The Common Good as a Principle of Social Justice

9 The common good as a principle of social justice Michael J. Thompson Every society is essentially a cooperative enterprise. Each consists, at any given moment, of a series of nested forms of cooperation and interaction, some small, some large, but all for the purpose of producing some end, some purpose. This cooperative enterprise that is society should not be seen, however, simply as the result of some social contract or as the deliberate choice of each member of the community. It is, rather, the very ontological feature that circumscribes the social itself; it is what society is and also defines and constitutes, reciprocally, what each individual is and can be. Society cannot be understood merely as the aggregation of persons, it is also, and more correctly, an entity with relations, processes, and structure. We all share, therefore, basic commonness with others within society. Within these relations, processes, and structures, individuals are shaped and thus, the relation between the individual and the community is dialectical in nature. Hence, the purposes toward which we orient these relations, these processes and structures tell us much about the kinds of lives and goods that each of us as individuals can enjoy. The idea of a good life that I will advocate here is one that sees society in these terms and which uses this ontological view of the social as not only a descriptive but also an inherently normative claim. Since cooperation and interaction can be oriented toward very different ends and purposes, we can ask ourselves what the best, or ethical ends of such cooperation might be. What kinds of goods and purposes are worthy of our commitments as rational members of any form of sociation and society therefore constitutes the basic question I want to investigate here. My intention is to show that a common interest is a specific kind of end or purposes that describes the status of the best end or purpose of social life and to suggest this as a basic conceptual groundwork for a theory of social justice. The relation of this discussion to the question of growth comes into play when we consider the way that the capitalist paradigm of growth is premised not on orienting cooperative relations toward common ends and purposes, but toward particular ends and purposes. This kind of growth is produced through the expansion and intensification of social relations that are extractive and exploitive, i.e., those that generate surplus through unequal forms of social cooperation. The good life, by contrast, which I identify with the common good and with a condition of social justice, is organised not according to competitive, extractive and exploitive relations, but through relations oriented toward those ends and goods that are beneficial for the association as a whole. My starting point is the ancient thesis 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 119 19-06-2017 11:15:10 120 Thompson by Plato in his Republic that the essence of justice is to be found in the ways that social relations are structured; that justice and the common good are synonymous terms. To live in a good society is to live in a just society; and to live in a just society must mean that our economic life and institutions are oriented to maximise those goods that are beneficial to society as a whole. This is because, since our individual lives are each interdependently related to others, society constitutes for us a kind of ontological structure of relations and interdependencies that make a good life possible. Justice is a matter of maximizing those goods that fortify and expand the structures of social interdependencies and the specific kinds of powers that those social interdependencies make possible. In deep contrast to the liberal theories of the good society, we should not see equality of opportunity as the end of a just community since this tells us nothing about the kind of society of which individuals are members. One reason I think that this argument serves as a more compelling theory of justice is that it forces us to look not only at the “basic structure” of any society, but, more importantly, at the ends and purposes that any society is oriented toward. If we equate justice with an equality of opportunity, basic liberties, and a “difference principle”, we are not able to judge the ends of that society. A society whose collective efforts and purposes undermine its own social foundations – whether through the production of environmentally destructive ends, a facile consumerist culture, or whatever – cannot be considered just, on this view, even if it were to meet the basic Rawlsian criteria of “fairness”. This is because these ends can be seen to violate a common interest and it is this common good, rather than merely “fairness”, that should be a criterion of judgment when evaluating a just society. I would like to explore what this entails and what kind of ideas we can glean from it. Given these preliminaries, my thesis here is that the common interest does not lie in a particular norm or set of values, but rather in the nature and structure of social relations themselves. The idea here is that the common good must refer to the kind of social relations to which any individual belongs: the common good is a product of the structure of social relations to which I belong which promotes the highest possible enhancement of the goods shared by all. A common good therefore is something to which I belong and which is both individual-enhancing and public-enhancing. This means seeing the wealth of society, its productive energies and resources, as a property and a capacity of the community as a whole; that the social resources of the community should be oriented to mutual needs of its members. By far, though, the view of contemporary moral and political philosophy has been to negate the existence of any kind of common interest or good. Indeed, although late-19th- and early-20th century liberal theory restricted liberal thought through the positing of a common interest, contemporary liberal theorists have renovated the conception of liberalism toward anti-perfectionist premises. According to this view, we can establish a foundation for rights and a “basic structure” to regulate the capacity