Wisdom, Law, and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics

Chapter 17: St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good

Chapter 17 ST. THOMAS, JOHN FINNIS, AND THE POLITICAL GOOD Introduction In our observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the role of the philosopher is to provide, as Jacques Maritain said, the true philosophy of those rights.1 The present study is focused on the nature of political society, with the view that this is the best thing there is, at least in the line of practical life, in human affairs.2 Not to be allowed to live the full life of political society is to be gravely deprived, and philosophical teachings that tend to diminish our awareness of the nobility of political or civic life should prompt us to work hard toward their refutation. Thus, I see myself here as defending the universal right to live in a true city (using this word to translate the classical ‘‘civitas’’ or ‘‘polis’’). Although many articles in the Universal Declaration relate to this, I would cite especially article 28: ‘‘Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.’’3 In the early 1940s there was a rather acrimonious dispute among Thomists in North America, involving principally Charles De Koninck and Ignatius Eschmann, O.P. De Koninck had published a book on the primacy of the common good ‘‘against the personalists.’’4 Eschmann regarded it as an attack on Jacques Maritain, and also as a conception of the common good at odds with the Christian tradition. His vitriolic attack on De Koninck5 provoked a response much longer than the latter’s original essay.6   Wisdom, Law, and Virtue It has always seemed to me that De Koninck had by far the better of the argument and that the important point brought forth by the debate was the idea of an intrinsically common good, a type of object of experience that even if one were the only creature of God, one would have to encounter as a participable or communicable object. Much of the debate turned on the nature of the object of the beatific vision, that is, the creature ’s vision of God’s essence. Eschmann stressed the ‘‘personal’’ and ‘‘private ’’ nature of a contemplative experience. De Koninck insisted that even if there were only one creature capable of having such an experience, that creature would be encountering God as a common good. For De Koninck , the nobility of the human person lay not in its private goods but in the fact that it is a being meant to participate in the more universal good. It was very much in the line of De Koninck’s thinking that if a member of a political community has certain rights that lie in a zone untouchable by the leaders of the body politic, the reason is especially that that member is not only a member of the civil or properly political community but also and even primarily a member of a more universal and noble community . Thus, there was great insistence on the nobility of the common good as such.7 As we move toward the end of the twentieth century, it seems that we are better and better advised to seek good reasons to oppose the allencompassing power of political leaders. Newly invented machines threaten the ‘‘privacy’’ of the whole of human life. ‘‘Big brother’’ has taken on many faces, some in government and some at the head of ‘‘multinational ’’ commercial enterprises. It is not surprising, then, that we re- flect on the grounds for resisting the omnipresent imposer of policies. The present study questions John Finnis’s interpretation of Thomas Aquinas, concerning the specifically political common good.8 It is evident that Thomas limits the zone of human life subject to direction by the human legislator. Not only is God to be obeyed rather than man (where the two conflict), but man’s jurisdiction over man is not all embracing and leaves room for personal responsibility in such key areas as marriage. Finnis finds Thomas’s justification of the limits not altogether clear,9 and proposes (basing his argument on certain texts) a conception of specifically political society as that of Thomas, a conception that is held to help clarify the situation. The said conception seeks to present political society St. Thomas, John Finnis, and the Political Good  as something less that a...