twentieth century, it is nonetheless the case that since the ending of the Second World War the recognition of human rights has been a major part of a complete revision of the shared horizon of international relations. This revision is variously labelled a reconceptualization and a transformation of ideas and practice in the relations between global players. Andrew Hurrell (2007; 2010) has drawn attention to this dynamic and listed all its dimensions, stressing the common aspect of its ambitious normative implications. In particular, he notes the expansion of the domain of international law with an increase in density and penetration of rules and attention to implementation. ‘A minimally acceptable order came increasingly to be seen as involving both limits on the freedom of states to resort to war and the creation of international rules that affected the domestic structures and organization of states, invested individuals and groups within states with rights and duties, and sought to embody some notion of a general common good’ (Hurrell, 2010, p. 52). States could not avoid the pressures arising from the new understanding of their role in the international order, even if it would be more convenient or comfortable for them to do so. The former Westphalian idea of sovereignty gradually gave way to a shared view that the legitimacy of states depended on how they treated their own citizens. Hurrell points to the key conceptual change ‘from the idea of the state as sovereign to idea of state as agent – an agent acting both in the interests of its own citizens and on behalf of an international community that is increasingly supposed to embody and reflect shared interests and shared values’ (2010, p. 52). Throughout his commentary on these developments Hurrell draws attention to the dimensions of shared meaning that constitute the horizon of international affairs. He stresses shared values, shared interests, shared normative expectations and shared ideas, and even mentions the notion of a general common good. This might be elaborated further as the object of concern for cooperating partners. The fostering of shared understanding and the maintenance of agreement on basic values and principles and the upholding of human rights would belong among the common goods of collaborating parties.

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However, Hurrell also notes developments in recent years that point to a revival of a Westphalian view in practice, not least because of the shift in the global distribution of economic power. All the more reason for collaborating parties in international relations to make it their common concern that the sharing of values, meanings and standards achieved to date not be diluted. It belongs to the global common good to care about these intellectual, moral and spiritual goods. But Hurrell also notes how the resilience of the Westphalian state system is making the realization of the liberal dream of an international order based on human rights more and more elusive. A number of factors are at play in these dynamics, most noticeably the emphasis on security in the context of combating perceived global terrorism. But the interest in state security is not the only influential factor in the resilience of the nation state: Hurrell points to the prevalence of nationalism as a source of identity and self-understanding, the strengthened economic role of states in the context of globalization, as well as the perception of the balance of power in both regional and global terms in the foreign relations of sovereign states (2010, pp. 67–8). Those who wanted to see a shift from a pluralist world of many states involved in power politics to a solidarist world of trans-national institutions securing human rights must be patient in accepting that the dream will not be realized so soon. These accounts of the history exhibit the double sense of rights as both norms and goods. Rights are moral claims typically articulated as norms. The success story of this development has been the enactment of sets of norms guiding both national and international behaviour. Rights also appear as goods, the goods of liberation, freedom from domination and the possibility of living life as one chooses. The goods at another level are the institutions in place to secure people’s rights. Norm systems are also institutions, and at their core are the norms prescribing and proscribing relevant actions. The authors surveyed here also show how shared meaning, shared values are goods in common, which can be the object of collaborative action. With an ongoing story of development, it appears that there are goods still to be achieved, and their anticipation is heuristic, naming what is yet to be achieved, but which is not completely known because it is dependent on human ingenuity.

Human rights and the good When considering the relationship between human rights and goods, another profound ambiguity appears. On the one hand, there is the role that a person’s

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interests plays in determining their rights. On the other hand, there is the observation that those who collaborate in the human rights community have as their goals certain goods, whether the vindication of one victim’s rights, or the promotion of knowledge of and respect for human rights, or the enactment and adoption of human rights legislation, or the pressing of a state violator of rights to change its behaviour. While there may not be much talk about human rights as common goods, there is acknowledgement of the public good nature of the human rights regime. The international human rights regime and its corresponding institutions is identified by some analysts as a global public good (Kaul et al., 1999, pp. 2–19). Calling it such draws attention to the fact that the costs of providing it cannot be borne by those who benefit from it. Once it is in place, like street lighting, it can be enjoyed by anyone, and its availability as such provides a context of security for all. But for those who cooperate in providing, maintaining and benefiting from the regime, it is a common good of their cooperation. This complex network of cooperation is what lends plausibility to the spontaneous expectation that human rights offer a prime example of global common goods. Heightened awareness of the goods valued in common will help reinforce the cooperation; hence the usefulness of spelling out the dimensions of global common goods. The relationship between rights and the good is complex and controverted. In Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of the use of rights language in contemporary political discourse, he targets the attempt to ground rights in an account of the good. He suggests that rights are a fiction and supports this assertion by pointing to the absence of any shared account among liberal thinkers who use the language of rights as to their nature and their justification. As he famously remarks, when comparing human rights with unicorns and witches, and the failure to demonstrate their existence, ‘every attempt to give good reasons for believing that there are such rights has failed’ (MacIntyre, 1985, p. 67). In After Virtue he takes as his prime target the work of Alan Gewirth and traces his argument justifying rights. As MacIntyre reconstructs that argument, it begins with the assertion that certain things are good for someone. That assertion may be supported with explanation and example as to how something benefits a person. At some point in the argument, then, according to MacIntyre, there is a move from saying that A is good for x to asserting that x has a right to A. This move is questionable. What is the warrant for saying that because something is good for someone they therefore have a right to it? It is important to recall that MacIntyre’s concern is to expose the hollowness of the claim of some liberal thinkers that there is an incontrovertible starting

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point for ethics and political theory in the fact of rights. Such rights on his view are a fiction. This challenge sets a task for theorists who acknowledge some relationship between rights and the good: evidently the things to which people are said to have rights are goods that they would want to have and enjoy. How then can the relationship be explained if the derivation of the right from the givenness of the want, desire or aspiration for the good is excluded? John Finnis is a primary example of a proponent of the link between rights and goods (1980). His position is not vulnerable to the criticism voiced by MacIntyre, since he does not attempt to defend the idea of natural or human rights as basic, being the (self-evident) grounds of obligations. Furthermore, in linking the list of human rights to human goods, as aspects of human flourishing, he does not invoke any automatic deduction from the assertion of a good to the establishment of a prescription. Rather, from the recognition of the many elements of human good, the question is raised for any society as to how the dimension of person’s goods are to be protected and respected by being enshrined in rights. In introducing his collection of essays on the topic of Human Rights and the Common Good, he suggests the discussion is ‘about what kinds of flourishing, and thus what kinds of rights, would appropriately be the object of legal protection, in our societies or, again, in any’ (Finnis, 2011c, p. 1). Far from advocating any simple direct derivation of a right, or a norm imposing obligations, from an identification of human goods, Finnis is aware of the complexity of legislation and recognizes that there is a debate to be had, and a set of procedures to be conducted before the legal protection of rights can be secured. It is in order to facilitate that complex debate that he introduces his account of human goods, and of the common goods at stake. Among the requirements that practical reason brings to bear on the debate is the demand that there be no direct harm to any instance of genuine good. Timothy Chappell articulates a similar requirement when spelling out the implications of the account of human goods for ethics. The right is to be defined ‘in terms of a logically prior good’ in his view, but that good is pluriform and diverse (Chappell, 2007, p. 102). In his context, rejecting a utilitarian-style approach to the good as something to be maximized, Chappell insists that while any of the goods might be the object of pursuit, all goods are to be treated with respect, while none should be violated. He proposes as a central thesis of natural law theory ‘that when you are not pursuing a good, then you must respect or honour that good, and must not violate or dishonour it’ (Chappell, 2007, p. 112). It is this attitude, formulated by Finnis and Chappell in different ways, that explains the elaboration of human rights as based on goods as aspects of human flourishing:

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that elements of our good as humans ought not to be violated, and should be honoured and respected, is what grounds the listing of human rights.

