Introduction

This chapter develops a conceptual framework to analyse the problem of the common good in a morally and culturally diverse European Union (EU). It addresses the following questions: What is the common good? On what philosophical grounds, if any, can a diverse group of states, such as Denmark, Italy and Poland, speak of their common good? What are public values? Can public values translate a shared conception of the common good in a diverse polity? I claim that public values – understood as the values endorsed by the fundamental laws of a polity, such as constitutions and international treaties – provide guidance regarding what fundamental conditions and goals a society considers desirable. All citizens of a given polity are expected to uphold its public values, regardless of their individual preferences and worldviews. By bridging the substantial moral differences amongst citizens, public values create a common standpoint against which both individual conduct and public policies ought to be assessed. I argue that this critical role of public values does not apply exclusively within the nation-state. When the public values endorsed by a given group of states overlap significantly or when they explicitly endorse common values through international agreements (as in the EU), it is plausible to speak of transnational conceptions of the common good. I suggest that shared understandings of the common good within groups of states will be thicker or thinner depending on the extent to which their public values overlap. Regarding the relations between polities with clashing conceptions of the common good, such as the United States and Iran, I claim that states should, in principle, respect each other’s conception, provided that they do not perform gross and systemic violations of the fundamental rights enshrined in international law. However, I argue that even highly diverse political communities can usually reach a basic level of moral agreement when it comes to addressing certain fundamental global challenges, including climate change and HIV/AIDS, warranting talk of a global common good.

I begin by defining the concept of the common good and situating it within the landscape of contemporary political theory. I also identify a few key challenges to which the common good has recently been exposed. Then, I introduce the notion of public values and discuss their main features. Subsequently, I investigate whether and to what extent public values may apply beyond the nation-state. I discuss two moral principles to guide the relations between states and regions that have clashing conceptions of the common good. Furthermore, I present a few trade-offs linked to the transnational pursuit of the common good that may imply sacrificing some national interests. Finally, I briefly outline a strategy to advance the common good beyond borders.

The common good: a conceptual framework

The common good: still a useful concept?

Since the concept of the common good is simultaneously “self-evident and confused”, it pays to begin with a definition.¹ By common good, I mean the conditions and goals that benefit a community as a whole without imposing impermissible harm on some of its members. This definition emphasises two critical aspects. To begin with, the common good refers to conditions and goals that benefit a political community at large, as opposed to limited groups of individuals. While, as we shall see, pursuing the common good does not always mean improving the well-being of all citizens, policies for the common good are expected to generate benefits for at least the large majority of them and provide a compelling justification for the sacrifices they may require from the remaining groups.² Note that, as has rightly been argued, these widespread benefits cannot always be captured by means of summing individual utilities in a narrow utilitarian fashion.³ For example, investing in a public school system benefits not only students who attend better-equipped schools but also the broader community by improving literacy levels, enhancing innovation capacity and promoting social mobility. Indeed, these are conditions and goals that most societies consider desirable. Therefore, the notion of the common good is not normatively redundant on a purely aggregative moral doctrine.⁴

Second, this definition emphasises the point that the common good should not be advanced at any cost.⁵ As I will claim, the pursuit of the common good provides moral grounds to demand certain sacrifices from some citizens and social groups, but there are limits as to what should be asked on behalf of the greater good. For instance, redistributing wealth and income typically reduces socioeconomic inequalities within a community. Reduced inequality, in turn, improves the physical and mental health of citizens, strengthens the educational performance of children and diminishes the level of violence, thereby contributing to the common good.⁶ However, if scaled up to a degree in which the marginal utilities of individuals would be equalised, as Peter Singer has famously suggested, redistribution may jeopardise certain fundamental individual rights, notably the right to property.⁷ Crucially, certain policies that may enhance the common good imply morally unacceptable bodily or psychological harm. Consider, for example, the use of torture to obtain information about the location of the members of a terrorist group. These cases suggest that the common good is not an ultimate goal – that is, it should be weighed against other relevant considerations. Therefore, pursuing the common good is incompatible with imposing morally impermissible harm, which this book shall equate with gross violations of fundamental rights.⁸

