Solidarity and the Common Good: An Analytic Framework

Abstract

The notion of solidarity entered the modern lexicon as a development of the ideal of fraternity invoked in the French Revolution. By associating "fraternity" with liberty and equality, the revolutionaries picked up classical and medieval ideals of friendship and linked them with a distinctively modern concept of individual freedom. Since then the term has been used in a variety of contexts, theoretical and political, and with a range of meanings. Theorists distinguish concepts of solidarity by both its scope (family, occupation, nation, etc.) and basis (affective, traditional, rational, etc.). They also pursue different theoretical aims: whereas sociologists seek models of solidarity that explain social order and change, philosophers often link solidarity with normative theories of legitimate government, the good society, and morality.1 Normative theories typically strive to identify modern forms of solidarity that are compatible with individual freedom and self-realization, as opposed to traditionalistic forms that have authoritarian aspects. If solidarity involves a kind of group cohesion based on the recognition of a common good—shared interests or values—then non-authoritarian modes should presumably meet at least two conditions. First, the common good must be genuinely common in some sense, involving the goods of individual members; second, the judgment that it is common may not be simply imposed on members in an authoritarian manner, but must somehow involve their input and free affirmation. In this essay, I address two questions raised by these conditions. First, what makes a common good common, a good that somehow combines the goods of individuals? Among those who have devoted explicit attention to the idea of the common good, we find disagreement over the answer to this question. Whereas individualists argue that the common good can always be reduced to the goods of individuals, collectivists maintain that some common goods are "irreducibly social."2 The second question regards the role individuals appropriately play in collective judgments that a given interest or goal is a genuinely common good, one that each individual can freely and rationally accept as a personal good. Here I assume that non-authoritarian modes of solidarity grant individuals some degree of interpretive competence or authority in the identification and interpretation of common goods. But how is such competence distributed? How much epistemic authority does the individual have as compared with the group? Here too we should expect to find different answers. The different answers to the two leading questions suggest that solidarity takes different forms. I thus distinguish a spectrum of types of solidarity by the kind of common good each involves and the implications for commonability and interpretive competence. After sketching the recent discussion on the common good (sec. II), I describe two ends of a spectrum, one characterized by individualistic common goods, the other by irreducibly social goods (secs. III, IV). This spectrum helps us clarify the roles of solidarity and the good in Kantian autonomy-based ethics (sec. V). I conclude with some prospects for moral theorizing (sec. VI). In what follows I use the term "solidarity" to refer to a quality of human association, specifically the cohesive social bond that holds a group of people together in an association they both understand themselves to be part of and value. In other words, solidarity is a mode of group cohesion based on some level of conscious or intentional commitment (or "group identification") on the part of members. Besides the value of membership itself, solidary groups are held together by the shared recognition of a common good or goods: one or more specific value, goal, or interest, such that members are willing to act on one another's behalf or on behalf of the group as a whole insofar as that good is seen to require such action. Often such action goes together with some level of mutual dependence. I do not claim that this characterization covers all uses of the term or includes all the characteristics that theorists have connected with solidarity. But it does cover many uses, and includes the features necessary for my argument.3 Recent analyses of the common good have tended to contrast social conceptions of the common good with individualistic conceptions. Charles Taylor, for example, has argued for the idea of "irreducibly social goods," such as culture and friendship, which cannot be decomposed into a set of individual benefits or understood as the aggregation of goods of individuals. Alasdair MacIntyre distinguishes the sum of individual goods from the common good internal to a practice, namely excellence in the joint activities relevant to the practice.4 Mark Murphy distinguishes aggregative and irreducibly social (or "distinctive") conceptions of the common good.5 At issue in these discussions is the relationship between a given mode of group association and the benefits or goods that accrue to individuals through that association: can we understand the common goods gained by association entirely in terms of the goods of individual members? The competing answers share the general idea of a common good as something that more than one individual can pursue, achieve, possess, benefit from, value, or enjoy. Commonness can either be merely nominal (disparate individuals enjoy the same kind of good) or focused on a single thing, condition, or state of affairs that more than one individual can partake in. These can be good in different senses. Following rational choice theorists, Hechter distinguishes private, public, and collective goods.6 Each of these can function as a more-than-nominal common good. This holds even for private goods, whose consumption is excludable and rivalrous: I can enjoy it only insofar as others do not. Nonetheless, if the private good is divisible—if we cut an apple in half, or take turns using a bicycle—then we take what would otherwise be an exclusive individual good and make it a common good by dividing its use. The commonness of such goods is therefore aggregative, a sum of individual goods of users. Other things, such as clean air, are non-excludable public goods that allow for non-rivalrous consumption: my enjoyment of the good does not exclude or detract from others' enjoyment of it. These are clearly common goods, but they are not irreducibly social in Taylor's sense. On the one hand, a person can enjoy such a good without having cooperated in its production. On the other hand, the goodness of many public goods can be understood