Disputes about the meaning of rights Whenever new claims are formulated as human rights the question is immediately opened about the identity criteria of rights: How is the validity of the claim to a (moral) human right to be vindicated? And when it appears that the different rights of different people or groups are in conflict what criteria are available for determining priority or strength of claim? Roger Trigg’s (2012) account of the tension between equality rights and liberty rights is a case in point. Debates among lawyers and academics reveal that there is considerable divergence in their views. Whether or not human rights require a ground or justification, what the relevant ground is or should be, how that ground is to be understood, and how the rights corresponding to that ground so understood should be formulated and applied are all matters of dispute. Do human rights require a justification, or are they self-evident? If they require a ground, is it necessary or desirable to appeal to a notion of human nature? How might the anthropological ground of rights be established without failing into the dangers of cultural imperialism? If the ‘human’ of human rights is not to be understood in terms of a universal human nature, how is it to be understood? Are the relevant proposals adequate to what is the shared understanding and practice of collaborators? Some of these disputes are reported briefly, not to resolve them but to show that the debate is to be understood as an attempt to clarify what exactly is the good for which the collaborators strive together.

The ground of human rights Chris Brown maintains that an adequate account of human rights requires an explanation in terms of human nature (2013, p. 23). He argues that many difficulties encountered in the understanding and application of human rights derive from the deliberate exclusion of the question of human nature. Among those difficulties are the familiar criticisms that the human rights regime is carried by a Western, and also particularly masculine perspective on the world, and that the judgements made in its name reflect a distinctively Western and liberal philosophy. Defenders of human rights are sensitive to these charges of

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cultural particularism and attempt to secure the claimed universality for human rights. These attempts are ever only partially successful. The difficulties arise, according to Brown, because ‘the international human rights regime has been established without the employment of a coherent account of human nature’ (2013, p. 23). Brown suggests that human rights rest on an account of the good life for human beings formulated in universal terms, but there is reluctance to admit this fact, so that the charges of cultural imperialism remain plausible. Standard ploys to avoid discussing the good for humans, which would require addressing human nature, include the appeal to positive law (human rights have become the currency of international law due to conventions and treaties), and also the pragmatism of what works (human rights are seen as useful, and even useful fictions). The problem with these approaches is that they cannot ground a moral obligation for anyone who disputes the usefulness of human rights or the moral validity of a global imperialism. The refusal to consider the topic of human nature in the context of these debates leads Brown to observe that ‘arguments from human nature appear to have been de-legitimated in contemporary discourse’ (2013, p. 24). He lists various factors that explain ‘how human nature has become a myth’. Or course, there never was a universally agreed account of what it was to be human – a key point in illustrating this is the fact that not all human cultures accept that human beings have just one life to live. It is necessary to distinguish between affirming a common humanity, and explaining in what exactly the communality consists. The intellectual challenge of developing an adequate explanation was avoided by scientists and philosophers in their adoption of the ‘scientific rejection of essentialism’. While rejecting all the deficient accounts of human nature, they sidestepped the difficult task of constructing an adequate account. The lack of such a defensible account has rendered universal human rights defenceless against the challenges of cultural imperialism, in Brown’s view. He concludes: ‘The twentieth century rejection of human nature was a reaction to Social Darwinism and the political implications of notions of scientific racism, but there is good reason to think that the genuinely scientific study of the human animal will not lead to such reactionary conclusions’ (Brown, 2013, p. 37). Brown is not alone in his objection to the fashionable anti-essentialism in the academy. While he sees its impact on the lack of grounding for human rights in an account of human nature, Martha Nussbaum bemoans the prevalence of antiessentialism among some people concerned with development. She has devoted a number of publications to development issues, in particular, the objectives of development policies, in The Quality of Life (1993, edited jointly with Amartya

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Sen) and the role of women: Women in Human Development (2000). A number of articles have been devoted expressly to countering the anti-essentialism she has encountered among professional colleagues (1992). She can accept the concerns that have led some to abandon any appeal to a determinate account of human beings – the desire not to impose one’s own perspectives or values on others, and the desire to be sensitive to the distinctive culture, experience and language of those who are recognized as different. But, she argues, the appropriate response is not to abandon all determinate accounts of humankind, but to generate one that is appropriately sensitive to cultural particularity and to difference. She argues very persuasively that the lack of an adequate account of the human would undermine two essential attitudes that are the pre-condition for all development work: compassion and respect. Without a sense of the other, no matter how different, as nonetheless like oneself in fundamental respects, it is difficult to see how genuine compassion with the other as suffering or needy could be maintained. A patronizing pity such as might be had for suffering animals would be possible, but compassion requires a sense of equality so there can be a kind of identification with the situation of the other. The related attitude of respect similarly requires recognition of those features of the other that are so valued that they can evoke the commitment to protect and foster, and not to harm. Since her target audience is, first of all, the community of those concerned with development work, Nussbaum’s appeal is to their own presupposed motivations of compassion and respect, which inevitably would be undermined by the anti-essentialism they espouse. Nussbaum (1990; 2000) attempts to produce a historically sensitive account of the most basic human needs and human functions. This results in a list of ten aspects of human functioning, to which correspond human capacities, and it is in relation to the basic capacities that she thinks development policies should be formulated. The task of development would be to facilitate people in their various situations acquiring the capacities to a certain threshold level so that they would be empowered to function in their contexts. She claims that her approach in delineating these features of being human is an essentialism of a kind, but which is not vulnerable to the standard criticisms adopted by the antiessentialists. Her summary of the standard criticisms of essentialism is useful, because they are basically the same objections raised against a universalizing doctrine of human rights. The first objection is that essentialism neglects historical and cultural differences by proposing an account supposedly applicable to all times and places (Nussbaum, 1992, p. 208). The second objection is that ‘by determining

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in advance what elements of human life have most importance, the essentialist fails to respect the right of people to choose a plan of life according to their own lights, determining what is most central and what is not’ (Nussbaum, 1992, p. 208). The third objection is that the application of essentialist ideas is inevitably prejudicial to some. The experiences and values of some people are discounted or ignored altogether since they don’t correspond to the pattern formulated in the essentialist account (Nussbaum, 1992, p. 209). Brown, Nussbaum and Buchanan (2006), who bemoans ‘Taking the Human out of Human Rights’ among others, want to defend the view that an adequate specification of what is due to human beings requires some reliable account of what constitutes humanity. Not all insist on a realist metaphysics or description of human nature, but all seek an understanding of what is owed in terms that correspond to what human beings are. The attempt to do without such an account is present already in the drafting of the Universal Declaration, motivated by the desire not to alienate adherents of any religion or culture by a too obvious commitment to religious or metaphysical doctrines (Glendon, 2001). Subsequent developments, however, have shown that surrogates have entered to fill the gap. The notion of dignity, simply co-affirmed with rights in the 1948 Declaration, is presented in the later Covenants as the ground of human rights, even though the meaning of the term remains obscure. Human dignity is supposedly the reason why humans have rights, claims against each other and against their states, but it remains no less mysterious than the idea of human nature (McCrudden, 2013). Glenn Hughes argues that the vagueness is not a disadvantage but enables the concept to function as a heuristic, guiding development (Hughes, 2011).

