Good Society

Philosophers, religious figures, ethicists, and politicians throughout the ages and across cultures have argued over the nature of a good society. This entry examines the reception and discussion of the concept in the United States, where it is problematic. The notion presumes that there is such a thing as society, which is greater than the sum of its individual parts; that there is such a thing as a common good shared by all members of a society; and that there is such a thing as the good society, a unitary representation of the immense diversity that is found in the United States. In the philosophic tradition of liberalism that is foundational to U.S. culture, society is made up of freely contracting individuals. Each individual is free to pursue his or her own version of the good, and there is no way to judge whether [Page 564]one person's version is better than another. Liberal philosophy thus confines itself to reflection on the common procedures that enable a diverse multitude of selfactualizing individuals to pursue their various interests most fully without harming one another. Insofar as this liberal philosophy implies any goodness at all, it is of a negative sort: What is good is an unregulated market economy and a minimal state that interferes as little as possible with each citizen's pursuit of his or her private version of the good.

In the twentieth century there were attempts to modify classical liberalism to take account of the dense interdependencies of advanced industrial societies. In general, these emphasize the necessity to preserve equality among citizens by using progressive taxation to construct a social safety net and to use an expanded government to regulate the market economy for the security of all citizens. Even this egalitarian liberalism, however, is based mainly on prescriptions for procedures to ensure relative equality and social stability rather than on notions of a substantive common good.

On the other hand, U.S. religious traditions and those civic traditions that were inspired by classical Greek and Roman philosophy are perfectionist rather than procedural. They assume that some ways of life are better than others and advocate visions of civic solidarity based on notions of a common good. Although the main language of U.S. public discourse is based on liberal philosophical premises, powerful voices in the society continue to advocate for visions of the common good. Some of these emphasize more solidarity between rich and poor and call for distributive and substantive justice, rather than simple procedural justice. Other voices emphasize the need for a national commitment to a “culture of life” that would prohibit abortion. Others emphasize the need for a public moral order that would celebrate the traditional family and restrict “unorthodox” forms of sexuality, such as homosexuality. There are debates within the United States' various perfectionist religious teachings, however, about how far each tradition should accommodate the ethical pluralism that is inevitable in such a diverse society.

U.S. society is rife with debate, therefore, about what it means to have a good society. On the one side are those for whom the term is inherently suspect because it might attempt to impose one particular group's version of the good on a diverse society. On the other side are those who believe that social coherence is impossible without some basic social agreement on a common moral foundation for the society. But those who think this way are divided between rigid fundamentalists who think they can and should impose a firm moral order on the society and those who think that the moral order needs to be flexible, a matter of constantly shifting interpretations of the common good.

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