Patrick Deneen, a professor of political philosophy at Notre Dame and critic of liberalism, began a tweet thread on May 17 by asserting, “Liberalism holds that there can be no common good, only individual interests.” Deneen’s assertion is incorrect, but classical liberals can make it too easy for critics. Talk of the common good is not a collectivist plot, and classical liberals should be more comfortable affirming it in political discussions.
“Liberalism,” perhaps more than most words, has varied in meaning over time. When I write of “classical liberalism” or “liberalism,” I am looking to Adam Smith as my guide. Smith propounds a “liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice” in the Wealth of Nations, and he propounds a quite robust conception of the common good in The Theory of Moral Sentiments.
First published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) investigates how human judgment works. One edition of the book was titled, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments, or An Essay towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men naturally judge concerning the Conduct and Character, first of their Neighbours, and afterwards of themselves.” Although verbose, that title does better to set out what we might anachronistically call Smith’s “research question” for TMS: How do humans judge the conduct of other humans and themselves?
Smith eschews extreme individualism in the first sentence of TMS: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.” Taking that as obviously true, Smith then explains how that works. After all, we can’t enter into the feelings of other people directly, and we aren’t ever completely sure how someone else actually feels.
Given that impenetrable barrier between ourselves and others, Smith surmises that the best we can do is imagine how we would feel if we were in another person’s situation. He calls that “sympathy,” and defines it as “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.” Sympathy is inherently social.
When discussing virtue, Smith first uses an expression that he uses throughout TMS: “impartial spectator.” By that phrase, Smith means many different things, and a fuller understanding of it can lead to a liberal definition of the common good. Daniel B. Klein, Erik Matson, and Colin Doran, all of George Mason University, provide a good exposition on the levels of the impartial spectator in TMS in their paper in History of European Ideas.
One can think of the impartial spectator existing on different levels. The lowest level is the most obvious: some person judging an event who isn’t on either side. We most commonly use the word “spectator” in an athletic context, so let’s consider a football game between the Packers and the Bears at Soldier Field in Chicago. Packers and Bears fans at the game would be spectators, but they are not impartial. But if a couple from Los Angeles who normally cheer for the Rams (who are in a different division and aren’t rivals with either the Packers or the Bears) were visiting Chicago and decided to attend the game just for something fun to do, they would be impartial spectators.
That’s the most obvious sense of the phrase, and it’s easy to see how the perspective of an impartial spectator would be important for judgment. Let’s say there’s 50 seconds left in the fourth quarter, and the Packers are down by four points. They’re on the Bears’ 15 yard line, and it’s fourth down. Aaron Rodgers tosses a pass into the endzone to a waiting Packers wide receiver, and a Bears defensive back makes a physical play to break up the pass. All the Bears fans are cheering, and all the Packers fans are crying for a defensive pass interference call from the referees.
Our couple from Los Angeles is going to provide better judgment on what the proper call was than the Bears fan sitting to their left or the Packers fan sitting to their right. As a Packers fan, I can hardly write this example without saying it was obviously pass interference!
The value of an impartial spectator now established, let’s consider a higher level of impartial spectator (I promise we will arrive at the common good eventually). There’s value in a random bystander’s opinion, but each of us have people we trust more than others. Those people can also be impartial spectators. Unlike our couple from Los Angeles at the football game, these impartial spectators often don’t really watch the event they are supposed to be judging. We think of them, however, to judge our actions. Examples might include parents, grandparents, clergy, teachers, professors, or coaches.
We have all had situations where a friend does something, and we shudder and think, “My mom would kill me if I did that.” Or we do something good, and we think, “Coach So-And-So would be so proud of me right now.” When we have those thoughts, we are using that higher level of the impartial spectator, and it’s more versatile than the real-life impartial spectator. The couple from Los Angeles at the football game would only be helpful in a few specific situations, but considering what our moral exemplars would think about actions is helpful in many various situations.