Rejecting the need for grounds James Griffin (2008; 2010) wants to avoid becoming embroiled in debates about the grounding of human rights. He begins with the given-ness of international human rights law and with the community of those who operate its institutions. His concern is not theoretical, but practical. He distinguishes between systematic and piecemeal approaches, locating his own among the latter. Where a systematic approach would proceed from general theory of some kind, and generate an account of ethics, value, rights, legal moral rights and human rights (2010, p. 741), his piecemeal approach begins from the particular notion of human rights as he finds it emerging in the human rights tradition. He then explores

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how this notion of human rights fits into the most satisfactory account of ethics he can devise. The task is to identify the meaning of rights in this tradition, and to establish the existence conditions for human rights so understood. In other words, Griffin’s approach accepts that there is in use a concept of human right that functions well for a purpose and the philosophical task is to make the ethical notion of a human right clearer. He avoids with this approach any engagement with the systematic theoretical debates, which from his point of view are both unnecessary and unsuccessful. Griffin’s approach then would concede to MacIntyre his criticism of attempts to justify human rights, while at the same time dismissing this failure of systematic theory as irrelevant to the philosophical task of clarifying language that is already in use, and serving valuable purposes, albeit with limitations. Public discourse of human rights in ethics, law and politics relies on this emergent concept. But, Griffin notes, this concept is not available to cover the whole spectrum of morality. There are many kinds of justice and fairness, in his view, which cannot be spoken of in the language of human rights. How exactly the boundaries are to be drawn is the philosophical task adopted. Some things will be excluded; what is included also requires specification, but an initial determination is that there are rights that people have simply in virtue of being human. James Griffin (2010) has formulated the constraints that an adequate reconstruction of contemporary human rights discourse would have to satisfy. He labels them uptake and durability. Uptake points to the requirement that the proposed account would be accepted by the professionals and activists of various disciplines who regularly use the language of human rights, and durability is the requirement that theory would persist and continue to be relied upon through further developments in the language of human rights. To satisfy the constraint of uptake, a theoretical account of human rights language would have to be acceptable to the very diverse community of lawyers, social scientists, political philosophers and activists of various kinds who engage on a daily basis with human rights and their violations. Griffin’s reason for identifying this constraint is closely linked to what he sees as the aim of such a theory. It is needed because of the threatening incoherence of human rights language in which there are no clear existence conditions for identifying human rights. Such lack of criteria of identification leads to the much bemoaned inflation of human rights claims. For instance, is it a human right of gay and lesbian persons that they have available to them a legal institution of same-sex marriage? There are advocates and opponents of the claim that it is a human right, but there are no clear criteria established within the discourse of human rights available to

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determine the answer. Different state and national jurisdictions may create the relevant institutions and then the positive right comes into existence in law. Other benefits to be hoped from a successful theoretical reconstruction of human rights are criteria for filling the content of identified rights, so that clarity about the exact entitlements of those who claim the relevant rights is achieved. And where disputes may arise particularly when trade-offs with other rights are needed, it would be useful to have some indication of the relative weights to be given to the different rights so that claims might be prioritized. A successful theory should deliver these further criteria specifying relative moral weighting. Pursuing his ‘piecemeal’ approach, Griffin assembles elements of the notion of human rights coming from the Enlightenment tradition. First, they are seen as moral rights that people have simply in virtue of being human; second, no specialized rationality but simply ordinary moral reasoning is all that is required to determine the existence and content of human rights. The third aspect, and the most controversial element of his approach, is his assertion that the notion of humanity, in virtue of which any of us is said to possess human rights, is our status as normative agents. Finally, he generates a list of paradigmatic rights. He insists that rights are not to be identified with interests, but they are protections of certain key human interests (Griffin, 2010, p. 746). Central among those interests is the interest in autonomy (Griffin, 2008, pp. 151–8), liberty (2008, pp. 159–174) and the minimum welfare required for the maintenance and exercise of moral agency (2008, pp. 179–84). A central move in his argument is to tie the attribution of human rights to the notion of personhood, understood as the possession of normative agency (2008, pp. 32–3, 36). This, according to Griffin, is the notion of humanity, in virtue of which we possess human rights. Normative agency is not merely the capacity to act deliberately and to take responsibility for one’s actions; it is more fundamentally the capacity to choose one’s own conception of the good and to shape one’s life accordingly. The ability to decide for oneself how one wishes to live and what image of the good life one wishes to realize in one’s own personal story is precisely that aspect of autonomy that was at the heart of the liberation agenda, which is the tradition of human rights (Reus-Smit, 2010, pp. 35–6). To respect this autonomy, liberty must be secured for persons so that they are free from coercive interference from the state or other bodies, and have the space to live the life they choose for themselves. But if Griffin is clear about the rational core of human rights, he is equally clear about the criterion for the ascription of rights to subjects. Those persons who have the capacity for normative agency are the subjects of human rights, and only those persons. He does not allow for

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exceptions, as for instance, infants, the senile or demented. Since they do not have the capacity for normative agency, they have no human rights. If they are maltreated, for instance, in a case of sexual abuse of infants, or if the organs of the demented are harvested to benefit others, these are not violations of their human rights, because they have none, in Griffin’s view. They do have moral rights and it would be gross violation of their rights were they to be mistreated in the way suggested. So it is important not to misunderstand Griffin or accuse him of depriving such vulnerable human beings of protection or even of tolerating such mistreatment. He insists that we would still have obligations towards infants and the senile, for example, constraining what might be done to them, but not because they possessed human rights. ‘My belief is that we have a better chance of improving the discourse of human rights if we stipulate that only normative agents bear human rights – no exceptions: not infants, not the seriously mentally disabled, not those in a permanent vegetative state, though we have weighty moral obligations to all of them’ (Griffin, 2010, p. 749). As John Tasioulas comments, on this account, the torture of the senile or of infants would be a moral horror, but not a violation of their human rights. ‘To say . . . that the murder of non-agents violates their rights, but is not a human rights violation, is to rely on what looks, from an orthodox point of view, like an artificial distinction between universal moral rights and human rights’ (Tasioulas, 2013, p. 303).

Human rights as norms The discussion of rights in relation to the good, considering the grounding and the explanation of rights, has led inevitably to rights as norms. Already in following Griffin’s proposal we were considering the operative language of the human rights community as it makes, propagates and enforces human rights laws. Following the ‘norm’ side of the disjunction it is clear that much work has been done and continues to be done on formulation of codes of rights for adoption in international conventions and in national legislation. Not only codes must be drafted, but structures of monitoring and enforcement must also be designed. While this is precise and technical work of legal drafting, it is focused on the character of rights as norms. While this might not be problematic for the experts involved, there are significant debates about the relationship between the moral norms of natural rights and human rights, and the legal norms enacted by national legislatures and international treaties (e.g. Tasioulas, 2013; Griffin, 2010; Buchanan, 2006).

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One major area of debate is associated with John Rawls’s proposals in the Law of Peoples, which results in what is called a political reading of rights. Rights are understood functionally from the role they play in international relations in triggering possible intervention in the affairs of a state accused of significant violations of the rights of its citizens. Long-standing principles of state sovereignty and non-intervention have been weakened or adjusted due to the acceptance of humanitarian intervention and the responsibility to protect. This in turn has led to a reworking of the categories of human rights, as exemplified by John Rawls’s limiting of classes of human rights violations that might warrant intervention. The ensuing debate opens up a wide spectrum of issues. Rawls’s proposals are intended to avoid the charges of paternalism and cultural imperialism raised against human rights advocacy. As noted earlier, critics maintain that the language of human rights is tied to a particular culture, it is parochial and partisan. For some countries and some cultures, the language and requirements of human rights are foreign, but more than that, they represent an imposition of an alien culture. They represent a set of values at odds with traditional values, and in the conflicts that arise the impact of human rights is to shift societies away from their traditions. Given this situation, human rights advocates must answer a charge of partisanship. At the same time, they are also challenged to face the charge of paternalism. It appears that those who wish to bring about the protection of human rights of others who themselves do not value such protection are deciding on behalf of those others what is good for them. Should the charge of paternalism be sustained, it would compromise the claim that there is a common good in the shared ecumene of human rights. Indeed, the good ‘for’ all would be identified and chosen by some for the benefit of all, but not all would acknowledge that their good is represented in the chosen human rights regime. This reflects the tension between the good in an ontological sense and the practical sense of good. Beitz warns against the assumption that might be located in the challenge of partisanship or paternalism, especially when arguing that human rights discourse is rooted in a culture alien to some states’ traditions, that all the participants in the traditional society agree in the rejection of human rights as alien. It would be an unwarranted assumption to suppose that all members of the traditional society endorse the practices that deprive them of the freedoms and opportunities named from outside their oppressive situation as their rights. Advocates of human rights make their case on behalf of those whose interests they wish to uphold, and who would welcome the intervention if they could (Beitz, 2008, p. 151).

