The Common Good in Natural Law Political Philosophy

As we saw in 2.4, the status of law as a giver of demands proves not that the law is committed to the view that it is authoritative but only to the view that its dictates are backed by decisive reasons for action. But, as we saw in 2.7, given the normative openness of practical reason and the rational desirability of a basis for common action among agents, the characteristic case of non-defective law will be that in which law is established as authoritative. We thus turn to the second key natural law thesis (0.1): that the law's reason-giving power flows from the common good of the political community. When law is authoritative, the natural law theorist wants to say, it has that status because of the way that the law is situated with respect to the common good of the political community. The common good is, according to this view, some state of affairs (perhaps a very complex one!) that is good, something that there is reason to promote, honor, respect, and so on, and is common, having this value for all members of the political community.

It is worth pausing for a moment to note that the commonness criterion implies that Hobbesian conceptions of the common good are, at most, deviant natural law conceptions of the common good. Recall the situation that Hobbes describes as the “natural condition of mankind.”