Now imagine an impartial spectator who is above all, overflowing with benevolence, and supremely knowledgeable. Smith writes that this impartial spectator
does not feel himself worn out by the present labour of those whose conduct he surveys; nor does he feel himself solicited by the importunate calls of their present appetites. To him their present, and what is likely to be their future situation, are very nearly the same: he sees them nearly at the same distance, and is affected by them very nearly in the same manner.
An impartial spectator who doesn’t grow weary, never tires of our petitions, and stands outside of time so that the past, present, and future look the same to him—if he’s not God, he’s at least godlike. Continuing the progression, this impartial spectator is universal and concerned with what we can safely call the common good (see, there it is).
Smith’s moral system is based on considering what other people think, i.e. it is inherently social. So social that Smith even sees the self as social. He describes our conscience as “the man within the breast” who is a representative of the universal impartial spectator from the previous block quote. Even when we make decisions by ourselves, we are still consulting the man within the breast, and by extension the impartial spectator, and wondering what he would think of our actions.
By making a moral system where sociality is essential, Smith also makes consideration of the common good essential. The highest-level impartial spectator is common to all of us, and when we consider what that impartial spectator would consider good, we are considering the common good.
Too many liberals seem to have taken a mischaracterization of Margaret Thatcher’s quote, “There is no such thing as society,” as a mantra. When you read that quote in context, it’s clear Thatcher was not saying that we should all just look out for ourselves. Immediately after saying there’s no such thing as society, she continued to say, “There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour….”
When we look after ourselves, our families, our neighbors, our communities, our countries, and our species, we are pleasing an impartial spectator who would look on our conduct. We are serving the common good. It is not illiberal to say so. Adam Smith said so in a very robust way in TMS. Anyone claiming to be his intellectual descendent should have no problem saying so too.
Liberals would do well to be more open about the common good. Sociality is not socialism, and we can affirm one without affirming the other. Adam Smith shows us the way to affirm the first and condemn the second, and we should follow his lead.
Dominic Pino is a graduate student in economics at George Mason University and a 2020 Political Studies Fellow at the Hertog Foundation.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Aug 9 2020 at 11:53am
Great post, Dom!
Pierre Lemieux
Aug 10 2020 at 12:47am
Interesting post. The challenge, as I see it, is to reconcile, if possible, this idea of a common good with Anthony de Jasay’s individualism (and the impossibility of a social welfare function). The fact that de Jasay claims to be in the tradition of Hume and classical liberalism seems to make the challenge even more pressing.
Jon Murphy
Aug 10 2020 at 1:48pm
I do not know de Jasay as well as you, so I’m going to comment primarily on social welfare functions.
The way I read Smith (and, consequently, Dominic) is that “common good” here doesn’t refer to welfare as we economists understand it or utility. What Smith means is what set of institutions, virtues, etc., best allow for human flourishing. For example, a solid foundation of justice allows for people to discover how we can help each other and prevents backsliding into a sort of Hobbesian jungle. The amiable virtues help provide that “spice of life” that makes our lives pleasurable.
These sorts of things do not require any sort of social welfare function. We’re not maximizing, or even counting, anything. It’s a discussion of frameworks rather than specific actions.
Mactoul
Aug 10 2020 at 1:35am
This derivation of hypothetical godlike “impartial spectators” to explain a very basic notion of common good which even a child could understand (i.e. defense of the city) only underscores the trouble liberal theory has in dealing with mundane reality.
Mark Z
Aug 12 2020 at 4:42am
That’s an extreme example and not very useful in practice, in that it’s a case where we may assume literally everyone in the city has common interests. Most uses of the term ‘common good’ are not like that (including your examples below) in that the purported ‘common good’ is good for some people but bad for others. Some people are more harmed than helped by measures to stop pandemics; the cost of paying for more national defense at the margin may be worth it for some people (e.g., wealthy property owners who would lose a lot in the reallocation following a conquest) than for others, who stand to lose little.