So why does the common good matter at all? As will become apparent, this concept is particularly relevant as a means to provide justification for much-needed yet politically and economically demanding reforms, as well as to contest policy agendas that only serve the interests of small and privileged groups. This point has been forcefully made within the “contractarian” tradition, for whom the primary purpose of creating a network of shared political institutions supported by a monopoly of force is to improve the general welfare – not just that of a few individuals. Relying on the idea of the social contract – either in an explicit, tacit, or hypothetical format – contractarian authors have argued that citizens would only consent to the creation of a coercive state if this would allow collective action problems to be solved and the provision of certain goods that improve everyone’s living standards.⁹ Accordingly, John Rawls has stated that “[g]‌overnment is assumed to aim at the common good”.¹⁰ Yet, as has been widely documented, contemporary policymaking processes are to a large extent shaped by well-organised private interests, which have a disproportional capacity to influence policy outcomes.¹¹ All too often, the agendas of certain political parties, business conglomerates, and religious groups are prioritised over the common good in domains as varied as public health, education and environmental protection. This state of affairs calls for a renewed debate about the pursuit of the common good.¹²

However, contemporary political theorists have increasingly regarded this concept as problematic. In their view, the following question has become unavoidable: How can there be a common good in highly diverse societies? For authors such as Aristotle and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, moral diversity did not present itself as a major challenge against the pursuit of the common good since the content of public policies would be determined by relatively small city-states and republics where a consensus was usually in reach through effective public deliberation.¹³ In turn, for a medieval philosopher such as St. Thomas Aquinas, the shared ethical framework provided by a common religion under Christendom would leave no room for fundamental disagreements about the nature of goodness.¹⁴ Yet, due to the processes of modernisation and secularisation, societies became more heterogeneous and plural. This development has led to the coexistence of multiple conceptions of goodness, which cannot always be reconciled. Given this change of circumstances, and despite having been a recurrent theme throughout the history of political thought, the common good has been relegated to a secondary role by contemporary political theorists. At present, the so-called communitarian scholars remain its leading proponents, notably Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Amitai Etzioni.¹⁵

Yet these authors have arguably failed to provide compelling answers as to how the concept of the common good can accommodate the changes wrought by modernisation and secularisation, particularly when it comes to moral and cultural diversity and global interdependence. Indeed, most communitarians still associate the conception of the common good of a given political community with a set of moral beliefs and social and cultural norms widely shared in that community, which they typically take for granted.¹⁶ However, this implausibly replicates the assumptions about cultural homogeneity and broad moral consensus underpinning the works of Aristotle and Aquinas, which no longer hold in contemporary societies. Furthermore, unlike what communitarians seem to assume, self-governing communities such as the nation-state currently lack sufficient means to realise the common good.¹⁷ In fact, given the high level of interdependence that globalisation has brought about, political communities increasingly need each other to pursue the common good. For example, the goal of addressing climate change, which many nation-states consider desirable, can only be fulfilled through close transnational cooperation. As we shall see, the transnational nature of the common good is particularly apparent in the EU case, for which communitarianism has a blind spot.¹⁸ Therefore, a compelling account of the common good for the 21st century will have to accommodate these significant developments.

A few methodological challenges

It is worth noting that the conceptual difficulties underpinning the common good are not only linked to a change in historical circumstances but also to some complex epistemological issues. How can we know, or agree on, what the common good stands for? The so-called epistemic account of democracy advocates “the capacity of ‘the many’ to make correct decisions and seeks to justify democracy by reference to this ability”.¹⁹ In its classical formulation, this view presupposes the existence of independent standards of truth against which competing policy options can be assessed.²⁰ Thus, on this account, a key challenge is designing procedures through which the “good” options may be effectively selected.