of social arrangements to construct an equal opportunity for individuals to pursue their personal conceptions of a good life. This turn in liberal theory makes the pursuit of a common good not only illogical but also undesirable. The common good cannot be simply understood as an emergent property of atomic individuals pursuing their 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 120 19-06-2017 11:15:10 Common good as a principle 121 self-interests. Rather, it needs to be seen as a property descriptive of the socially interdependent relations that constitute social reality. In this sense, the common good can be discerned only by inquiring what goods, ends and purposes enhance the shared social-relational structures and processes that constitute the community and to judge these purposes and ends according to what enhances the social goods that can lead to enhanced collective and personal goods. In modern republicanism, the question of the common good was a central concern for thinkers such as Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, something that has been marginalised in contemporary neo-republican theory which has placed emphasis on more liberal concepts of individual liberty as “non-domination”. Emphasis on a common interest and common good was displaced over time in political philosophy by the growth and development of political liberalism. Thinkers such as Benjamin Constant were adamant in their separation of the modern from the ancient ideas of society; the former concerned with the liberty of the individual and the latter with the community over the individual. This thesis still plagues and limits our moral and political imagination. Liberalism has absorbed this individualist ideal into its basic foundation. According to this latter view, modernity was to be conceived not as a synthesis of the individual and collective good, but rather with a political and cultural order where a plurality of conception of the good would be allowed. If we were to prioritise the good over the right, so this argument goes, we would find ourselves in a state of accepting the good of others rather than freedom to choose our own conception of the good. Hence, the central tenet of political modernity has been to discard the notion of a common good and instead accept a pluralist conception of privatist ideas of the good. Ever since Kant, the basis of this liberal view has been that we should privilege the “right” over that of the “good”. This means that, according to Charles Larmore, that liberalism “has also taken to heart one of the cardinal experiences of modernity. It is the increasing awareness that reasonable people tend naturally to differ and disagree about the nature of the good life” (Larmore 1996, 122). But Larmore’s remarks, often repeated by liberals, is too simple. A common good can be understood in objective, rational terms once we understand that certain kinds of cooperative activity (i.e., any basic social action) are interdependent and the ends of that activity are best when they are general, i.e., when they satisfy the needs of the association as a distinct entity since members of that association will therefore be enhanced as a result. As I see it, the common interest is any end or relation that provides goods that are equally beneficial to all members of the community and not simply to a portion of that community. This means that economic institutions and activities must be subject to principles that serve social ends and purposes. Given the kind of embeddedness of society in market relations described by Karl Polanyi, modern capitalist societies operate under the conception that that which benefits the market must also benefit society. Employment, consumption, education, and so on, are all circumscribed by the narrow logics of economic growth – a kind of growth that is itself defined by its own expansion and its own interests. But if we reverse this idea and instead see economic activity as re-embedded within society, a new set of principles can be seen to emerge. One of them I will 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 121 19-06-2017 11:15:10 122 Thompson seek to develop in this chapter, and that is that a society has a common interest in any end or good that all will be able to consume or from which they will be able to benefit. Although this can be seen to rely on certain ontological ideas about the nature of social life, I will not dwell on this and instead inquire into the nature of common goods, which must be seen as those goods that enhance the interdependent nature of the relational structure to which each member of the community belongs as well as be, in some basic sense, enhancing or beneficial to each member in a non-extractive, non-exploitive sense. Two kinds of social goods We can begin this analysis by defining two basic kinds of social goods. In its broadest sense, a good, as I will define it for my purposes here, is any end sought or desired. There can be personal or private goods, as when I simply seek or desire to listen to music or read a book, or take a walk, or whatever. In this case, a personal or private good is something I desire on my own, for my own reasons, and which requires no effort from anyone else to fulfill it. However, a good is a social good whenever it is something that requires another agent for it to be produced or obtained. Hence, a social good is distinct from a private or personal good to the extent that any private good is one that neither effects another agent nor requires another agent for it to be obtained (whether in terms of production or consumption). Any good that requires or affects another agent or group of agents therefore is a social good. This means that social goods entail certain kinds of relations insofar as they require some degree of social cooperation to achieve and/ or to produce them. It does not mean that this good is necessarily a good for those others; it simply means that it requires some degree of social cooperation for it to be produced and obtained. Two basic kinds of relations can be understood to be subclasses of social goods. On the one hand, a social good can be produced through an equal, cooperative relation. I can ask someone to help me fix my car, I can pay a doctor to help cure my illness, and a