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A number of strategies are followed by human rights advocates to answer the charges of paternalism and cultural imperialism. One strategy is to distinguish between a core set of rights and the more extensive set of liberal rights in an attempt to show that the former is universally acceptable, and so would not be vulnerable to the charges of partisanship and paternalism. The first strategy of identifying a core among the list of human rights is followed by several thinkers in a number of contexts. Some attempt to establish a core, which is common to all traditional moral codes, such as the norms prohibiting murder, theft, perjury. In this way, a corresponding set of rights is generated, reflecting persons’ interest in survival, invulnerability, opportunity of redress. Charles Beitz (2008, p. 150) summarizes the various strategies following this line. Henry Shue develops the category of Basic Rights, reacting against the position of those who would confine the core set of rights to those dealing with personal security. Shue insists that subsistence rights are no less basic, understanding this category to include whatever rights need to be satisfied so that any other rights can be satisfied. Personal survival and security are evident examples (Shue, 1996). Michael Walzer (1994) draws a similar distinction, but in terms of the underlying morality, suggesting that a set of standards or negative injunctions to which all societies can be held as a minimum could be discerned as a core shared by all thick moralities. In presenting his political reading of rights, Rawls speaks of ‘human rights proper’, a limited set of rights relevant to the possibility of humanitarian intervention, while the other rights are remarked upon as liberal aspirations. Beitz adds another possibility, borrowing the idea of an overlapping consensus from Rawls’s Political Liberalism and suggesting that the set of essential non-parochial rights might be those that it would be reasonable to expect adherents of conventional moralities to accept as consistent with ‘any of the main conceptions of political and economic justice in the world’ (2008, p. 151). But there are problems with this strategy. For one thing, the international human rights community, as represented by the UN, has explicitly rejected the move, insisting in its 1993 conference in Vienna that the full set of rights is to be implemented. The ‘duty to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms’ was reaffirmed (Beitz, 2008, p. 148). But even for reasons of theory there are difficulties with the proposal. On what grounds does one distinguish the narrow core from the broad set? Is it a principled distinction, or a pragmatic one? In either case, but especially in the latter, the question will be why the line is drawn where it is. For instance, on which side of the division will discrimination on religious grounds be placed?

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Among the accusations is that rights language is an imposition incompatible with some traditional cultures. But this accusation seems to rely on the idea that the validity of claimed rights would depend on the acceptability to all concerned. That seems to contradict the moral foundations of rights. As one commentator put it (Beitz, 2008, p. 152), genocide is wrong, but not because all agree that it is so: instead, it is because of the great evil involved in the deliberate attempt to exterminate a whole people or population that genocide is rightly condemned. The values and interests incorporated in human rights are not such because they happen to be valued by all human cultures. And so the force of rights is derived from their moral grounds. But this argument, though strong for the rights of the person, appears weaker for those economic and social rights that seem to be more conditional on the availability of institutions and resources, such as the political rights of participation, or the right to paid holidays. The strongest case for distinguishing a core from a broader set of human rights is seen by some to be rooted in the developing practice of humanitarian intervention, whether by military or by economic or by diplomatic means (Walzer, 2004). Practitioners in the area accept that certain violations of rights may trigger the response of intervention from the international community, but other forms of violation will not bring the same response. Rawls has formulated his understanding of the rationale for this distinction: It refers to a sense of what is conducive to the peace and stability of international order. In other words, there are some non-liberal societies that do not ensure the full set of human rights for their members (some elements of religious freedom, and of political freedoms), but which can be tolerated nonetheless. His reasoning seems to accept that those societies do have the potential for change, and that they are more likely to change by being treated as partners in an international society of states than by being coerced into change. This stance has provoked the criticism of many liberal supporters who protest at the refusal to endorse democratic rights or the rights of women to equality. Rawls speaks of these rights as liberal aspirations. As Reidy (2004) remarks on surveying the literature, some critics objected to him giving priority to corporate entities, peoples, over individual human persons. His account of human rights of relevance to international relations was considered too thin: for instance, many would have wanted him to include affirmation of rights to democratic government or to political equality or to egalitarian welfarist distribution. Similarly, the fact that he did not require IOs (International Organizations) to be democratically structured was found objectionable.

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With his focus on international order, Rawls considers only those rights the violation of which can be a trigger for intervention by an outside party in the affairs of a sovereign state. It is this role in the modern world that for Rawls marks out human rights as distinctive within the class of moral rights in general (Tasioulas, 2010, p. 653). But more specifically, it is not the violation of every right, or indeed any particular violation of a human right, which can function as the relevant trigger. Rawls is cautious in delineating the possible triggers, but his silence has been read as excluding many important liberal rights. In a footnote, Rawls raises and answers the question of justified intervention: ‘Is there ever a time when forceful intervention might be called for? If the offenses against human rights are egregious and the society does not respond to the imposition of sanctions, such intervention in the defense of human rights would be acceptable and would be called for’ (1999, p. 94). But, more generally, he expresses the hope that societies that violate human rights would learn from their contact with liberal peoples the value of liberal principles and ideals, and could adopt them with time, conforming their behaviour to these ideals, with the result that human rights violations would diminish. This more passive stance in the face of human rights violations has provoked widespread criticism. But, at the same time, it has motivated Rawls’s defenders to explore more precisely what is to count as egregious violations of human rights. One such defence points to the potential source of instability in international affairs arising from the tendency, real or perceived, of liberal regimes’ desiring to propagate their model of liberal democracy and transfer it to other cultures and parts of the world. ‘Nation building’ is perceived as a threat carried by enthusiastic liberals against non-liberal peoples. Andreas Follesdal asks if non-liberal states should ‘continually fear intervention by liberal states eager to promote democracy, human rights, and economic distributive justice – and contested conceptions of liberalism?’ (2006, p. 301). Rawls’s ambition in The Law of Peoples, he points out, is to remove this source of global instability, by providing liberal societies with reasons to tolerate and respect the political autonomy of some non-liberal decent peoples. The threat of liberal humanitarian intervention is removed. However, Follesdal doubts if Rawls has provided the required reasons to persuade liberals (2006, p. 313). Buchanan (2006) joins with those who are critical of Rawls for abandoning an anthropological grounding in favour of a political reading of human rights. He understands the concern to avoid parochialism in the restriction of global human rights to what might be grounded in the view of human good or human nature as generated by one particular culture, but the effort of generating a

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political conception of rights results in a marked restriction of the content of those rights. Freedoms from religious and other forms of discrimination as well as welfare rights are excluded from the list in the political conception. This follows from the functionalist understanding of rights on which Rawls relies: in the relations between peoples, it is assumed ‘that the distinctive function of human rights norms is that their violation supplies grounds for intervention across borders’ (Buchanan, 2006, p. 152). It is the pre-eminence given in Rawls’s analysis to this function that conditions the restrictive list of rights. In considering the relations between peoples, Rawls focuses on the means of enforcement, and as a result he seems to be unwilling ‘to recognize something as a “human right” unless “intervention” to enforce its protection might in principle be warranted’ (Buchanan, 2006, p. 137). Macleod (2006) agrees with other critics that it is a mistake to confine the list of human rights to those it might be legitimate to enforce coercively. However, he sees the point of Rawls’s strategy in terms of the distinction between the political conception of justice as the content of an overlapping consensus, and the moral conceptions of justice that would be embedded in the comprehensive doctrines. Comprehensive liberals following Rawls in domestic politics are content to tolerate the different (reasonable) comprehensive moral doctrines present in the polity as long as the representative of each can endorse, with their own reasoning, the overlapping consensus. This distinction between the political and the non-political present in Political Liberalism is carried over to the analysis of the relationship between liberal peoples and other decent but non-liberal peoples. As long as decent peoples can endorse the reasonable terms of relationship between peoples as worked out in the postulated double original position, then liberal peoples will not require their adoption of the full set of liberal rights. In effect, liberals are asked to consider their liberal doctrine of human rights as an example of a comprehensive doctrine, so that ‘when questions of international relations have to be dealt with, the preferred solution (from the standpoint of political liberalism) ought to be one that permits appeal to comprehensive doctrines only in the non-political sphere’ (MacLeod, 2006, p. 140). Without some such rational basis for the differential treatment of decent peoples, and for a corresponding distinction between an expansive and a narrow list of human rights, Rawls would not be able to claim that decent societies respect and protect human rights. Rawls’s distinction between certain rights which are deemed more fundamental or basic and the more extensive list as included for instance in the universal declaration, follows from the centrality given to the functional

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concern with enforcement. Only the egregious violation of certain rights will warrant intervention and the overriding of sovereignty. What is ultimate, then, is not the rights as such, but the agreed standards of behaviour between liberal and decent peoples, and these depend on what could be accepted in the relevant original position.

