David Hollenbach

The Common Good Revisited

ASURVEY of the horizon of contemporary social ethics suggests that some moral questions are indeed perennial. The late 20th century— with its brave new technologies, frightful capacity for destruction, and growing web of political and economic interdependence—confronts the human race with ethical choices that are genuinely new. But in their efforts to address many of these new issues, a number of ethical thinkers have recently begun to debate the meaning and practical relevance of an idea that can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero. I mean the notion of the common good. This essay will highlight some of the most important discussions going on in social ethics today by viewing them from the perspective of this debate about the meaning of the common good. First, some of the reasons why the question of the common good has re-emerged as a matter of serious moral argument will be outlined. Second, a theological argument for a pluralistic, analogical understanding of the common good will be outlined, an argument that draws on several themes present in Augustinian and Thomistic sources. Third, the possibility of reinterpreting the common-good tradition in a way that enables it to contribute to a nonindividualistic understanding of human rights will be explored. This essay will present only a sketch of some current discussions of the common good. It will focus on a theoretical question that cuts across numerous practical ethical discussions: whether the idea of the common good is meaningful and usable at all in present historical circumstances. If this essay is able to clarify the state of this question within the framework of theological ethics, it will have achieved its purpose.

Migration as a Challenge for Theological Ethics

The movement of massive numbers of people across national borders is one of the defining characteristics of the world today. In 2010 over 214 million people were living outside of the country in which they had been born. More than half of these people had migrated to the high income countries of North America and Europe. Most moved voluntarily in pursuit of a better life for themselves and their children. But a remarkably large number were driven from their homes involuntarily, including over 15 million refugees fleeing persecution and war across national borders, plus more than twice as many internally displaced within their own countries. Dire consequences of climate change threaten even greater displacement in the years ahead. It is not surprising, therefore, that a major social-scientific study calls our epoch The Age of Migration.2 In the same vein, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees foresees a future marked by people being pushed and pulled across borders and within their own countries by conflict, calamity and opportunity. This mass movement of people is one aspect of the growing phenomenon of globalization. It brings both benefit and great harm to vast numbers of people. The reality of people on the move, therefore, cries out for serious assessment from the perspective of both theology and ethics.

Corporate Investments, Ethics, and Evangelical Poverty: A Challenge to American Religious Orders:

During the past three or four years an intense debate and self-examination has been underway in the American churches over the question of the ethics of church investment. The discussion has been brought about by a growing realization that the way the American economy functions is intimately intertwined with the freedom and well-being of men and women in the United States and in the poor nations of the world. The concern of the churches to aid in the attainment of a just society and to provide moral leadership based on the message of Christ has made this discussion an inevitable development in our increasingly interdependent society. Also, because the relationship between social responsibility and investment mores challenges the churches to address evolving social structures and social values in an innovative way, this development is highly significant for the future shape of the churchsociety relationship. It would not be extreme, I believe, to compare the present state of the movement for social responsibility in investments to the early days of the involvement of the churches in the American labor movement. The issue of what the church should or should not do with its investment funds is a highly complex one. It involves the disciplines of economics, finance, and law. Any concerted effort by the church to deal with this question in a sustained and systematic way will require reliance on the expertise of persons trained in these fields who are at the same time trained in and sensitive to the ethical questions which are at the heart of our modern economy. But the knowledge of law and economics is not sufficient. There are ethical, theological, and religious questions which themselves must be dealt with in evolving an appropriate stance for the church in the United States. This article will try to clarify a few of these ethical and religious matters for one segment of the Roman Catholic Church: orders or congregations of religious men or women who have committed themselves to a particular style of the Christian life through the vow of evangelical poverty. How much money the religious congregations of the United States have invested in stocks and other securities is difficult to determine. The amount varies greatly from order to order, and the highly decentralized financial organization of the American Catholic Church puts all attempts to discover the amount on shaky ground. In his recent and lively study of the wealth and financial power of the Catholic Church in the U.S., James Gollin estimates that the holdings of the

War and Peace in American Catholic Thought: A Heritage Abandoned?