group of individuals can come together to produce some other good that all may need, such as food, shelter, and so on. These goods are common goods in the sense that all members of the community do or potentially can benefit from them and that they are produced for the general interest of the association itself. But there is another way that goods can be produced and obtained. I can use cooperation to produce goods that are not for the benefit of all; I can in fact utilise and shape social relations in order to achieve a good that is for my particular or arbitrary benefit. In this sense, I can extract benefit from another or others, as when I organise labor to produce goods that are not of common benefit, but for my own profit. These goods I will call pleonexic goods in the sense that they serve to produce some kind of surplus benefit for the person seeking the good.1 The basic idea of power as the capacity to extract benefit from some other person or group of persons for one’s own arbitrary or particular ends therefore is the essential background for the negation of the common good and of any conception of social justice. These are examples of pleonexic goods in that they are goods produced and obtained for the surplus benefit of one or a small sub-group of the community. 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 122 19-06-2017 11:15:11 Common good as a principle 123 Pleonexic goods have the feature that they create and sustain unequal relations between social members or classes. To formalise this a bit more, we can say that what I am calling pleonexic goods are those that are obtained by (i) extracting benefit from another person or group; (ii) redirecting or re-orienting the capacities and resources of individuals or the community as a whole toward one’s personal or partial benefit; and/or (iii) invading group or collective resources for particular benefits that could otherwise be beneficial to that group as a whole. A pleonexic good therefore means that the benefit of A is obtained by detracting from the benefit of some other agent or group, B. We can therefore see that growth can be cast in either common or pleonexic terms. The former would be a kind of growth that would satisfy the conditions of common needs and interests; it would be able to expand social goods and to nourish the social-relational structures that form the contexts for individual actions and needs. Pleonexic growth would expand economic activity and wealth, but would violate a significant number of those common needs. In capitalist society, growth is of a kind that creates but for the benefits of those that control resources. Social wealth is not only mal-distributed; the content of much of this wealth – i.e., the ends that are produced – are constantly mediated by capital and private interest or ownership. This is not a simplistic problem of a zero-sum where some benefit at the sole expense of others. Rather it is a problem where the ends of production are to meet the needs of surplus first and social goods second, if at all. A pleonexic good and relation therefore are not strictly zero-sum, but must be extractive from one agent to another. The kind of goods and growth that pleonexic relations produce can be seen to violate the principle of the common interest since that growth is generated at the expense of many for the benefit of some. Surely, being employed at a McDonalds is better than being unemployed; but, this does not take into account the very ends and purposes of this work and this kind of enterprise. The question is not simply whether or not the worker should get “fair” wages; it is more importantly about the capacity of members of the community to organise the labor of others, to sell unhealthy food, to sustain chains of meaningless, alienated labor, and so on. The owner has clearly created some new economic value where none has existed before; but the more important question is whether or not this is a value that enhances common, public ends and goods or pleonexic ends and goods. In this sense, pleonexic goods are defined in opposition to common goods insofar as the former are not pursued for the benefit of the community, but only the arbitrary interests of the person seeking them. Pleonexic goods are therefore those that can only be attained by extracting some benefit or resource or capacity from another, whether these be other people, individuals or groups, or from nature itself. A public or common good, on the other hand, is a kind of good that is (i) attained without extraction from any other agent (individual or group); (ii) has beneficial consequences, either actually or potentially, for anyone within the community; (iii) where there are no barriers to access those goods; and (iv) the use of that good does not deprive anyone else of that same good. A consequence is actual when the benefit is immediate for all (such as clean air, clean water, and so on) and it is potential when it is a good to which I might, at some time, need to have access (such as quality health care, good school systems, 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 123 19-06-2017 11:15:11 124 Thompson and so on). The common interest must therefore embrace both the diminishment of pleonexic goods as well as the protection and expansion of public goods. These two attributes taken together can be seen to constitute a basic conception of the common interest. In other words, a society that prevents pleonexic relations and goods and promotes common goods and relations is also one which promotes the benefits of individuals themselves because individuals are constituted by their relations and are a function of the kinds of common goods to which they have access. As T.H. Green puts the matter: “it is only in the intercourse of men, each recognised by each as an end, not merely a means, and thus as having reciprocal claims, that the capacity is actualised and that we really live as persons . . . . society then is the condition of all development of our personality” (Green 1969, 192; cf. Simhony 2001). Given the discussion thus far, we can say that: 1 2 Common goods are goods procured by a group for the good or interest of that group; group members are not only conceived as members of the group, but also as individuals who instantiate that