Lesson 21: The Common Good

AGENDA

• The Common Good
• The Case of HIV/AIDS
• Discuss Case #13: Pastoral Responses to HIV/AIDS (Europe and Africa)

1. Today we are addressing the last of the topics for this unit of the class, which you will recall is about the categories of moral theology for the church community. That topic is the common good.
1. This is a term that is used in many ways in public discourse, but in the Catholic tradition it denotes both a particular quality of human life and a norm for life together
2. The quality of human life is that all human beings share a single over-arching good (namely, God as creator and goal of human life) and that human beings come to recognize this truth, worship and witness to it, in community. In other words, human beings are social creatures. This does not mean that we can choose to be social when it suits us or when we are in the mood. It means rather that there is a social dimension to everything we know and everything we do. Our life as social beings seeking our ultimate end together is itself a good
3. What this means in terms of a norm for our life together is that the common good is more than just the sum of individual goods (especially material goods), so that an economic or political strategy that seeks to maximize the wealth of as many individuals as possible, or to protect the physical safety of as many people as possible, would not constitute a proper vision of the common good. The common good is rather a recognition of our inter-dependence or a number of levels
1. Our decisions affect each other in many and sometimes unforeseeable ways. This means our economic decisions, our political decisions, and all of our decisions that we like to think of as confined to issues of personal morality actually have a social dimension
2. Any rights that we have derived not from own claims that we should be free to order our lives in any way we chose, but are the correlate to our duties. If we are created beings, this means that we have not given ourselves our own destinies. Our life must have a basic character of a response to the will of another. Our duties derive from our dependence on another for our existence. And this means that any rights we have (and we do have them) are the necessary conditions we have to fulfill our duties to ourselves (to grow and develop in love of God and neighbor) and to others (that we must help others to do them same)
3. Our life together must aim at a peace understood as comprehensive human development, that affirms each person in their wholeness and integrity, that is a person developing through time along all of the various facets of their life: individual pursuits rationally ordered, family life, civic life, education, leisure, and religious life
4. Illustration from Pope Paul VI: “When we fight poverty and oppose the unfair conditions of the present, we are not just promoting human well-being; we are also furthering man's spiritual and moral development, and hence we are benefiting the whole human race. For peace is not simply the absence of warfare, based on a precarious balance of power; it is fashioned by efforts directed day after day toward the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God, with a more perfect form of justice among men.” —Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, par. 76 (1967
5. He speaks of the common good in terms of a “full-bodied humanism”—“The ultimate goal is a full-bodied humanism. And does this not mean the fulfillment of the whole man and of every man? A narrow humanism, closed in on itself and not open to the values of the spirit and to God who is their source, could achieve apparent success, for man can set about organizing terrestrial realities without God. But "closed off from God, they will end up being directed against man. A humanism closed off from other realities becomes inhuman. True humanism points the way toward God and acknowledges the task to which we are called, the task which offers us the real meaning of human life. Man is not the ultimate measure of man. Man becomes truly man only by passing beyond himself.”—Pope Paul VI, Populorum Progressio, par. 42 (1967
2. How does the idea of the common good relate more specifically with the ideas about justice we discussed earlier?
1. Justice is the set of conditions necessary to attain a vision for a properly ordered human society, and this is what the common good is (that properly ordered society, with all living peacefully as God intended). But this sense of justice also calls us back to Thomistic conceptions of justice as the will rightly ordering internal and external realities
2. Recall that basic justice is the minimum levels of participation in the life of the human community for all persons (par. 77) and that this standard is minimum which has yet to achieve the full measure of biblical justice
3. More specifically this entails
1. Commutative justice: fundamental fairness is agreements, contracts, and social dealings
2. Distributive justice: proper distribution of resources so that the poorest have their basic needs met (it is necessary for participation in the human community
3. Social justice: social institutions must enable people to participate in the social life of the community, and each individual has an obligation to participate
3. The common good is a vision for a peaceful community that applies both to life inside the church and to life outside the church.
1. On the one hand, the Church is called to model on the inside what it preaches beyond itself. If it is to state that the worldwide human community has a responsibility to each of its members, then it must model this in its own life. It should be a community where each of its members exhibit care for all other members. (You hear this refrain increasingly in local parishes that set up ministries intended the serve the varying needs of their members.
2. On the other hand, concern for the common good calls the Church to care for those that the rest of society disregards. But this often requires an expansion of our moral thinking, of what counts as morally relevant. If the Church is going to call others (individuals and governments) to take up the work of world-wide comprehensive human development, then it must constantly be examining how it takes up this same work
3. Here is where the issue of the HIV/AIDS crisis gives us a helpful example.
4. Here we also have an example of where leaders of the church can express a fundamental disagreement over how the church should approach such a moral problem (see South African Bishops conference and one of its members, Bishop Kevin Dowling). 

THE CASE OF HIV/AIDS

1. Two issues here in this case: one is a broad social strategy and the other is specific case of pastoral counseling.
1. In the former case, the bishops of the Catholic church, but specifically the bishops in areas of the world where HIV/AIDS is an unavoidable issue in everyday life, are trying to establish a way to promote effectively the teaching of the church on the human sexuality at the same time they try to confront the reality before them. They are currently facing national policies and campaigns to stop the spread of HIV/AIDS, though a strategy that has become known as ABC (Abstinence, Be Faithful, Condoms). The question is how to respond to the “C” part of this strategy.
2. In the latter case, religious leaders are confronting a different issue, and that is how to counsel couples about their sexual activity in particular situations.
1. What happens if one member of the couple is HIV+ and the other is not? What should the couple do?
2. What if one of them contracted HIV through an extramarital affair? Would that chance the dynamics and if so how
3. What if one of them was raped during war-time and contracted HIV that way? Would this impact their decision and if so how?
2. What do the statistics show us on this issue of HIV/AIDS infection [US Census Bureau and UN/WHO Aids Initiative]? This does not change the kind of analysis required, but it does give us a sense of the urgency of the problem.
1. US
1. Population: roughly 300,000,000
2. Currently infected: 1,200,000
3. % infected: .4%
4. Deaths per year: 16,000
2. Africa
1. Population: roughly 920,000,000
2. Currently infected: 24,500,000
3. % infected: 2.4 % (11% in sub-Saharan Africa, up to 30%)
4. Deaths per year: 2,000,000
3. World
1. 6,500,000,000 (over half in Asia)
2. 38,000,000
3. .5
4. 2,800,000
3. Does the principle of double effect help in sorting out a moral response to this issue? (elaborated on the handout from last time)
1. The action must be good in itself (or at least neutral)
2. One must intend (directly) the good rather than the evil effect
3. One must not produce a good effect by means of the evil effect
4. There must be a proportionately grave reason for producing the evil effect

Discuss Case #13: Pastoral Responses to HIV/AIDS (Europe and Africa)