Conclusion The question pursued in this study is whether it can be meaningful to speak of common goods at the global level. Are there goods in common that are global? Analogous with the idea of a good functioning city, which is a good for all its inhabitants, is there a meaningful notion of the flourishing of humankind on a global scale? As well as the ontological conception of the good there is the practical: Are there global common goods that can be identified as the shared objects of cooperation on a global scale? Does the notion of common good add anything to the terminology of private and public and club goods already available? Does any obligation follow from the identification of a genuine common good? These have been our guiding questions. In this chapter, I have reflected on the language and institutions of human rights. On the face of it, one would expect that human rights, if anything, would qualify as a common good of all women and men. It would seem obvious that the flourishing of the human population of the earth cannot occur when the fundamental rights of many individuals and many peoples are disregarded or violated. It must be part of the well-being and good functioning of every single person that they enjoy security in the conduct of their lives and are assured of protection and redress in cases of discrimination or violation. This is what one would expect to find, but on closer examination difficulties arise. I have been arguing throughout that common goods of cooperation require a dimension of shared meaning, which can in turn be a common good and a focus of attention when disputed or confused. In relation to human rights, while there are global campaigns to promote them and major international conventions to secure them in law, the meanings sustaining the language and practice of human rights remain disputed. They are sometimes said to be culture-bound, a parochial product of the West, which is imposed as an unwelcome foreign ideology on ancient cultures. And even in the supposed home of human rights in the western and northern countries of the world, it appears that there is no agreement either on the foundations or on the meaning of human rights. There continues to be a

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lively philosophic discussion that reveals that the dimension of shared meaning is fragile and still unsettled. These disputes have been part of the discourse of human rights from the beginning. I do not claim to be able to resolve them, but I hope to have shown how the consideration of human rights language and institutions in the light of the common good can enrich perspectives on the issues. Efforts to deal with the challenges reveal that the common good of global human rights is only inchoately known. It is a heuristic that is still in the process of being discovered even as it is being constructed. An important common good in relation to human rights would be the clarification of shared meaning and the attainment of agreement on the nature and foundation of human rights. This is not likely to be achieved in the near future, given the extent of disagreement, but it can provide a target motivating progress in that direction. In the meantime, greater awareness of the fragility of the international human rights regime can point up the need to identify goods to be pursued and respected. The relevant institutions, officers, knowledge and skills, if not appreciated as common goods that are to everyone’s advantage, can easily become neglected. Populist politicians, bemoaning the encroachment of human rights legislation on the sovereignty and freedom of action of governments, can reinforce prejudice against such legislation. The norms of human rights and the corresponding legislation imposing obligations can lose their respectability quite easily, unless there is deliberate and sustained effort to reinforce the conception of the goods that are at stake in having such laws and their institutions. Only with an appreciation of the goods at stake can peoples’ willingness to bear costs and sustain burdens be maintained.

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Conclusion

Some readers will expect by the end of this work to be presented with a list of global common goods, goods that should be the focus of cooperative attention, or goods that should be pursued by everyone. They will be disappointed. There can be no such list. Of course, as the preceding chapters have shown, there can be examples of global common goods, but not an exhaustive list, or anything that approximates to that. To attempt such a list would be to slip into a prescriptive mode, expressing obligations and suggesting what people ought to value. The whole study has been predicated on the importance of recovering a focus on goods that are the object of action and freeing ethics from a preponderance of concern with norms. This stance will be maintained to the end, despite the very reasonable desire to know what goods might be, or even ought to be, common goods at a global level. Besides, the thrust of the investigation has been to examine and reflect on various discussions about international relations and global order, global justice and the international human rights regime in order to draw attention to the goods in common that are at stake in those debates, but which might not be sufficiently adverted to by the participants. The concern was not to say to such participants what goods they ought to be pursuing, but instead to help them become aware of the nature of the goods towards which they are already working. Several chapters were devoted to developing the concepts and distinctions that would facilitate reasonable talk about such goods. This remains the orientation in conclusion, to facilitate a more deliberate attention to the goods for the sake of which people and states cooperate in fact. As Aristotle remarks, all action is for the sake of some good, and all cooperation is for the sake of goods in common. With all that is being done and the complex forms of collaboration that are constantly expanding, there are many goods being pursued, and a more articulate acknowledgement of them will facilitate greater appreciation and awareness of the complexity and the richness of goods in common.

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Talk of goods, the good life, common goods and the ultimate good, typical of an Aristotelian approach to political matters, appears threatening to liberals committed to the defence of autonomy. The suspicion always is that those who advocate a political perspective based on a conception of the good will ultimately attempt to impose their view at the expense of others’ views of their good. The liberal concern with autonomy and liberties grounds the generation of principles, criteria and rules that can be relied upon in dealing with conflicts typically understood as occasioned by differing visions of the good life. Generate laws and rules and apply them impartially is the typical solution of liberal political culture to major social problems. It is not surprising, therefore, if the approach to global ethics typically focuses on two issues: the generation of appropriate norms and the problems associated with motivation. The first issue draws a comparison with national communities, and asks how the generation of norms with validity on a global scale might be conceived and enacted. The second issue wonders how people in their varied cultures and situations can be motivated to comply with norms that are designed to benefit distant others. David Miller’s (2000) discussion of the comparison of social justice in the national community and global justice internationally illustrates the first issue (Chapter 10). Also the contributions of the various cosmopolitans to the clarification of global justice sought the generation of universally valid norms. John Rawls is a further example, his Law of Peoples (1999a) delivering for an international situation a set of laws, which parallel without reproducing the principles of justice of his A Theory of Justice (1999c) (Chapter 9). On the problem of motivation, the cosmopolitans anguish over how people might be motivated to do what has been demonstrated to the cosmopolitans’ satisfaction to be their obligation to do. Dobson (2006) worries that the appeal to shared humanity is insufficient to motivate. A consensus seems to emerge that the insight into responsibility for the problems could generate enough guilt to motivate action. Not positive duties, but failure with regard to negative duties, the carbon footprint, are to be relied upon for the necessary motive force (Chapter 10). But sometimes the concentration slips. Instead of focusing on laws, their justification and motivation, sometimes the authors drift into writing about their vision for a well-functioning global order. In other words, as the exploration of this book has shown, they bring in considerations of the good often in language that explodes the constraints of the narrow agenda. For instance, David Miller outlines what he considers to be the appropriate norms to guide individuals and countries in the pursuit of global justice (Chapter 10). He summarizes

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the demands of global justice in terms of three obligations: the obligation to respect basic human rights worldwide, the obligation to refrain from exploiting vulnerable communities and individuals, and the obligation to provide all political communities with the opportunity to achieve self-determination and social justice (Miller, 2002, p. 176). Having listed his proposed obligations, he concludes in a different key by offering a vision of a good situation, one that is by implication proposed as worth pursuing. His vision is of ‘a world in which nations independently pursue their own conceptions of social justice, as well as other aims and goals, while at the same time respecting basic rights, both internally and externally, and avoiding exploitation of individuals or of other communities. To create such a world, very different from our own, would be an achievement of the highest order’ (2002, p. 179). Indeed, this would be a goal worth pursuing. The political philosopher arguing in Aristotelian mode would agree but might suggest the priorities be reversed. Instead of beginning with the generation and justification of obligations and the struggle with how to motivate compliance, would it not be more satisfactory to begin with the vision of the good, outlining what exactly is thought worth striving for? Let the good appear, in the sense that it be made comprehensible and shown in its attractiveness, and let those attracted by it be moved to pursue it. What laws and obligations will be appropriate will emerge in the course of trying to achieve the good. Chris Brown’s (2013) argument that the proponents of human rights who have excluded the question of their grounding in an account of human nature is relevant here (Chapter 11). He makes the case that the absence of a disciplined attempt to articulate the vision of human flourishing, which motivates the generation of human rights law, leaves a set of problems that defy solution in the absence of such an account. John Rawls’s Law of Peoples was oriented to finding the laws that might provide a source of order for the international society of states. His work conformed to the typical pattern as outlined. But he also ended with a shift to a vision of a reasonably just society of peoples, presented as a possibility that might motivate commitment to achieve it. Referring to his efforts in sketching the law of peoples, he comments on their usefulness in relation to an ambitioned goal. ‘For so long as we believe for good reasons that a self-sustaining and reasonably just political and social order both at home and abroad is possible, we can reasonably hope that we or others will someday, somewhere, achieve it; and we can then do something toward this achievement’ (Rawls, 1999a, p. 128). As commented in Chapter 9, Rawls is operating with a vision of a global common good that breaks through his technical discussion at points, revealing

