The Common Good

January 1, 2009

This is a guest post by Paul Caron, Institute of Advanced Catholic Studies. It is part of the Faith and Good Governance research of the Religion and Development Program at the Berkley Center.

Mainstream approaches to addressing corruption focus primarily on law and a series of social interventions centered on legal frameworks. This could be termed the “secular” view of the possible solutions to corruption. It is an “outside to inside” approach, characteristic of social engineering. Such approaches carry certain assumptions, both implicit and explicit. An example is a Harvard economist who, in an excellent, technical study on the impact of religion on economic development, used as the defining marker of religion (or people who are religious) people’s belief in heaven and hell.
Our True Wealth of Nations highlighted how much conventional macroeconomic thinking has consciously eliminated any value system or normative system influence in analysis. We argue that that is academically wrong, since the intentionality factor must include a definition of man as a being whose complete self includes a soul and the ability to make conscious and moral decisions; many great secular economists, such as Amartya Sen, agree.

Real progress against corruption will come with the development of a concept of “common good.” Admittedly, the concept will be slightly vague and filled with trade-offs, but it can develop from the faith community. Once we have central piece, then corruption can be seen as dysfunctional actions against the common good. This means bringing faith, with its beliefs and values, into the real world, and using them.

Many people who hold firmly to their values realize that the secular approach, now becoming more aggressive in the public square, is a danger to them. This might be why the question was raised as to why religious groups have not participated as much as anticipated.

Working from without to cause change is more difficult than working from within. How that idea is framed and put into action is the question to be answered. Conceptual structures have their place, but we hope that we are seeing a major shift from that approach to the recognition that there is a deeper and perhaps more powerful weapon.

I am reminded of Hillary Putnam, a philosopher at Harvard, who moved from analytical philosophy and conceptual forms of metaphysics to a personal, value-centered sense of reality. Martin Buber has suddenly been thought of as carrying the torch.

Whether it is possible for many faith organizations to agree on a common denominator of belief concerning corruption, and thus develop action plans that do not collide but perhaps coordinate (together with the NGOs of interest) might be the real nexus of causing leverage for change.

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