Yves R. Simon and 'The Common Good': A Note on the Concept

The term "common good" is not much in use of late. "Public interest" has largely replaced it. Yet some of the problems of modern political thought are evident in the current widespread disagreement about the meaning of "the public interest." " Many reject the idea of public interest or common good altogether;2 others identify it with an aggregation of particular interests.3 Most commonly, the public interest is conceived as the policy which emerges from the conflict of interests within the democratic process, or, occasionally, as the process of interest conflict and compromise itself. I have criticized these conceptions elsewhere.4 Their most fundamental flaw is the failure to see anything to politics beyond the encounter of interests: that is, wants, desires, or preferences. In the "politics of interest" there is no public to possess an interest, let alone any criteria according to which an interest's moral or political worth might be assessed. I do not intend to re-cover that ground in this essay. I intend, rather, to suggest how a "unitary conception" of the common good, such as Yves R. Simon's, avoids the theoretical pitfalls to which other theories are subject. The term is taken from Virginia Held's classification of public interest theories. Held's criticism of other conceptions-"preponderance theories" and "common interest theories"-parallels and complements that given above of the dominant conceptions and need not be