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what is the operative dynamic of this thought. He qualifies his proposed vision as ‘a realistic utopia’, a comment taken up by his commentators (Martin and Reidy, 2006). But Rawls is unambiguous about the intent of his work. It is to provide ‘a long-term goal of political endeavour’ (1999a, p. 128). Even a field as rigorously ‘realist’ as International Relations is discovered to have developed an appreciation of international common goods as relevant to the explanation of patterns of international cooperation, and the source of motivation for the cooperating parties. More nuanced appreciation of what is involved in authority, legitimacy and their roles in motivating the behaviour of international actors has relied on an appreciation of the goods at stake. Among these are the goods of shared understanding, shared meaning, even between conflicted parties whose interests are opposed, but who nonetheless have an interest in maintaining the shared space constituted by the shared meaning (Chapter 7). To make a case for the importance of common goods, as understood in the broadly Aristotelian tradition, it was important to acknowledge the achievement of games theory and related rational choice models in exposing the structures of collective action (Chapter 8). The exploration of the various situations in which collaboration on an international scale might be required revealed the dilemmas faced by cooperating partners when called upon to take on expenses and costs that might prove to be unnecessary or that might make them vulnerable to freeriding by others. While offering valuable analyses of the dilemmas that arise from the consideration of the distribution of costs and benefits, these treatments of collective action did not supplant the need for considerations of the common goods involved, not least the shared meaning between the cooperating parties. Also in considering the difference between categories of public and private goods, on the one hand, and common goods on the other, the issue of distribution of costs and benefits was found to be critical. Complementarity was endorsed, with emphasis on the distinctive contribution of the Aristotelian analysis in focusing on the goods being pursued, as distinct from the pay-off to or costs and risks borne by collaborators (Chapter 4). The analysis of the goods of cooperation drew attention to the complexity of those goods, and the corresponding need for nuance in speaking of the goods in common when people act together. There is no need to repeat the listing of instances of types of goods, other than to insist on the basic thought that in each case the good is ultimately concrete and specific. It might be action to get ratification (concrete public action) by states of a covenant on children’s rights (a concrete document), which commits those states to providing education

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(specifically schools, with teachers, with curriculum) to actual children (concrete persons). At the end of this list is a boy or girl in a classroom enjoying a right. But more urgently, at the end of this list are other boys and girls whose rights are denied them, but which are being vindicated by INGOs drawing attention to their plight. In each of the fields surveyed in the chapters of this book, a constant theme has been the emphasis on shared meaning as a good in common between cooperating partners. Sometimes that shared meaning is taken for granted, and sometimes it has to become a goal of action, when there is a crisis and a need to repair or sustain or regenerate the meaning. The social ontology of John Searle was of use in analysing the importance of shared meaning in constituting the social world and, in particular, the creative role of declaration in making that to exist, which is declared to be the case (Chapter 6). The reliance on shared meaning as essential to common goods required a prior discussion to eliminate the danger of reduction of asserted goods to subjective valuations (Chapter 1). The good is not a transferred label whose real referent is the psychological state of the agent, desiring the object in question. Apart from the traditional contrast between the Aristotelian and the modern Hobbesian– Humean manner of dealing with this issue, it was also necessary to confront the claim that there can be no external motivator for action. Bernard Williams was the origin of this denial of external motivators: the agent cannot be motivated by anything that is not already in his motivation set. John Searle’s work proved useful for this task in showing how agents are capable of creating for themselves desire-independent reasons for action (Chapter 2). But, in addition, other authors exploited some cracks in Williams’s formulations to reveal the confusion in his notion of desire, and also show how his concession of a ‘sound deliberative route’ made possible the recovery of external reasons. Having cleared away these objections, the possibility of an exploration of common goods on a global scale was opened. The exploration of Galston’s remarks dismissing the notion of a highest good, a summum bonum, a notion borrowed from Aristotle, has proved doubly valuable for our task. Galston made his case in the name of pluralism, and so it provided the opportunity to link an account of common goods with a pluralist philosophy of the good (Chapter 3). At the same time, it posed a challenge to explain how a complex social organization could be said to have a common good. Relying on an understanding of the good as flourishing, familiar examples were taken to show how it could be meaningful to speak of the flourishing of a complex organization without succumbing to a monism or other reductionism

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of the good. The well-being of a city, the flourishing of a university, are examples familiar enough from experience and from reports, and these were used to make the case that it can be meaningful to speak of the common good of such entities. At the same time, it had to be shown how the flourishing of the whole is constituted by the autonomous flourishing of individuals and of parts, and in this the example of a university as a complex organization proved useful. How could a university do well that did not foster the autonomy of its teachers and researchers, and foster the creativity of its different departments? None of those activities of fostering could be simply top-down, administration led, but had to be by partnership with independently motivated agents at every level. Yet, all together, while each one might have their own story to tell, could be said to cooperate for the common good. The example of a university, or of a university city, or of a country, illustrated the possibility of speaking meaningfully of the goods in common for which all involved cooperated, at various levels of awareness and commitment, but nonetheless truly. By extrapolation, and with the help of examples taken from International Relations, and from Rawls’s Law of Peoples and other contributions, it is argued that we can also speak meaningfully of global common goods. Given the complexity of cooperation involved, sometimes the cooperating partners will be national states and IOs, sometimes it will be individual citizens and INGOs. Sometimes also the cooperation will be deliberately sustained with the knowing commitment of all involved, but on other occasions it is sufficient if local actors concentrate on their own business, as is presumed to be the case with the functioning of markets. That it is meaningful to speak of global common goods is not an inconsiderable conclusion in the context of the exclusion of talk of the good from political philosophy. But more, I trust, has been achieved in this exploration. There is, in addition, a mapping of the complexity of the goods in common in global cooperation. This is useful not only as a guide and aid to mutual understanding, but also a helpful corrective to monism of various kinds. Nevertheless, the concern about obligations remains, what ought to be done. This is well treated in other branches of ethics as well as in global ethics. How goods and norms relate to one another has emerged as a theme throughout this study. At the start, it was necessary to insist that there is no direct deduction from the affirmation that something is a good to a prescription that one ought to pursue that good. This is important, given the anxiety expressed that talk of the good is a covert way of imposing norms. But as the examination of the language of human rights has shown, while the dimensions of the good and the obligatory might be distinguished, they cannot be easily separated. As noted