wholly in terms of their benefits for individuals.7 As Hechter points out, the free rider problem makes it difficult to explain solidarity on the basis of pure public goods: why cooperate in pursuit of such a good, if the group cannot exclude me from enjoying it? Within a rational choice framework, robust cases of group solidarity must involve "collective goods": more or less excludable goods that can be attained only through (or more efficiently through) a joint effort involving a group of individuals. But referring to a good as collective does not automatically determine whether or not it qualifies as a socially irreducible common good. To decide the question we must clarify the ways in which groups pursue and achieve goods together, typically through sociocultural practices of various sorts that involve modes of cooperative activity. Here Murphy provides helpful clarification. To say that "state of affairs x is an irreducibly social good for party y" could mean that the state of affairs is irreducibly social, involving the coordinated efforts of multiple individuals. In a strict sense, however, an irreducibly social common good means that the party y, the beneficiary of x, is irreducibly social.8 To exemplify this strict sense, social practices must produce goods that benefit groups as such, over and above their benefits for individuals. Murphy has doubts: though he grants one can meaningfully speak of such higher-level attributions of benefit, they do no real work in practical deliberation. But such work is a crucial condition for his conception of the common good: it "should be something that the citizen has . . . very strong reasons to pursue and promote."9 He thus inclines to what Mason describes as an individualist view: "the value of social relations or other social phenomena is always reducible without remainder to the value they contribute to the lives of individuals."10 Murphy's analysis helps us to sharpen the first leading question, regarding the relation between common and individual goods. To address the second question, regarding interpretive competence, requires an analysis of the hermeneutical dimension of common goods. When Taylor speaks of the cultural background as "irreducibly social," he refers to this common hermeneutical accessibility rather than to either of Murphy's two senses of the phrase. Common accessibility is crucial for non-authoritarian groups that grant individual members interpretive competence: for solidary action, members must reach sufficiently similar conclusions about what the common good requires of them (according to their roles). Drawing on Philip Pettit's holism, I assume this coordination is possible insofar as the concepts and values necessary for appreciating the common good are "commonable": mutually accessible public possessions realized and sustained through social interaction and dialogue. As a result, members do not merely conjecture about one another's private mental states but can come to know that each refers to and strives for the same good.11 But this collective knowledge has a social structure that Pettit does not fully analyze. As we shall see, the social structure of commonability—its depth, the distribution of interpretive competence, and locus of epistemic authority—varies with the mode of solidarity. I begin with instrumental associations, which define one end of a spectrum. I take solidarity to be a property of intentional groups, as opposed to crowds, that is, accidental assemblages incapable of solidarity.12 As I broadly construe it, "intentional" simply means that members understand and value their belonging to the group. What I call "voluntary instrumental associations," however, display a higher level of intentionality: members of such associations decide to join together because each sees association as a way to attain an individual good. Thus, members value such associations solely for instrumental reasons. Imagine, for example, that several bachelors join in a condominium time-share agreement for vacation purposes. Each has an individual interest in the condominium as a vacation spot, but none can afford it alone. I assume here that a time-share condo is a private good: none of the bachelors can enjoy its use unless he is the sole occupant. At the same time, because the use of the condo is temporally divisible, it functions as a common good for the group: a single thing that the members can share. Other examples of such associations might include joint investment schemes, marriages based on mutual pecuniary advantage, and coalitions. Although we might hesitate to regard instrumental associations as solidaristic, they exhibit features of solidarity. They involve a kind of social bond: they are held together by each member's interest in a common good. Moreover, members act on one another's behalf. In an investment society, for example, each contributes money to the scheme and assumes a shared investment risk. In the time-share condo, the group might set rules of use that members are expected to observe. In such situations, each person depends on the others' contribution or compliance as a condition for achieving a private good (profit, a well-kept vacation getaway). The above characteristics sufficiently resemble the formal features of solidarity to allow instrumental associations to fix one end of a spectrum, characterized by common goods that have two properties in relation to individual goods: (1) Members are held together by the shared perception that membership is in one's own self-interest. Thus, each member values the association only as a means to acquiring individual goods. (The clearest cases involve private goods, but one might imagine instrumental associations based on self-interested pursuit of public goods or collective goods.) Thus, members need not take any interest in the others' enjoyment of their individual good, beyond a self-interested concern that others do not become dissatisfied and exit the group. (2) The common good is some thing, condition, or state of affairs whose goodness usually consists in the aggregate satisfaction of individual preferences.13 Such goods are common goods only in a very thin, decomposable sense. Two further properties specify the social structure of commonability. (3) To form an instrumental association, the values and concepts that define the common good must be sufficiently commonable (mutually understandable to members) for disparate individuals to see that their self-interests converge. But this commonability need not go very deep. It is enough for the bachelors, for example, to understand that each member has an interest in a vacation spot. But the substance