In February 1987 George Weigel published what is likely to become one of the more controversial studies of American Catholic life and thought to have appeared in recent years. The book, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace, advances three theses that are clearly designed to change the state of the question in church discussions of the theology, ethics, and politics of peace and war in our day. First, the tradition of Catholic social theory as it developed in the United States up to the time of John Courtney Murray and Vatican II is a resource that could make a great contribution to the cause of both peace and freedom in our day. Second, during the generation since the Council, the religious and intellectual leaders of the Church in the United States have not only failed to develop this tradition in a way that enables it to realize its potential for good, they have largely abandoned their heritage. Third, Weigel proposes a reclamation and expansion of the tradition that he believes will make an important contribution to a new order of peace, freedom, and justice in our conflict-ridden world. Broadly speaking, Tranquillitas Ordinis has the appearance of a neoconservative rejoinder to both the liberal and the more radical currents that have been present in American Catholic social thought over the past 20 years. This appearance, however, is in some ways deceptive. Michael Novak, the most prominent Roman Catholic neoconservative, has criticized Catholic thinking on economic life for failing to learn from the great successes of the democratic capitalist system that has so shaped American life. For Novak, Catholic social thought has remained too closely tied to premodern, predemocratic, precapitalist institutions and modes of thought to be able to address contemporary economic problems effectively. By way of contrast, Weigel argues that the tradition of Catholic thought on war and peace, extending from Augustine to Thomas Aquinas to John Courtney Murray, had in fact learned just what it should have learned in order to contribute to the contemporary discussion of the ethics of international politics. Weigels charge is not that the tradition has been too static, but that those who should be the chief bearers of this tradition have rejected it. In the Roman Catholic context,

Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear War: The Shape of the Catholic Debate:

ARGUMENT ABOUT nuclear policy has been a fact of public life in the West since the awesome power at the heart of matter was first unleashed during the Second World War. This debate has assumed a number of distinct forms, which have been influenced by the political climate prevailing between the superpowers, by the state of relations between members of the Atlantic Alliance, by the development of new technological capacities, by the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and by the level of public awareness and understanding of nuclear-policy questions. Recent events suggest that the state of the nuclear question is assuming a distinctive form in the present moment. US/USSR relations are at a most delicate and dangerous point. Tensions have increased significantly in the aftermath of Soviet actions in Afghanistan and Poland. These tensions are reflected in the US Senates nonratification of the SALT II treaty and in the acrimonious exchanges at the Helsinki Accord review conference in Madrid. At the same time, the two sets of negotiations which have recently begun in Geneva on strategic-arms reductions and on the control of intermediate-range nuclear forces in Europe have opened at least a slim possibility of new developments in arms-control policy. The new state of the question is also shaped by the significant strains which have recently developed within NATO. A significant intellectual debate has begun within the Alliance about the wisdom of a NATO declaratory policy renouncing the first use of nuclear weapons. Further, technological developments have created the possibility of deploying formidable new first-strike weapons, such as MX and Trident II, and weapons which are difficult to detect both before and after they are launched, such as the cruise missile. Possession and deployment of such

Book Review: The Ethics of FreedomThe Ethics of Freedom. By EllulJacques. Translated and Edited By BromileyGeoffrey W., Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976. Pp. 517. 13.50.

the classical distinction between being and doing as the optic for their reflection. Scripturally-derived norms and insights are then seen to function in different ways relative to these two different foci. With respect to the dimension of being, the whole range of scriptural material has the possibility of functioning as a principle of selective perception in the various activities and phases of character formation. With respect to the dimension of doing, the selection of related norms, imperatives, and illuminating analogues is consequent to an identification of the parameters of particular instances of moral decision-making. While the employment of the distinction between being as character formation and doing as decision-making has limitations, it is a more fertile distinction than the typical Roman Catholic counterpart, which renders the elements of moral analysis in terms of the triad of agent, action, and circumstances. The authors are to be credited for their search for inclusive moral concepts. Their explication of this classical distinction is, however, uncritical and hasty. The theoretical mileage gained by their search is reduced somewhat by their undialectical rendering of the economics of character formation and decision-making. Perhaps their purposes would have been better served if they had undertaken their search for a fruitful conceptualization of the action complex in the more empirical literature of the behavioral and social sciences or in the literature of philosophical pragmatism.