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in Chapter 3, Chappell (1998, pp. 74–5) provided the terms with which to articulate the appropriate connection between goods and norms. Goods are promoted when we pursue them, but when we are not actually pursuing goods the attitude of respect is required, as well as the commitment not to violate goods. The implications of non-violation and of the respectful attitude provide the link with goods in the generation of norms. The emphasis throughout has been on goods as the objects of action, so that the concentration has been on the good in practical reason. But at times it has also been necessary to mention goods in an ontological sense, what is really good, even if not recognized as such by those whose good it is. In Chapter 10, the example of smallpox eradication was used to make the point. However, there is a double point to be made, one about the reality of the good of which beneficiaries (and even providers) can be ignorant, and a second point about the sense of identity as participant in a group. A smallpox-free existence is a very definite good that can be shared in by everyone on the planet even if they are unaware of it. It is a state of affairs to everyone’s advantage. This good was achieved by the coordinated efforts of many people. The ‘we’ who did this, achieved the virtual eradication of smallpox, and can be proud of their success that benefits many others. The common good in question here can be distinguished as the common good of the actors and campaigners, and the common good of the beneficiaries. There are distinct identities in play corresponding to the different goods. Those who collaborate in the campaign to eradicate the disease do so at different levels, with varying degrees of knowledge and responsibility. Allowing for the gradation of knowledge and deliberateness, however, there is a group of collaborators who are the agents bringing about the desired goal, the eradication of the disease, and for a significant proportion of that group there is a shared sense of ‘we’, a common identity. On the other hand, the beneficiaries of the campaign will not have a shared identity, a sense of ‘we’, except on the rare occasions when they might be reminded of the gratitude they and humankind owe to the benefactors. This absence of consciousness of a shared identity does not undermine the fact that they enjoy and benefit from a good made available to them. To have a common good in this sense does not presuppose either a shared identity or an awareness of the good in question. However, as noted in the Introduction, there is a ‘we’ addressed in this book, which is in the process of self-discovery. Roger Scruton (2012) was cited in the introduction and discussed in Chapter 2 for his treatment of the sense of local identity, which he considered the essential ingredient for any effective action to

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deal with environmental issues. The fact of a sense of local identity cannot be denied, but the possibility of a more universal identity should not be ruled out because difficult to achieve or sustain. Goods valued, pursued and respected in common generate a sense of identity among those who do so. The valuing and respect for goods in common at the global level will also have the effect of unifying people in a shared concern. How politically effective this might possibly be is another question. To ask about this is to operate in the domain of practical reason, but there is a further ontological aspect. Richard Kraut (2007) was cited in Chapter 1 for his theory of developmentalism as an elaboration of the Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia or flourishing. In becoming aware of and committed to the respect for and pursuit of global goods in common, ‘we’ are becoming more of what we are capable of being, and developing as human community. The self-discovery, and self-realization implicit in the investigation of goods in common at the global level must be added to the goods ambitioned and achieved in our cooperation. Normally we won’t focus on such goods, since attention is directed to those matters of concern, such as the safeguarding of the language in which human rights are expressed and justified. But even as the appropriate use of a language is reinforced by its successful use, so too the bonds of people united in the valuing of goods are liable to be strengthened by the successful achievement of those goods. Aristotle is sure about this: It is the sharing of a view on what is good and beneficial, lawful and right, which constitutes community.

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Wilkinson, R. and K. Pickett (2010), The Spirit Level. Why Equality is Better for Everyone, new edition. London: Penguin. Williams, B. (1981), ‘Internal and external reasons’, in B. Williams (ed.), Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–13. Wolf, M. (2005), Why Globalization Works. The Case for the Global Market Economy. New Haven & London: Nota Bene Paperback. Wolff, J. (2011), Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Enquiry. London: Routledge. Wolterstorff, N. (2002), ‘Comments on William A. Galston’s Liberal Pluralism’ prepared for delivery at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Washington, DC: June 20, 2002. Zaibert, L. (2003), ‘Intentions, promises, and obligations’, in B. Smith (ed.), John Searle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 52–84.

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Index abstraction 6, 13–14, 16–17, 28, 32–3, 88 aesthetics 13–14, 16, 20, 22, 33, 55 America 116, 125–9 analogy 5–7, 17, 47, 49, 53–4, 72–5, 86, 91, 167, 201 anarchy 114–20, 129 Anderson 5, 20–2, 46, 53, 88 Anscombe 22–3 Aristotle on cooperation for common goods 73–5, 85, 210 on ethics 3 on eudaimonia 23, 52 on the good 5, 12–13, 73–5, 85, 210 on the good life 5, 53, 88 on the highest good 30, 45, 49, 88, 207 on politics and the shared view of the good 29, 45, 58, 73, 85, 207, 210 associative obligation 7, 168 attitudes of valuation 6, 25 Augustine 89 authority 4, 33, 46–7, 114–16, 120–1, 206 civil 42, 114 collective 7, 73, 169 global 60, 73, 169 legitimate 115–16, 120 public 4, 73 sovereign 127, 129, 167, 169 autonomy 24, 29, 32, 47, 53, 55, 60, 128, 146, 181, 194, 199, 204, 208 Axelrod 133 Barrett 136–40 Beitz 7, 156, 181, 196–8 Berlin 45–6 Bingham 39–41, 125 Böckenförde 96 Böckenförde paradox 96 Boyle 128 Brown 7, 189–90, 192, 205 Buchanan 192, 195, 199–200 Bull 125, 129 Buzan 114

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Caney 161–2 Chappell 10, 32, 36, 38, 40–1, 44, 50–3, 188, 209 Chicago 54–5, 91 civic republicanism 93, 95 coerced exchanges 70–1 coercion 6, 114–16, 120, 131, 169, 175 collective action 6, 103, 131–3, 136–40, 206 common goods in ontological sense 24, 176, 196, 201, 209–10 in practical sense 6, 8, 15, 32, 42, 48, 74–5, 83–9, 176, 196, 201, 209–10 see also cooperation, good, good life commons 5, 68, 72, 81, 84, 134 communitarianism 144–5 consequentialism 3, 9–10, 53 constitutive contribution 58–9 construction 85, 92, 127, 163, 183–4, 193 contextualism 9, 170, 174 contract 29, 37, 127, 143, 169 cooperation Aristotle on 74–5, 89, 107, 202 forms of 65, 70–1, 75, 83–9, 97, 123 and game theory 132–5, 137–40 global 19, 85, 115, 130, 201, 208 for goods in common 6, 8, 15, 32, 42, 74–5, 83–9, 197 international 6, 71, 85, 113, 117, 119, 130, 140, 146, 206 Searle on 101–4 understood from common purpose 29, 38, 85, 94, 129 see also collective action, self-interest under interest cosmopolitanism 7, 9, 120, 126, 129, 144–68, 172–7, 204 Cronin 117–20, 124–6, 129, 131, 140–3, 158 deontology 3, 10, 105 desire-independent reasons for action 5, 34–8, 68, 99, 101–2, 113–15, 207

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de Soto 65 developmentalism 24, 33, 43, 210 dignity 15–16, 89, 147, 192 discrimination 7, 15, 18, 168, 197, 200–1 Dobson 166–7, 204 Dunne 114 economics categories 5–6, 20, 61–2, 67, 73, 77, 80–1, 84 and injustice 162, 166, 168, 197–9 rationality 70 English School 114, 129, 183 environment 2, 28, 34, 54–5, 59, 69, 72, 114, 118, 122, 128, 169, 210 Epstein 70 equality 15–17, 39, 87–8, 144–9, 152, 161, 164–72, 177, 189, 191, 198 ethics basic question 3, 6–7, 9, 25 developmental approach 24 global ethics 1, 3–4, 9, 159, 204, 208 question of the good 4, 10, 30, 75, 159, 180, 188, 203 eudaimonia 23, 51–3, 75, 210 Europe 42, 71, 78, 89–90, 110, 118, 128, 138, 150, 181 evaluation 19–21, 31, 35, 46, 54, 84, 86, 91, 123 externalities 55, 67, 69 fairness 41, 144, 146, 148, 167, 172, 193 Finnis 11, 14, 22, 42, 188 flourishing 53–4 free-riding 69–71, 133 friendship having goods in common 84, 89 as a value 12–14, 16, 22, 50–1, 87 Galston denies a summum bonum 47–9, 207 rejection of monism 49–52 on value pluralism 45–8, 207 Gamble 9 game theory assurance game 137–8 chicken game 138 coordination game 137–8 prisoners’ dilemma 68, 133–7 Glendon 192