Yet political communities face at least a degree of epistemic uncertainty under which it may be difficult to foresee which course of action will advance the common good.²¹ For example, in the face of Russia’s threat to invade Ukraine, Western states had to decide whether to adopt bold preventive measures or explore diplomatic channels without knowing which options would be more effective. In addition, “the many” may clearly make bad decisions.²² Consider, for instance, the victory of the National Socialist Party in the 1933 elections in Germany. Such outcomes have bred “suspicion about the use of independent standards of correctness or truth in the realm of democratic decision making”.²³

Alternatively, it may be plausibly argued that the common good is a socially constructed moral standpoint. According to this view, each polity’s understanding of “good” and “bad” collective choices depends on what its citizens have defined as standards of public morality, typically through the mediation of political institutions. Instead of taking the common good as a given, this account equates the latter with explicit moral commitments by a community.²⁴ It thus regards the common good as an “essentially contested concept” in relation to which each community may have more or less plausible conceptions.²⁵ This view is more compelling than the epistemic account, given that it is ready to accommodate the circumstances of moral pluralism and epistemic uncertainty described above.²⁶ However, it does not automatically circumvent the question of how a common standard of goodness can be found in a morally diverse society in the first place. Indeed, given the high level of moral and political polarisation in many present-day polities, the Rawlsian hypothesis of “overlapping consensus” between competing comprehensive doctrines of the good will hardly hold.²⁷ If it is reasonable to assume that “individuals have some degree of interpretive competence or authority in the identification and interpretation of common goods”, then one will need to identify clearly the putative source of a common moral standpoint that guides collective choices.²⁸

Therefore, in order to articulate a conceptual framework of the common good that is suitable for a highly diverse and interdependent EU, we will need to address the following questions: On what philosophical grounds, if any, can a group of states as diverse as Denmark, Italy and Poland speak of their common good? How can we know what specific good(s) are constitutive elements of the conception of the common good of any particular polity, such as the EU? In this chapter, I will claim that these questions can be tackled effectively by analysing the public values endorsed by the political institutions of the communities at stake. I will argue that public values provide a common standpoint to normatively assess public choices, irrespective of the multiplicity of private conceptions of the good. As we shall see, these values are outlined in the fundamental sources of any legal order, notably constitutions and international agreements. Subsequently, in Chapter 2, I will apply this theoretical framework to the EU. I will claim that the question of whether a culturally diverse EU where EU citizens are socially detached could share common standards of public morality has to be addressed in light of the international treaties that its member states have voluntarily entered into with one another. I will show that EU treaties are morally loaded and provide robust grounds for a shared conception of the common good.

Note that this study of the public values of the EU will have to be complemented by a pragmatic discussion concerning the institutional practices by which these values could be realised.²⁹ Indeed, the following question will be in order: What types of institutional rules and procedures could facilitate the pursuit of the conception of the common good enshrined in the EU treaties? While in recent years, several proposals to improve the standards of public deliberation have been put forward by the specialised literature, they do not always offer practicable solutions for a transnational polity with nearly 450 million citizens and 24 official languages.³⁰ Furthermore, a system of multilevel governance, such as the EU, brings about unique challenges that call for tailor-made solutions. Therefore, the question of how to make EU policymaking more oriented towards the common good remains largely unaddressed. As I will argue, the main challenge at the EU level is related to the chronic conflicts of national interests. In a nutshell, even if the member states have agreed, or were to agree, on common values, it may still be hard to mobilise the resources and means to put them into practice. This difficulty is particularly salient given that the institutional architecture of the EU does not comprise a fully-fledged supranational government. I will discuss these issues in detail in Chapters 3 and 4.

What are public values?

