Communitarian Common Good

Individual Choice and the Unity of Common Good
While communitarians generally argue that members of a community share the same set of values and the same vision of the substantive good, to which new members are socialized, liberals tend to “construe this as equivalent to the rejection of individual diversity in relation to human goods” (Nederman, 1992, p. 977). In particular, liberal theorists largely seem to assume that any conception of the communal good that exceeds minimal consensus on tolerance and public order “imposes an ‘exclusivist,’ quasi-totalitarian conception of a common life upon individuals, who are thereby prevented from choosing their own life plans” (ibid.). In the effort to strengthen the communitarian argument and to fend

Since “the health of the organism requires that every limb and organ must share full membership in the body, the free judgment of each segment of the community must be encouraged and defended” (Nederman, 1992, p. 980). In order for individual moral judgment about the common good to be effective, members need to have sufficient liberty in choosing and carrying out their actions as they deem right. John argues that “virtue does not arise in its perfection without liberty and that the loss of liberty demonstrates irrefutably that virtue is not present” (John of Salisbury, 1990, p. 176). He takes the individual’s capacity for moral reasoning and the freedom of individual judgment, rather seriously, encouraging virtuous men to denounce the wrongs and injuries committed by others, and praising rulers and great men “who allow social inferiors to vocalize condemnation of the vices of their superiors” (Nederman, 1992, p. 980; John of Salisbury, 1990, pp. 177-180). In the end, both individual choice and personal liberty are part and parcel of the common good for

to exercise their discretion with regard to utility of the whole” (Nederman, 1992, p. 981). Again, by construing the common good not as a simple, imposed unity, but rather as a “multiplicity ordered toward a single end,” the medieval understanding of the body politic “permits the communitarian to construct a framework within which to understand the diversity of interpretations of that good and to appreciate the necessity of diversity itself” without surrendering the doctrine of substantive common good itself (Nederman, 1992, p. 983). Whereas today we tend to think that the commitment to community values and shared conceptions of the good is mutually exclusive with individual moral judgment and individual evaluation of the good, medieval political theory vividly illustrates their deep