Solidarity and the Common Good: An Analytic Framework

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. 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