group itself. Goods of the group must also be goods for each member. Pleonexic goods are procured by a group for a sub-group and its arbitrary ends and/or interests. Pleonexic goods diminish the common interest because they orient the activities and capacities of individuals toward the partial interests of the community. Social extraction is a central mechanism for this kind of power enhancement because it consists of reorienting the ensemble of capacities and resources that belong to individuals and the community as a whole toward elite interests and benefits. Whenever I extract a surplus benefit from someone, I detract not only from their own good, but from the potential good that could have been shared by the community as a whole and that I instead consume or accumulate it for my own, private ends and control. Indeed, Rousseau saw this as the genesis of inequality for which the general will was a solution: “as soon as one man needed the help of another, as soon as one man realised that it was useful for a single individual to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, labor became necessary. Vast forests were transformed into smiling fields which had to be watered with men’s sweat, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops” (Rousseau 1964, 171). Rousseau’s thesis is that the origin of inequality is simultaneously the decline of any capacity to realise the common interest since each person sees that they can gain more benefit by seeking to have others work for them, or to extract some benefit from them for their own ends or purposes. Extraction is therefore at the basis of detracting from those goods that which could be better realised for all if they were diverted away from public ends by extractive means. The common good therefore has to proceed along the lines of understanding benefits and ends that are utilised by the community as a whole; they are not utilised for a subgroup of the community at the expense of any other member. In this respect, the common good is something that cannot simply be understood in individual terms, but must be understood in terms of the relational structure of social 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 124 19-06-2017 11:15:11 Common good as a principle 125 cooperation. Each individual receives benefit from the corporate, interdependent entity which is society. The common good or common interest consists in the orienting of these capacities and resources toward goods and purposes that are best for the community as a whole because such goods and purposes constitute a developed individual existence as well. This is no communitarian argument; it is a thesis that uses the common interest as a metric to understand when the social practices and structures of the community are being oriented toward the good of all or the good of the few. It does not seek to place communitarian limits on the ideas and opinions of each individual; it seeks to undermine the ideological complexes, the constellation of moeurs, as Rousseau would refer to them, that distract citizens from this insight, this very fiber of what they saw as civic-mindedness, civic virtue itself. Radical republicans are therefore primarily concerned with the common interest, but from the perspective of social power, or material forms of power. In this sense, the continued relevance of this tradition retains its salience in an age of corporate, administered capitalism. Figure 9.1 Pleonexic and common interest social schemes 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 125 19-06-2017 11:15:11 126 Thompson If we consider Figure 9.1, we see that different social schemes can lead to different kinds of benefit schemes. Suppose that the convex line represent the possibility frontier of social production between agents X and Y (these can be individuals, classes, or groups). Further suppose that each ray bisecting the convex possibility frontier represents the distribution of possible benefit that can be shared by X and Y cooperating in some basic way. When pleonexic goods are pursued, there is some degree of extraction taking place and the distribution of benefits is asymmetric. The rays B and C represent social schemes that are pleonexic. If we consider line B which shows an extractive relation of X from Y, then we see that the amount of benefit derived by X is proportional to the amount of benefit diminished for Y. Hence, if we take the ray a, which represents a scheme which pursues common interests and goods, we see that the benefits for a and b are such that they are not only equal but that they reveal the relevant extent to which where the benefit derived by b is greater than that derived by a. In any relation where a1 and a2 are the result, then we can see that X and Y both are able to utilise the same amount of benefit. It is not the purpose of any socially-cooperative activity to benefit one member at the expense of any others. For this would establish the view that some are to benefit from others, and would transform the very purpose of social membership from achieving general ends toward achieving only particular ends. If we consider that A represents a scheme where both X and Y receive the requisite amount of benefit from any social relation or social scheme, then we can also see that {b1 – b2} is a surplus benefit gained by Y from the extraction of benefit from X and that {a2 – b2} gives us the relative amount extracted from X in order to provide for the surplus of Y. In this sense, pleonexic schemes are such that the relation or scheme of relations that exist allow for the extractive power of one agent or group over another. The pleonexic scheme represented by B, for example, implies that Y would benefit at the expense of X according to {b1 – c1}, and so on. Similarly, the area of the square {a1, a2} is larger than the areas of either the rectangles {b1, b2} or {c1, c2} which would imply that the general amount of benefit produced is larger than in schemes which are organised for extractive purposes. Of course, this discussion is highly abstract and ideal. But it lays a certain logical foundation for the discussion of certain kinds of social schemes and social relations and their properties. One thing we can take from it is that pleonexic forms of social relations are such