Both conservative and leftwingers have maintained that there is a common good which we should set out to realize. But other conservatives and leftwingers have declared with equal conviction that there is any such common good. Could it be that both sides are unclear about what is at stake?
The case against the assumption of a common good is usually made in the name of moral pluralism or individualism. The claim is that there exists a plurality of different conceptions of the good which can lay equal claim to validity. In one version of this claim, this moral pluralism manifests itself in the existence of different cultures; another, more radical version assumes that moral pluralism is grounded in human individuality.
Stuart Hampshire argues vividly argument against the idea of a common good t in his 1989 book Innocence and Experience. He asserts that the only thing that can hold society together is a commitment to procedures for negotiating our moral differences. The key to the social order is what he calls “procedural justice” — which he contrasts to a substantive conception of justice which, according to him, is always the expression of a particular understanding of the good. Procedural justice, he writes, is a means for enabling human beings “to co-exist in civil society, to survive without any substantial reconciliation between them, and without a search for a common ground. [My emphasis] It is neither possible nor desirable that the mutually hostile conceptions of the good should be melted down to form a single and agreed conception of the human good. A machinery of arbitration is needed and this machinery has to be established by negotiation. Justice can then clear the path to recognition of untidy and temporary compromises between incompatible visions of a better way life.” (p. 109)
This account suffers from a number of flaws. The first is that it treats conceptions of the good as if they were necessarily disjoint. But we know from history and experiences that such conceptions may overlap in part and that the communalities they share may serve as a basis for mutual recognition and peaceful coexistence in society. We also know that parties that meet will try not only to identify existing common ground but set out to create new such ground. Societies are never held together only by a shared sense of procedural justice. they also seek to foster common sentiments.
We must accept that there is no complete vision of a common good shared by humanity at large and that there cannot be such a thing. But that should not deter us from striving to achieve a limited sort of social consensus. This is, indeed, what we generally set out to do in politics. We can, for that reason, characterize politics as an ongoing search for a common good. But we must allow at the same time that there is no single ultimate good of this kind to be found. Our search does not have a single, fixed target. We must also acknowledge that even when we agree, for the time being, on a particular conception of the good, there are likely to be those excluded by that conception. Social consensus is never the consensus of everyone in society.