What is the Common Good?

Catalog description

This course explores the concept of the common good, as articulated in philosophy and illustrated in drama, literature, and film. We begin by studying the blueprint for a concept of the common good that Aristotle sets out in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, and its full development in St. Thomas Aquinas. Armed with this theoretical background, we apply ourselves to questions such as: how should regimes and authority figures provide for the common good through the law? What does pursuing the common good involve when the demands of justice are in tension with general beneficence? How compatible is value pluralism with the pursuit of the common good? We will read Sophocles, Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and St. Thomas More, among others, to reflect on the nature of leadership, justice, dissent, and principle, and how we can pursue the common good while remaining true to our conscience.