that they generate growth of individual benefits at the expense of others. Indeed, there can be social schemes where inequality and exploitation exist without growth. But the key here is to find a scheme that can satisfy the conditions of justice that I am describing as well as the possibility for the growth of social resources. There is no reason to assume that growth cannot occur within the confines of a social scheme that serves common ends, goods and purposes, does not undermine members of the community for the benefit of others, does not destroy the natural and social environment, and allows for the expansion of technological, scientific, and cultural development. One way of understanding this problem is to see it as social waste: i.e., as the ways that we conceive the congealed efforts of socially organised labor and 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 126 19-06-2017 11:15:11 Common good as a principle 127 production.2 As I have been arguing, common interests and goods are those that result from certain social relations; that the social relations themselves are always of a kind that they are pursuing some kind of good or end. The central question is therefore how to judge those goods and ends? If we view the matter of justice through the lens of the common interest, then it becomes clear that desert is not the criterion for judging a just social scheme. One reason for this is that desert is defined internally by the ends of the system already in place – e.g., profit. Hence, desert is subjective defined by the purposes of profit expansion rather than by social ends and purposes. Rather than desert, the criterion that has warrant is the extent to which essentially cooperative activities satisfy the self-enhancing and group-enhancing ends of social life. This is because, unlike the basic social ontology that undergirds liberalism and utilitarianism that view society as aggregates of individuals, a more accurate social ontology would conceive individuals as integrally-related and mutually-constitutive members of an essentially associative and cooperative body. This does not dissolve the individual into the community, but shows the socially-interdependent dimensions of a true conception of developed individuality, but one that is also a function of the shapes of social-interdependent and cooperative activities that any society puts into place. When we see that self-enhancing and group-enhancing variables are mutually constitutive of one another, when we see that social forms of cooperation and interdependence are ontological features of sociality, we are moving in a different space of reasons. Assessing a just social scheme now becomes premised on the extent to which it can be said to satisfy the ends and needs of the community in which it is embedded. This should not be taken to mean that questions concerning proportionality and distribution are irrelevant. It only means that they need to be considered within a new moral context that places the question of common goods and its core. It is not simply the case that pleonexic relations and goods are unjust because of any sense of desert; rather, they are unjust because they violate the basic purposes for which all human association is constituted: the self- and group-enhancing potentiality of cooperative group membership itself.3 The common good as a category of social goods is therefore the optimal category for judging the ends and purposes of any social scheme. Purposes and ends One of the consequences of a society that is dominated by pleonexic interests and goods is that the efforts of human social labor are wasted. What this means is that social waste becomes more prevalent. Social waste comes into play whenever some thing, or some person, or some group, or aspect of nature is unable to bring forth into the world the maximum of its abilities and potentialities, either because of non-use, under-use or misuse. We are concerned here about how social resources (labor, education, skills, etc.) as well as natural resources are organised, deployed, utilised and toward what ends they are invested and oriented. For an activity not to be wasteful, it needs to be able to satisfy the greatest amount of potential needs that any specific resource possesses and it also has to be able to employ resources for the benefit of the society as a whole, and not 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 127 19-06-2017 11:15:12 128 Thompson merely for an exclusive part of it, or at the expense of it. In this sense, waste comes into play when society is deprived of the powers of certain human or natural resources; when those resources are under-used, mis-directed or misused, or when they are not used at all. Waste therefore occurs when the use of any resource (human or natural) is (un-, mis-, or under-) used in such a way that it fails to have maximum benefit for social needs. In effect, as Locke suggests when he says of the individual who has allowed spoilage that “he has invaded his neighbor’s share” (Locke 1689, II.37), waste is a kind of theft from others; and the larger the degree of waste, the more it becomes a kind of theft from society as a whole, often for the benefit of a minority share of that society. The simple fact that a given resource is employed for some productive use (as the classical economists theorised) is not sufficient, on my account, to guard against the charge of waste, because this fails to account for the ends, purposes, or projects toward which that production is directed, which could, in fact, be wasteful. It is also not enough that there is efficiency in the process of production since that, too, would fail to consider the ends to which that activity of production was being put to use. If this basic thesis is accepted, then it can also be argued that waste relates directly to issues of power and domination. The reason for this is that the capacity to generate and to direct social surplus and social production according to elite ends and interests entails that social life exists for the sake of those elite interests. This may seem intuitive on some level, but to formalise it, we need to see that waste is that amount of effort or resources used or unused in such a way that their potential benefit for others has been taken away. That