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global global public goods 72–3, 137–9, 169 see under ethics; justice globalization 164, 184, 186 good always concrete 5, 12–18, 32–3, 40–1, 75–6, 159, 174, 206–7 object of action 5, 12, 14, 17, 20, 33, 85, 94 Goodin 162–3, 173, 175 good life, the Aristotle on 3, 5, 53, 88–9, 204 different views 46, 89 global sense 5, 53, 122, 157, 162 the question of ethics 3, 5, 23, 25 goods club goods 5, 63–4, 77, 80, 84, 201 private goods 5, 62–3, 65, 69, 71, 73, 76–9, 84, 206 public goods 5, 61–73, 76–80, 83–4, 132–3, 136–40, 169, 176, 187 governance 114, 121, 123, 162 Griffin 52, 192–3, 195 Guantanamo Bay 6, 125, 129 Guinea Worm 139 Haldane 62, 77, 79–81 Hampton 134 Hart 180 health, as a value 14–22, 70–2, 84, 86–7, 92, 114, 136–7, 139 Held 162 heuristic 5–7, 87–8, 90, 94, 123–4, 129, 185–6, 192, 202 Hobbes 4, 6, 19–20, 114, 120, 134–5, 143, 167, 207 Hollenbach 63–4 Honohan 93, 95 Hughes 192 human rights as goods 180, 186–9 history 180–6 justification of 109, 187, 193 in The Law of Peoples 146–51, 154, 158 as norms 180, 195–200 source and meaning 189–95 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 40, 125, 149, 183, 192, 200 Hume 4, 34–5, 102, 207 Hurd 115–17, 120, 124, 129, 143, 158 Hurrell 120–4, 129, 185–6

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Index ICC 6, 119, 126–7, 183 incommensurability 11, 46, 50–1 individualism 144, 153, 161, 172 see also methodological individualism institutions as goods 7, 40–3, 83–4, 97–101, 104–27, 150–69, 179–87, 192–4, 201–2 integrative higher order 53–4 intention 37, 102–4, 109, 113 in action 103–4 prior 103–4 intentionality ‘I’ intentionality 102–4 Collective 102–5, 107, 113 interest 4, 27, 40–2, 90, 99–100, 127–37, 140–4, 149–52, 185–7, 194–8, 206 communal 2, 27, 42, 118–19, 123–5, 129, 146, 149, 153, 185 self-interest 6, 107, 115–21, 131–3, 140, 146, 156, 158, 167, 169, 173 international protection regimes 108, 140 international relations 6–7, 113–20, 180–6, 196, 198, 200, 203, 206, 208 justice 6–7, 15–18, 74, 87–8, 114–16, 143–62, 166–8, 170–1, 175–6, 197–200 common good idea of 143, 148, 150–6 global 7, 9, 17, 97, 121, 145, 147, 159, 166–77, 203–5 perfect/imperfect procedural 17 procedural 116 pure procedural 17 social 7, 17, 169–74, 204–5 system 69, 86, 127 justification of norms 3, 30

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liberal democracy 24, 96, 148, 153, 199 liberalism 30, 96, 120, 144–5, 153, 157, 199–200 liberal peoples 6, 146–7, 149, 154, 157–8, 199–200 liberal pluralism 45–8 liberty 4, 15–17, 24, 45, 47, 88, 91, 144–8, 154, 189, 194 Libya 116–17 Locke 125, 165, 180, 182 Lonergan 87, 129 Luban 127–8, 137–8 McCrudden 192 MacIntyre 33–4, 57, 92, 94–5, 108, 187–8, 193 market failure 65 Marxist 95, 107 maximization 10, 23, 51–2, 152, 188 meaning, shared 6–7, 83–5, 90–100, 117, 120, 124–30, 183–6, 201–2, 206–7 means-goal relation 50, 56–7 metaphysics 12, 21, 73, 192 methodological individualism 102, 133 Miller 7, 162, 169–75, 204–5 monism 20, 46, 49–52, 60, 170, 207–8 morality 114, 162, 168–9, 193, 197 Mulhall 145 Nagel 46, 166–9, 172, 175 Nardin 122 narrative structure 53–4 Nickel 148 Nozick 144 Nussbaum 46, 57, 92, 190–2

Kane 24 Kant 3, 10, 43, 120, 128 Kraut 19, 22–6, 33, 43, 89, 210

obligation 9–10, 23, 27–31, 36–9, 43–4, 145, 159–75, 188, 190, 195, 201–5 Oderberg 10, 14 oikophilia 28 ontology 6, 37, 99–113, 146, 207

language 4–5, 84–94, 105–9, 125–6, 180–7, 191–6, 198, 201–2, 204, 210 law 4, 7, 17–18, 39–43, 48, 78, 86–7, 105, 109, 167–9, 188, 190, 202, 204–5 human rights law 8, 190–5, 201, 205 international 99, 116–17, 120, 185, 190, 204 law of peoples 141, 146–9, 154–6, 180, 196, 199, 204–6 see also rule of law

particularism 157, 162, 190 Plato 11–12 Pogge 7, 145, 161, 164–7, 175, 177 political liberalism 30, 147, 157, 197, 199 political philosophy 4, 33, 114, 143, 155–6, 175, 208 politics 5, 9, 45–7, 61, 88–9, 107, 121–3, 143, 155, 181, 186, 193, 200 postulate of self-interest 132

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prescription 5, 10, 28, 30–3, 39, 188, 208 preventive war 6, 126–9 public/private distinction 76 public reason 89, 153 Raphael 11–13 rationality 5, 44, 51, 68, 70, 80, 99, 102, 107, 132–6, 141, 144, 146, 194 Rawls 6–7, 17, 30, 89, 141, 143, 144–58, 172, 180, 196–200, 204–6 The Law of Peoples 6, 143, 154–7, 183, 196, 199, 204–5, 208 Political Liberalism 30, 147, 157, 197, 200 A Theory of Justice 144 Raz 46, 180 realism in international relations 114, 120 metaphysical 21–2 reasons, internal and external 5, 34–6, 38, 43, 207 reconstruction 193–4 reductionism 10, 53, 80, 84, 207 regulation 3, 9, 64–5, 69, 83, 96, 115, 124, 134–6 Reidy 146, 198, 200 religion 14, 30, 48–9, 71, 74, 89–90, 94, 128, 145, 150, 184, 192, 197–8, 200 Rengger 127 Reus-Smit 181–5, 194 Riordan 31, 75, 129 Rousseau 70 rule of law 5, 39–44, 59, 85, 95, 125 Salkever 89 Samuelson 62, 77 Sandel 144 Sandler 136–8, 140 Scheffler 87–8 School of Athens, The 11–13 Scruton 2, 28–9, 41, 43, 135, 174, 209 Searle 2, 6, 35–40, 44, 68, 99–111, 113, 115, 117, 163, 207 on social ontology 6, 99–100, 102, 107–8, 110, 113, 207

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Seel 42–3, 62, 77–8 Sen 190–1 Shue 182, 191, 197 Sigmund 131 smallpox eradication 139, 176, 209 Smith 34 social ontology see under Searle solidarity 41, 166, 172–5 sovereignty 108, 115, 117, 121–2, 126–8, 146, 167, 180–5, 196, 201–2 status function declarations 99–100, 105, 107, 157 subjectivism 38 summum bonum 46–9, 59, 157, 207 Tasioulas 195, 199 Taylor 46, 84–5, 95, 145 tolerance 15–16 tragedy of the commons 68, 128, 134 Trigg 189 UN 117, 119, 126 universalizability 3, 126, 191 USA see America utilitarianism 3, 10, 23, 50, 58, 160, 188 utility 23, 50, 118 valuation 5, 20, 21, 25, 207 value as intelligibility of good 5, 13–16, 22, 41, 43, 51, 77, 83, 90, 119 as quality of action 16 value pluralism 45–50, 54, 58, 60, 207 see under Galston virtue ethics 3, 93, 95–6 Walzer 17, 145, 197–8 well-being 7, 49, 51–3, 57, 59, 67, 71, 79, 88, 90, 149, 151, 201, 208 Williams 5, 34–6, 38, 46, 207 Wolff 71 Wolterstorff 48–9 Zaibert 37–8

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