Junior Faculty Fellow 2000-01
Mary M. Keys (Government and International Studies)
University of Notre Dame
Virtue, Law, and the Common Good:
The Relevance of Thomas Aquinas
My project, a book in progress, treats Aquinas’s account
of the connection between personal flourishing and the common good.
The study is primarily a political-philosophical anthropology, departing
from what I argue is a shared weakness of contemporary liberalism
and communitarianism: the inability to give a theoretically rigorous
account of the human good. On the one hand, privatization of good,
to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre, fuels social fragmentation.
On the other hand, community as the good threatens to absorb humans
into collective entities of questionable merits. Against this backdrop,
I propose a reexamination of the ethical and political theory of
Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas, human goods are both "proper"
and "common." Communities, like individuals, are accountable
to standards of specifically human flourishing. Aquinas stresses
the social character of human nature over the political and underscores
the great variety of means conducing to human fulfillment, thus
steering clear of a monolithic account of the common good. Yet he
also marks out an essential role for the political community proper
vis-à-vis human flourishing.
My argument hinges on an interpretation of Aquinas’s account
of the "good of virtue" as the nexus between personal
and common goods. I argue that Aquinas’s theory allows us
to overcome some central weaknesses in contemporary liberal and
communitarian thought, and I explore the possibility that insights
from Judeo-Christian revelation enable him to improve on Aristotle’s
classic account of the common good. While the very different social
and political circumstances in which he wrote suggest caution in
applying his analyses and prescriptions to our contemporary scene,
I argue that Aquinas’s theory of the common good is a helpful
and perhaps indispensable resource for political theorists today.
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