Three Mistakes About the Common Good, by Michael Pakaluk

By Michael Pakaluk, The Catholic Thing, May 25, 2022

Michael Pakaluk, an Aristotle scholar and Ordinarius of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, is a professor in the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America. He lives in Hyattsville, MD with his wife Catherine, also a professor at the Busch School, and their eight children. His acclaimed book on the Gospel of Mark is The Memoirs of St Peter.  …

I want to draw attention to three mistakes about Aquinas’ teaching on the common good which are encouraged by some presentations today of so-called “common good” jurisprudence. If we take Aquinas to represent “the classical view,” then these are mistakes, too, about classical thought.

Begin with Aquinas’s famous, four-part account of the essence of law: any law, he says, is:

(1) a precept of reason,

(2) directed to the common good,

(3) set down by a competent authority, and

(4) promulgated.

Because this is an account of the essence of something, you simply can’t have that thing at all, Aquinas thinks, unless all the parts of the account are somehow verified in it. …

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