I confess I had to read Dan’s post “What Exactly Is ‘the Common Good’?” twice before I could believe he wrote it. Was he really suggesting that the prime criterion through which political discourse has been conducted from Aristotle through the Founding Fathers was either empty pettifoggery or, worse, a ruse? Perhaps Dan suffers very acutely of an undue fear Adrian Vermeule and JD Vance. How else to explain a conservative (!) in National Review (!) recommending a form of prescribed amnesia that would render the political vocabulary of our Founding Fathers into a foreign language? Along with basically all classical political philosophy. 

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Dan points out, in several ways, that the meaning of “the common good” is contested, and he tries to demonstrate its uselessness by noting that while the Founders said they wanted to “establish Justice” and promote “the general Welfare” when describing the goals of government, they “avoided these terms when describing the powers of government.”

Uh, so? That isn’t an admission that the common good cannot be defined; it is just political architecture. Dan is reading the enumeration of powers as a repudiation of the preamble rather than its implementation. 

The deeper problem is his taxonomy. He takes five modern categories: legal moralism, utilitarianism, moral uplift, economic public goods, and Catholic political reflection, and treats the failure of “the common good” to instantly collapse into any one of them as proof of the term’s “vagueness.” That classical vocabulary feels “lossy” when translated into the file formats of post-1960s political idiom is not proof of meaninglessness. The Aristotelian-Thomistic definition is reasonably precise: The common good is the ensemble of conditions under which persons and communities attain their flourishing. That is definitionally not utilitarianism because a person’s good is constitutive of the common good, not fungible against an aggregate. 

The vagueness objection is catastrophically too broad. We use the term “democracy” all the time, even though it means something different in the context of Mao’s “democratic revolution,” or the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The founders also didn’t write the word “democracy” into Article 1. The word “liberty” would satisfy none of Dan’s tests for the common good: Its invokers don’t share one definition, it restates moral judgments, it’s easier to invoke than define. This is true of “equality.” Or, Dan being a lawyer, “due process,” which the Court has spent 150 years defining and reshaping. If contested application disqualifies a concept from political reasons, the entire liberal vocabulary goes down as well.  Justice, liberty, democracy, the common good — the argument over their application is political life. Dan’s standard, applied consistently, would leave us able to legislate only about things like speed limits. 

What Dan pins as “the common good’s” vagueness is not its emptiness, but its depth. Democracy is just such a word. Does it mean government of, by, or for the people? Or all three? How? Dan and every liberal operate with concepts whose contestability they’ve stopped noticing because their side won the battle to frame it. Classical philosophers think practical reason works this way of necessity, that we only seek as much precision as the subject admits. Ethics and politics deal in things that are true “for the most part” — and........

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