Жалпы игілік: Қоғамдық мүдде және оның философиялық негіздері

What is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community

In philosophy, economics, and political science, the common good (also commonwealth, general welfare, or public benefit) is either what is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a given community, or alternatively, what is achieved by citizenship, collective action, and active participation in the realm of politics and public service. The concept of the common good differs significantly among philosophical doctrines. Early conceptions of the common good were set out by Ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato. One understanding of the common good rooted in Aristotle's philosophy remains in common usage today, referring to what one contemporary scholar calls the "good proper to, and attainable only by, the community, yet individually shared by its members." The concept of common good developed through the work of political theorists, moral philosophers, and public economists, including Thomas Aquinas, Niccolò Machiavelli, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, James Madison, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, John Maynard Keynes, John Rawls, and many other thinkers. In contemporary economic theory, a common good is any good which is rivalrous yet non excludable, while the common good, by contrast, arises in the subfield of welfare economics and refers to the outcome of a social welfare function. Such a social welfare function, in turn, would be rooted in a moral theory of the good (such as utilitarianism). Social choice theory aims to understand processes by which the common good may or may not be realized in societies through the study of collective decision rules. Public choice theory applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests affect political activities and outcomes.

The term common good has been used in many disparate ways and escapes a single definition. Most philosophical conceptions of the common good fall into one of two families: substantive and procedural. According to substantive conceptions, the common good is that which is shared by and beneficial to all or most members of a given community: particular substantive conceptions will specify precisely what factors or values are beneficial and shared. According to procedural formulations, by contrast, the common good consists of the outcome that is achieved through collective participation in the formation of a shared will. It is when one another respects others' dignity and rights.

Under one name or another, the common good has been a recurring theme throughout the history of political philosophy. As one contemporary scholar observes, Aristotle used the idea of "the common interest" (to koinei sympheron, in Greek) as the basis for his distinction between "right" constitutions, which are in the common interest, and "wrong" constitutions, which are in the interest of rulers; Saint Thomas Aquinas held "the common good" (bonum commune, in Latin) to be the goal of law and government; John Locke declared that "the peace, safety, and public good of the people" are the goals of political society, and further argued that "the well being of the people shall be the supreme law"; David Hume contended that "social conventions" are adopted and given moral support in virtue of the fact that they serve the "public" or "common" interest; James Madison wrote of the "public", "common", or "general" good as closely tied with justice and declared that justice is the end of government and civil society; and Jean Jacques Rousseau understood "the common good" (le bien commun, in French) to be the object of a society's general will and the highest end pursued by government. Though these thinkers differed significantly in their views of what the common good consists in, as well as over what the state should do to promote it, they nonetheless agreed that the common good is the end of government, that it is a good of all the citizens, and that no government should become the "perverted servant of special interests", In The Republic, Plato's character Socrates contends repeatedly that a particular common goal exists in politics and society, and that that goal is the same as the goal for a flourishing human being, namely, to be a philosopher king, ruled by the highest good, Reason, rather than one of Plato's four lesser goods: honor seeking, money making, pleasure seeking, or empassioned addiction. For Plato, the best political order is one in which the entire society submits to the dictates of the leaders' faculty of Reason, even communistically holding possessions, wives, and children in common, creating a "cohesion and unity" that "result[s] from the common feelings of pleasure and pain which you get when all members of a society are glad or sorry for the same successes and failures." Plato's student Aristotle, considered by many to be the father of the idea of a common good, uses the concept of "the common interest" (to koinei sympheron in Greek) as the basis for his distinction between his three "right" constitutions, which are in the common interest, and "wrong" constitutions, which are in the interest of rulers. for Aristotle, a common good is synthesized upwardly/teleologically from the lesser goods of individuals, and their various kinds of larger and larger partnerships: marital couple, or parent over child, or master over slave; household; then village; then state. In this teleological view, the good stems from objective facts about human life and purpose, which may vary, depending upon peoples' occupations, virtue levels, etc. Aristotle argues that, regardless of form of government, those who have more of a rational understanding of the needs of the state's salvation, are entitled to a greater share in administering and determining justice, within the light of its common good, than those who have less, or no such understanding or concern for it, such as selfish despots and political factions, as well as uneducated artisans and freedmen, women and children, slaves, etc. More than this, Aristotle argues that rational discourse itself is what the state's Common Good relies upon, identifying those who lack it as "slaves by nature", while those who excel in it are nearly divine, possessing in themselves the whole purpose for which states exist, namely, the perfectly complete good/blessed life. In his Nicomachean Ethics then, Aristotle ties up the Common Good of the state, with that of friendship, implying by this, that friendly, rational discourse is the primary activity by which citizens and rulers bring about the Common Good, both amongst themselves, and so far as it involves their inferiors. According to one common contemporary usage, rooted in Aristotle's philosophy, common good then refers to "a good proper to, and attainable, only by the community, yet individually shared in, by its members." In a later work, Niccolò Machiavelli speaks of the bene commune or comune utilità , which refers to the general well being of a community as a whole; however, he mentions this term only 19 times throughout his works. Elsewhere in the Discourses, freedom, safety and dignity are explicitly stated to be elements of the common good and some form of property and family life are also implied. Machiavelli's common good is viewed by some scholars as not as "common", as he frequently states that the end of republics is to crush their neighbors.

