Aquinas, Feminism, and the Common Good

4. THE RETRIEVED PRINCIPLE OF THE COMMON GOOD AND HEALTH CARE IN THE UNITED STATES

CHAPTER 4 The Retrieved Principle of the Common Good and Health Care in the United States Now that we have retrieved Aquinas’s principle of the common good through the proposed feminist hermeneutics, we should inquire about its significance for the community. What is this retrieved principle capable of? What does it offer the human community? On the one hand, the distinction between fundamental ethics and applied ethics ought to be left intact; certainly the two moments in ethics are distinct and should not be blurred into one another, nor should one be reduced to the other. On the other hand, from several quarters we find an expectation if not a demand that theoretical considerations be extended into a logical or reasonable terminus in concrete or applied realms. HansGeorg Gadamer insists that ‘‘understanding always involves something like the application of the text to be understood to the present situation of the interpreter.’’1 Taking legal hermeneutics as his model, he says that theological interpretation is like the act of a judge interpreting a law. After the history and meaning of the law is studied, the interpretation of the judge has to do with its applicability. But application here, Gadamer says, ‘‘does not mean understanding a given universal in itself and then afterward applying it to a concrete case. It is the very understanding of the universal—the text—itself.’’2 Understanding the meaning and truth of the past is constituted precisely by understanding its significance and relevance for life in the present-day situation.3 What Gadamer discusses as application has resonance in the methodology of liberation theologians who employ a ‘‘hermeneutic circle’’ that requires not only the moment of analysis but implementation of a 128 The Retrieved Principle of the Common Good and Health Care
129 new practice informed by the analysis—which then itself is the focus of further assessment.4 Liberation theologian Mı́guez Bonino maintains that the moment of strategy for social change completes the process of ethical reflection by bringing together relevant sources to offer a synthetic moral judgment about what should be done differently to promote the greater flourishing of a previously neglected constituency.5 In this, Bonino echoes Martha Nussbaum’s method for determining the criteria that should both inform the community about the existence of suffering and injustice in their midst and guide the choices of strategic action. The basic ethical criterion or principle of justice for Bonino is the ‘‘maximizing of universal human possibilities and the minimizing of human costs.’’6 He uses the term ‘universal human possibilities’ to refer to distinctively human goods, ‘‘such as freedom; better human conditions , such as employment and housing; and space for human community , guaranteed by respecting human rights. Under ‘human costs’ he would include the loss of human goods, material conditions, and human rights.’’7 As a constitutive element in the methodology of liberationist ethics, the movement to strategic planning and action to address a situation of suffering is informed by foundational convictions regarding the human good, and by careful assessment and analysis of a particular situation of suffering. This chapter is not a strict application of the retrieved principle of the common good. Rather, it offers a specific situation of anxiety, distress , and in real ways, suffering, specifically, that of health care in the United States. I recognize that the proposal to address this particular social reality could be met with criticism: it could be argued that it represents such a uniquely first-world situation that it invalidates the attempt to argue for the significance of the retrieved principle of the common good as a principle that might or should be used in developing analyses of situations of suffering and strategic responses in any society . However, if it can be shown that the retrieved principle of the common good, applied in this situation, produces different questions, different perspectives, different demands on the community to which a response is required, there is no logical reason to conclude that it would not produce the same results in other settings. That, in fact, is the explicit goal of this entire work—to demonstrate that a feminist liberationist perspective on the principle of the common good causes different situations to be seen as more troubling than they are usually considered, and that the questions raised by this interpretation of the common good and the process of investigation that is necessary are dif- 130
The Retrieved...