You may be using the term ‘common good’ as interchangeable with ‘public good.’ But the traditional utilitarian case for state action (which exists more or less within the liberal framework) regarding public goods, that there exist collective action problems impeding maximizing welfare that can/must be solved by state intervention is still fundamentally individualist in nature, it is concerned with the sum of individual welfare across society, and is not, I gather, what Patrick Deneen has in mind in his critique of liberalism.
Louis Le Marquand
Aug 10 2020 at 7:07am
The “common good”, the “national interest” or the “public welfare” are some of the most vicious anti-liberal slogans to be uttered.
These slogans have no specific, concrete meaning. There is no way to interpret them in a rational and empirical way. They are slogans used by Plato’s philosopher-kings, would-be dictators who beleive that they how society should be organised.
The “common good” thesis is premised on the ideology of collectivism, which is the idea that some group; the race, the proletariat, the nation, Christians etc, are the moral standard of value. The individual should be subjugated to the collective will and sacrificed if and when the collective requires it. It’s the idea that a group of some kind is the metaphysical unit of reality, individuals are just cells that make up the collective body, or they’re cogs in a greater machine – what’s real is the machine as a whole, not the individual parts – they just serve the needs of the machine.
If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one per cent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.
There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. “The common” (the Germans) supported the Nazi government which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory.
If we accept the collectivist premise that man exists only for the sake of others, then it is true that every pleasure he enjoys (or every bite of food) is evil and immoral if two other men want it.
Only on the basis of individual rights can any good—private or public—be defined and achieved. Only when each man is free to exist for his own sake— neither sacrificing others to himself nor being sacrificed to others—only then is every man free to work for the greatest good he can achieve for himself by his own choice and by his own effort. And the sum total of such individual efforts is the only kind of general, social good possible.
Jens
Aug 10 2020 at 8:47am
How do you ensure that you do not interfere with the individual rights of others, if you cannot guarantee yourself to be able to assess their content and scope better than the others themselves? Of course everyone can say: These are the rights, this is how they are to be interpreted and this is how they are observed. But who is bound by that statement? Is it collectivist to ask such a question ?
Jon Murphy
Aug 10 2020 at 12:44pm
The problem with this phrasing is it doesn’t exist; indeed, it cannot exist. It is quite impossible for a person to “neither sacrifi[e] others to himself nor being sacrificed to others.” So long as we live together with other people, we must occasionally sacrifice ourselves to them (and vice versa). If you and your spouse are watching TV, some compromise must be made on what to watch.
Virtues like justice, benevolence, beneficence, love, courage, honesty, etc are all means of sacrificing one’s freedom for the sake of sociability. That is part of Adam Smith’s, and Dom’s, message.
Lawrence Feldman
Aug 10 2020 at 4:04pm
Jon,
I can be benevolent as an individual but how can society be benevolent without violating the rights of the individual? I don’t really understand what the common good is or how it can coexist in the real world with my right not to have to pay for it. Is assuring that people in need have health insurance for their kids part of the common good? Is me having to pay for their insurance a compromise I should make for the sake of sociability? I can be a good person and a generous person if I so choose but that will have little effect on the ocean of need in the world. When taken out of the theoretical and applied to the real world, I don’t understand this concept of the greater good and how it can coexist with the rights of the individual.
Thanks,
Larry
Jon Murphy
Aug 10 2020 at 7:21pm
Society cannot. Smith explicitly rejects the idea of societal, or even universal, benevolence (see his chapter in Theory of Moral Sentiments “On Universal Benelovence”)
Jon Murphy
Aug 10 2020 at 8:28pm
I think for Smith (and, consequently, how I understand Dom), “common good” largely requires negative things, not positive policies. Basically: don’t be a jerk. If I practice basic justice with you (don’t mess with your stuff), you reciprocate (do not mess with my stuff), and try to be a good person to my friends and loved ones, then it allows for human flourishing.