In Jean Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, composed in the mid 18th century, Rousseau argues that society can function only to the extent that individuals have interests in common, and that the end goal of any state is the realization of the common good. He further posits that the common good can be identified and implemented only by heeding the general will of a political community, specifically as expressed by that community's sovereign. Rousseau maintains that the general will always tends toward the common good, though he concedes that democratic deliberations of individuals will not always express the general will. Furthermore, Rousseau distinguished between the general will and the will of all, stressing that while the latter is simply the sum total of each individual's desires, the former is the "one will which is directed towards their common preservation and general well being." Political authority, to Rousseau, should be understood as legitimate only if it exists according to the general will and toward the common good. The pursuit of the common good, then, enables the state to act as a moral community. The Second Principle of Justice provides that social and economic inequalities are to be arranged such that "(a) they are to be of the greatest benefit to the least advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle" (the difference principle); and "(b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of 'fair equality of opportunity.

The idea of a common good plays a role in Confucian political philosophy, which on most interpretations stresses the importance of the subordination of individual interests to group or collective interests, or at the very least, the mutual dependence between the flourishing of the individual and the flourishing of the group. In Islamic political thought, many modern thinkers have identified conceptions of the common good while endeavoring to ascertain the fundamental or universal principles underlying divine shari‘a law. These fundamentals or universal principles have been largely identified with the "objectives" of the shari‘a (maqāṣid al sharī‘a), including concepts of the common good or public interest (maṣlaḥa ‘āmma, in modern terminology). Neoclassical economic theory provides two conflicting lenses for thinking about the genesis of the common good, two distinct sets of microfoundations. On one view, the common good arises due to social gains from cooperation. Such a view might appeal to the Prisoner's dilemma to illustrate how cooperation can result in superior welfare outcomes. Moreover, a cooperative equilibrium is stable in an iterated Prisoner's dilemma that is played for an indefinite period of time. Under these conditions, an individual does best by pursuing the course of action that is also optimal for society. On the other hand, economic theory typically points to social gains from competition as a rationale for the use of markets. Thus, Smith described the "invisible hand," whereby the mechanism of the market converts individuals' self interested activity into gains for society. This insight is formalized in the First Theorem of Welfare Economics. However, economic theory also points to market failures, including the underprovision of public goods by markets and the failure of self interested individuals to internalize externalities. Because of these factors, purely self interested behaviour often detracts from the common good. There is an important conceptual difference between the sense of "a" public good, or public "goods" in economics, and the more generalized idea of "the public good" (in the sense of common good, public benefit, or public interest), "a shorthand signal for shared benefit at a societal level". In a non economic sense, the term is often used to describe something that is useful for the public generally, such as education, although this is not a "public good" in the economic sense. However, services like education exhibit jointness of supply, i. e. the situation in which the cost of supplying a good to many users is the same, or nearly the same, as supplying it to one user. Public goods also exhibit jointness of supply, albeit with no diminishment of the benefits with increased consumption.

Social choice theory studies collective decision rules. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, an important result in social choice theory, states that no aggregative mechanism of collective choice (restricted to ordinal inputs) can consistently transform individual preferences into a collective preference ordering, across the universal domain of possible preference profiles, while also satisfying a set of minimal normative criteria of rationality and fairness. The Gibbard Satterthwaite theorem further demonstrates that non dictatorial voting systems are inevitably subject to strategic manipulation of outcomes. William H. Riker articulates the standard public choice interpretation of social choice theory, arguing that Arrow's Impossibility Theorem "forces us to doubt that the content of 'social welfare' or the 'public interest' can ever be discovered by amalgamating individual value judgments. It even leads us to suspect that no such thing as the 'public interest' exists, aside from the subjective (and hence dubious) claims of self proclaimed saviors." Thus, Riker defends a "liberal" conception of democracy, which centers on the role of constitutional checks on government. Public choice theorists have tended to share this approach. Buchanan and Tullock pursued this program in developing the field of "constitutional political economy" in their book The Calculus of Consent. More recent work in social choice theory, however, has demonstrated that Arrow's impossibility result can be obviated at little or no normative cost. Amartya Sen, for instance, argues that a range of social choice mechanisms emerge unscathed given certain reasonable restrictions on the domain of admissible preference profiles. In particular, requiring that preferences are single peaked on a single dimension ensures a Condorcet winner. Moreover, many of Riker's empirical claims have been refuted.

Public choice theory (sometimes called "positive political theory") applies microeconomic methodology to the study of political science in order to explain how private interests inform political activities. Whereas welfare economics, in line with classical political economy, typically assumes a public interest perspective on policymaking, public choice analysis adopts a private interest perspective in order to identify how the objectives of policymakers affect policy outcomes. Public choice analysis thus diagnoses deviations from the common good resulting from activities such as rent seeking. In The Logic of Collective Action, Mancur Olson argues that public goods will tend to be underprovided due to individuals' incentives to free ride. Anthony Downs provided an application of this logic to the theory of voting, identifying the paradox of voting whereby rational individuals prefer to abstain from voting, because the marginal cost exceeds the private marginal benefit. Downs argues further that voters generally prefer to remain uninformed due to "rational ignorance". Public choice scholarship can have more constructive applications. For instance, Elinor Ostrom's study of schemes for the regulation of common property resources resulted in the discovery of mechanisms for overcoming the tragedy of the commons. In many countries of the Commonwealth, charitable organizations must demonstrate that they provide a public benefit.

In deliberative democracy, the common good is taken to be a regulative ideal. In other words, participants in democratic deliberation aim at the realization of the common good. This feature distinguishes deliberative democracy from aggregative conceptions of democracy, which focus solely on the aggregation of preferences. In contrast to aggregative conceptions, deliberative democracy emphasizes the processes by which agents justify political claims on the basis of judgments about the common good. Epistemic democracy, a leading contemporary approach to deliberative democracy, advances a cognitivist account of the common good.