potential benefit is the complex part, for it implies that we can discern a superior good than that toward which the owners of those resources have decided to put it. This higher good can be understood by asking whether or not the production decisions of such owners of those resources satisfy common needs and ends, and not needs and ends that are arbitrary. We can classify social forms of production and consumption as either being socially valid or wasteful. In the former, activities of production and consumption are performed for the benefit of as many individuals within the community as possible. Wasteful forms of activity (production and consumption) are those that benefit some rather than others and thereby misuse the resources within society that could otherwise have gone to meeting the needs of those in common. A common need, or socially valid purpose, should not be seen as the result of the aggregation of the preferences of individuals. Rather, it is a normative criterion that asks for the extent to which human and natural resources are utilised for the interests of a minority’s benefits or for the benefits of the community as a whole. Oligarchic and democratic social wealth Once we see that there is distinction between the kinds of social goods that we can produce, we are in a position to understand the nature of social wealth as a whole, i.e., of the results of the ensemble of productive activities in which any society engages. If we choose to see any society as a whole as organised to produce 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 128 19-06-2017 11:15:12 Common good as a principle 129 different kinds of surplus, or wealth, then the question is: what kind of wealth is produced by a society made up of largely pleonexic versus common social relations? As I see it, this results in two different ways of understanding social wealth. Any society dominated by pleonexic relations and goods, we can say, produces oligarchic social wealth which is defined as the relative extent to which any individual within the community is able to control the labor and resources of other members of the community as well as direct that labor and those resources toward their own arbitrary ends and not toward public or common ends. A highly oligarchic form of social utilisation would therefore be when one individual receives the total benefit from the labor of everyone else, or from the social product as a whole; or when that one individual’s interests are the sole direction of social and resource utilisation. The more democratic the social utilisation, by contrast, the more each individual within the society benefits from the collective resources available to them, or from the collective efforts and labor of others as well as the employment of resources (natural and human). A just social arrangement will seek to enhance democratic forms of wealth over oligarchic forms because only the former are able to satisfy the mutual needs of the members of the association. Since society is not an aggregate of individuals, but is an entity with a distinct ontological status, it has certain causal powers over its members. Different shapes of sociality therefore have the ability to either enhance or degrade its members. Democratic forms of wealth seek to maximise the general interests of the members of the community for enhancement whereas oligarchic forms seek particular gains at the expense of the society as a whole. Growth and justice In this respect, the question of growth needs to be posed in a different way: any form of socio-economic growth that replies on pleonexic ends and relations will produce oligarchic forms of social wealth, whereas those that rely on and promote common goods and relations will enhance democratic forms of wealth. If we utilise the basic concepts I have elaborated above to understand the nature of just and unjust social schemes, relations and goods, then I think it can be extended to illuminate a conception of growth that can conform to the common good, or a just form of growth. As I see it, this would entail the expansion of the powers of the community through the growth of democratic wealth. We can see a path toward a just form of social organisation that can also provide the expansion of social and technological progress – a kind of progress that is premised on collective ends and needs and not on the particular ends and interests of the part over that of the whole. A key idea here is to include not only social resources and goods, but ecological and natural ends as well. Productive growth that damages or in any way unsustainably destroys the natural world cannot count as a common good or interest since human communities are situated within the natural world. Undermining the natural world therefore is against the common interest and good. Although this argument I have developed here is not an exhaustive account of the good life, it nevertheless contributes to a basic social framework that can make the good life more realisable for each and for all. 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 129 19-06-2017 11:15:12 130 Thompson Notes 1 The term “pleonexic” comes from the Greek πλεονεξία which means to have more than what one needs, and to want still more. 2 I have explored this concept of social waste directly in Thompson 2015. 3 Cf. the important discussion by Hurka 1993, 176ff. References Green, T.H. (1969). Prolegomena to Ethics. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell. Hurka, T. (1993). Perfectionism. New York: Oxford University Press. Larmore, C. (1996). The Morals of Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Locke, J. (1988 [1689]). Second Treatise of Government. In: Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, J-J. (1964). Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité. Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade. Simhony, A. (2001). T. H. Green’s Complex Common Good: Between Liberalism and Communitarianism. In: A. Simhony/D. Weinstein (eds.). The New Liberalism: Reconciling Liberty and Community. New York: Cambridge University Press, 69–91. Thompson, M.J. (2015). On the Ethical Dimensions of Waste. In: Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 101.2, 252–269. 15032-0549d-1pass-r03.indd 130 19-06-2017 11:15:12