The Liberal Conception of the Common Good

Liberal conceptions of the common good are a defective or imperfect or incomplete rendition of the church's understanding, he says. One liberal account in one liberal account, the common good degenerates into aggregate utility,. This is seen in the Benthamite utilitarian tradition where we take your utility, my utility, someone else's utility add them all up and then try to have social policies that produce the greatest sum of those. And that is not the Catholic conception which as I said there's no opposition between the individual good and the aggregate. The insight is that the good of the whole society is itself our good.