of what each understands as a satisfactory vacation need not be commonable among them. (4) Because an instrumental association comes together when each member decides it is in his or her individual self-interest, it operates on the rational-choice assumption that the most reliable authority for determining whether preferences are satisfied is the individual who has those preferences. This is a pragmatic assumption, not an empirical claim about the individual's capacity for enlightened self-interest. The fourth property also follows from the third: if the full meaning of a satisfying vacation has a somewhat different content for each bachelor, and if that content is not commonable, then if there is any epistemic authority at all on whether the condo is satisfactory, that authority is the individual. In voluntary instrumental associations, then, members depend on one another for attaining the goods each gets as a result of association, but they do not depend on one another for identifying that good and what counts as its realization. In ascribing interpretive competence to one another, we accord each member sovereign authority on whether or not the common good is indeed common—shared by him or her. But that does not make the individual the authority on the means to attaining the common good: the costs that the pursuit of the good exacts from each member and the rules of cooperation necessary for joint pursuit. If the decision to join depends on a cost–benefit analysis, then the individual is not an authority on the net value of association, whether it is individually good on balance to join, except perhaps in hindsight. If instrumental associations involve thin common goods that are merely the aggregation of individual satisfactions, pursued by each member without serious concern for the other's satisfaction, then it makes sense to define the opposite end of the spectrum by a form of solidarity that involves irreducibly social (i.e., not fully decomposable) goods that involve benefits or excellence for the group as a whole. I first argue, contra Murphy, that there are such goods. Team sports provide the clearest example of irreducibly social goods. In team sports, winning a competition on the basis of excellent team play is a common good internal to the practice. The team as such, rather than this or that individual, achieves and benefits from this good. On the one hand, winning a competition is a good, not simply because winning benefits the members of the team but because winning benefits the team as such. Indeed, in order for a team to win individual members might sometimes have to forego opportunities to achieve goods of individual excellence (e.g., be removed from the game). Moreover, pace Murphy, the good of the group plays a central role in practical deliberation: decisions are made about individual players in view of the team goal of victory. On the other hand, the excellent play that leads to winning perfects the team as such, precisely as a group of individuals acting as a coordinated unit. This good is common in a sense that involves more than the sum of individual excellences. This point is clearest when two or more team members work together in such a way that their individual excellences create a synergistic effect. Imagine a ballroom dancing couple, Janet and James, who achieve excellence precisely as a particular couple. The good they achieve together involves an irreducibly social state of affairs: neither can perform the specific dances without the other. But the good itself is also irreducibly social: the excellence they achieve is precisely the excellence of a particular couple as a couple. Indeed, we might imagine that neither partner is able to achieve his or her level of performance except with the other: so when Janet dances with Tom, a dancer whose individual skill equals that of James, she and Tom cannot achieve the level of performance exhibited by Janet and James. If the joint excellence of Janet and James were aggregative, then presumably they could exchange partners with another equally skilled couple without loss in their individual level of performance. However, if it is plausible to think that certain team combinations are uniquely suited to work together, then the excellence they achieve, as a common good, is irreducibly social in the strict sense—a good achieved by, and predicated of, the team as such. If one objects that the common goodness consists in the way that each dancer achieves individual excellence, then one misses what ballroom dancing and other team performances are about. Although each dancer is perfected as a dancer, this excellence occurs precisely because of the beauty of the couple's performance as a couple. If we chop the performance into two individual achievements, we miss the beauty that emerges at the dyadic level of a couple. This synchronized beauty partly defines what counts as individual excellence, hence as the individual good of each dancer. So we cannot fully understand individual excellence if we do not grasp the common good of joint excellence. An aggregative or individualist model, however, suggests just the opposite relation: that one can understand the common good by beginning with an understanding of the individual goods that make it up. It follows that that model fails to capture the relation between the common good and individual excellence in the case of ballroom dancing and similar cases. To summarize, we can say that the common good of excellent teamwork is irreducibly social because (1) it is predicated of and perfects the team as a whole; (2) it is logically prior to the identification of individual excellence; and (3) it conditions the pursuit of individual goods. This point should hold for any sociocultural practice in which participants collectively pursue common goods that are internal to the practice, defined by standards of excellence that apply precisely to the group as such, and that determine, at least partly, what counts as individually excellent contributions. Consider relational practices such as marriage. Success seems to be an achievement we predicate precisely of the itself as a joint there are examples of partners and who make with a view the common good of their which thus partly defines what the or partner counts as individually good. of the above the relation between individual and common goods in instrumental In the individual goods have the common good counts as such only insofar as individuals have their individual Moreover, such associations on the pragmatic assumption that the individual is the interpretive authority on whether

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