Larry Feldman
Aug 10 2020 at 2:07pm
Jon – can you take it out of the theoretical or expand it beyond a husband and wife compromise into what this means in terms of how society should function? If my neighbor wants a new fence, I’m willing to get a new fence even though I don’t really want one. But if my neighbors (the majority of the country) want to make sure everyone has healthcare should I sacrifice a bit of my freedom for the sake of sociability? The common good is for everyone to have healthcare. I don’t really understand, outside of a theoretical world in which every individual is equipped to succeed via their own motivation, how watching out for one’s neighbor (in a societal sense) can coexist with protection of the rights’ of the individual.
Jon Murphy
Aug 11 2020 at 10:00am
I am not sure if you saw my other response to you because I think it was caught in a spam filter, so I will proceed as if you did not.
As I read Smith, the common good is largely made up of negative actions: don’t mess with other people’s stuff (the virtue of justice). For people closer to us, the virtues of benevolence, love, charity, etc are more useful since we know and can readily sympathize with those people more completely. We know what they want, what they need. When people are farther away from us (socially), benevolence, love, charity, could actually end up being a positive harm!
So, the common good doesn’t imply “watching out for one’s neighbor (in a societal sense)” requires positive actions. Indeed, even if you want to be active in that person’s life, there are ways to do so without violating anyone’s rights.
nobody.really
Aug 10 2020 at 5:17pm
Has anyone read both Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments and Rawls’s Theory of Justice? How does Smith’s concept of the common good, as defined by an “impartial spectator,” compares to Rawls’s theory of justice, as defined by people who are impartial because they make their decisions behind a “veil of ignorance” regarding their own self-interest?
KevinDC
Aug 13 2020 at 9:11am
Smith’s impartial spectator and Rawls’ veil of ignorance are very, very different from each other, both in what they’re meant to evaluate and what they would recommend. To vastly oversimplify (because hey, blog comment!), Rawls’ veil of ignorance is a method for evaluating social institutions, based on outcome, where you don’t know who you are in the real world. Smith’s impartial spectator is more focused on evaluating personal conduct, based on virtue, where you do know who you are, but look at yourself from the outside. While TMS does talk about the justice of social institutions to some degree, it focuses more on the virtue of individuals acting with each other and uses these lessons regarding personal virtue to draw conclusions about just social institutions. Rawls looks at social institutions to determine their justice based on expected outcomes, then draws conclusions about the rules individuals should follow based on that. So they work in opposite directions. (Again, really oversimplified, and there really is no substitute for just reading TMS front to back!)
Here’s another difference that seems interesting to me. Rawls believes that if you were in the original position, behind the veil of ignorance, and don’t know your place in society, you will choose as if you are certain to live the worst possible life, and will always choose the society where the worst possible life is the least bad. So, imagine there were two societies you could choose to exist. In one society, all seven billion people on earth live in Star Trek level abundance – except for one poor soul who lives at a subsistence level. In society two, all seven billion people live at slightly above subsistence, but nobody lives any better than that. According to Rawls, everyone would prefer to live in the second society when behind the veil of ignorance, and it is the society that justice requires. But to Smith and the impartial spectator, it would be horrific to prefer the second society, even if you knew for certain you would be that one worst off person. As Smith says, “When the happiness or misery of others depends in any respect upon our conduct, we dare not, as self–love might suggest to us, prefer the interest of one to that of many. The man within immediately calls to us, that we value ourselves too much and other people too little, and that, by doing so, we render ourselves the proper object of the contempt and indignation of our brethren.” So, Rawls’ veil of ignorance would say “you should choose the second society based on the one in seven billion chance you might be poor”, whereas Smith would say you should choose the first society even if you were personally guaranteed to be the one person who was poor.
nobody.really
Aug 10 2020 at 6:03pm
Can we understand the standard problem of the “tragedy of the commons” without a concept of the common good?
Garret Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science (Dec. 13, 1968)
Mactoul
Aug 11 2020 at 1:41am
I should have supposed that national defense is a common good. And lockdowns and quarantine measures to stop epidemics are also common good measures. Both date back of ancient times.
The common good does not cease to exist if some political theory lacks terms to discuss it.
Jon Murphy
Aug 11 2020 at 8:51am
In reference to this and your earlier comment, I think you’re misunderstanding the point. The discussion of the impartial spectator is not a way to ” explain a very basic notion of common good.” It’s a method of analyzing whether something which is proposed as “the common good” is actually in the common good. In other words, it’s to avoid the very trap you step in: “common good” appears to be childishly simple, but such simplicity has lead to centuries of horrific abuse. If the “common good” is so simple a child can understand it, then why did societies founded explicitly on the “common good” (like the USSR, fascist Germany and Italy, Red China, etc) have such high body counts? Why did so many movements in the name of “the common good,” like eugenics, White Man’s Burden, etc., lead to such atrocious abuses?
Part of the point of this post is to explain that the concept of the “common good” is not childishly simple. It’s highly complex.
Quarantine, one of the examples you invoke, is an excellent example. Quarantine is not necessarily in the common good, even during a deadly pandemic. It may be, but it does not have to be. Here in the United States, during these COVID lockdowns, we have seen a huge increase in mental health-related deaths and a massive increase in real poverty. Further, there has been great social and racial unrest that is caused by the lockdowns. Are the lockdowns truly in the common good? You need some way to answer that question, and I do not think your manner of understanding the common good allows for an answer.
Mactoul
Aug 12 2020 at 5:08am
It is not only the communist polities that seek common good, all polities including USA do so.
Indeed, the State is directed towards nothing else. If the liberal theory can not make sense of this, so much the worse for liberal theory.
Common good is not the sum of individual good, but something that is common to the individual good. For instance, a city under attack may legitimately ask some individuals to sacrifice their property or even themselves for the sake of the city, with nothing to their personal benefit.
If you deny to the city this right, then first, you deny the entire history of man and secondly, such a denied city could hardly exist for long.
Mactoul
Aug 12 2020 at 5:14am
Any actual instance of quarantine may or may not be in common good, but the very act itself is directed to common good.
There isn’t and can’t be any algorithmic procedure to say whether a proposed act would foster common good or not but the declared intent of the State is always to the common good.
Jon Murphy
Aug 12 2020 at 8:07am
I’m having a little trouble understanding your point.
It is, of course, true that governments intend to work in the common good. What Dom and other liberals are doing is shoring up what “common good” means and how to think about it so that we can get a government acting in a just and proper manner. Adam Smith called government acting in a just and proper manner “jurisprudence.”
Jon Diesel
Aug 25 2020 at 12:14pm
TL;DR: What standards of judgment inform the impartial spectator in an anti-religious/secular world? How is moral coordination impacted by varied standards of judgment?
This is a great summary of Smith’s arguments in TMS. I have thought about how Smith translates to the modern world quite a bit and am struggling in some areas. Smith assumes (rightly so for his time) that all people have a conception of a higher being serving as the basis of their most abstract version of the impartial spectator rooted in a religious form of a deity. This deity does not have to be Judea-Christian either. I struggle with how folks that abandon religion form this concept of an impartial spectator. How do they make the leap from the second form to the third form outlined above? If their world is completely secular what do they draw upon to form their idea of a moral code? For example, Christian ethics is an underpinning for the man in the breast. But if a person refuses any ideas linked to religion, then what informs their man in the breast?
The recursive nature of reflecting with the impartial spectator can have a sort of coordination problem. If I know that you are a Christian, and you know that I am a Christian, then even if not of the same denomination there are some basic tenets we share and can make some assumptions about how each of us would view a situation. The abstracted man in the breast allows me to operate better when I am in a predominantly Christian setting based on this logic. Understanding one another becomes more difficult the less we know of what values of judgment our neighbors might be using. A Christian man in the breast might be ill-suited for coordinating moral judgment in a non-theistic setting.
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