Values can be defined as points of reference that provide guidance regarding what is good and bad.³¹ In what follows, I will focus on a particular category of values that has been scarcely analysed by moral and political theory – namely, public values. Public values are the values endorsed by the political institutions of a polity, notably by explicitly granting them a binding status in the fundamental laws that govern all public policies, state–citizen relations and the relations among citizens.³² Understood in this way, public values are those values enshrined in the political constitutions of states, as well as in sources with equivalent legal status, such as charters and bills of rights and certain international agreements and conventions.³³ Examples of familiar public values endorsed by most liberal democracies are the rule of law, solidarity, equality (with its many qualifiers, including social, gender and intergenerational equality) and freedom (namely, of expression, association, the press, and so on). As I will claim below, political communities tend to gradually develop the meaning and implications of their values through policymaking processes, landmark judicial decisions and continuous public debates. This interactive process – which I dub the interpretation of public values – allows societies to translate such values into particular models of social relations and institutional practices.

What is crucial about public values is that they provide a basic degree of normative consensus that allows citizens to assess social arrangements and patterns of behaviour through common moral lenses despite their different moral outlooks.³⁴ In contrast to personal values, public values are not connected to one’s particular worldview, ethical convictions or religious beliefs. They provide normative guidance to all public officials and citizens, regardless of their respective backgrounds and perspectives. In doing so, public values create a common viewpoint from which collective choices can be publicly labelled as “good” or “bad” – the standpoint of the common good.³⁵ It should be emphasised that public values do not consist of an all-encompassing code of conduct.³⁶ As a result, they are compatible with diverse private understandings of the good life. Yet, by the very fact that they have been granted constitutional status, public values have priority over private conceptions of the good. For instance, in a political community that has endorsed the value of equality, individuals are expected to make collective choices on the grounds of an egalitarian standpoint, regardless of their ethical convictions and religious beliefs.³⁷ Admittedly, this expectation presupposes a willingness to compromise for the sake of the community. As I will claim in Chapter 5, this can realistically be achieved in the presence of civic friendship.³⁸

Now, this conceptual framework raises a few questions that deserve close examination. First, what if a polity has endorsed a set of public values that are morally objectionable? Consider, for instance, a constitution that fails to recognise the value of socioeconomic equality, as in the case of the constitution of Chile.³⁹ Should constitutions that arguably encompass an undesirable conception of the common good be disregarded? Second, what can be said about cases where public values are one thing on paper and another in practice? For example, the Chinese constitution asserts the equality of all ethnic groups, but the Chinese authorities reportedly persecute the Uyghur minority.⁴⁰ What conditions should be fulfilled for a value to be meaningfully endorsed by political institutions? Third, what if the values enshrined in a constitution are not representative of the whole society? Consider, for instance, the 52 (out of 195) world constitutions that fail to sanction gender equality.⁴¹ Can the values of these constitutions still be said to express the standpoint of the common good? Fourth, how exactly does the interpretation of public values work in practice? Can it overcome the fact that certain states do not possess a written constitution? Finally, if public values are crystallised in enduring legal sources such as constitutions and international treaties, how do they accommodate the fact that societies undergo moral change? Can public values also change? I will address each of these issues in turn.

I should begin by explaining why, in most cases, this book takes public values at face value – that is, in how they are phrased in constitutions and other equivalent legal sources. Note that my purpose is not to discuss whether the public values of a given polity are normatively desirable but to investigate whether the values of different political communities may overlap and, if so, to what extent. This exercise calls for empirical sources that allow for meaningful comparisons. By relying on constitutions and international agreements, one can test in a systematic manner the existence of transnational conceptions of the common good.⁴² Admittedly, this methodological approach is exposed to the charge that the values endorsed by certain communities translate objectionable conceptions of the common good.

Yet conducting a normative assessment of the values of each political community also comes with distinct risks. To begin with, unless one adopts some form of moral realism, it is difficult to adjudicate categorically which public values are desirable and which are not.⁴³ Furthermore, a few past attempts to perform similar exercises have simplistically assumed that liberal values are preferable.⁴⁴ Therefore, while not every public value is normatively sound, referring to each polity’s current inventory of values presents as the most promising strategy.

However, this does not exclude the application of certain basic plausibility criteria. To begin with, it is crucial to ensure a correspondence between the letter of the law and the institutional practices within a political community. Indeed, “[c]‌onstitutions in authoritarian regimes are often denigrated as meaningless exercises in political theatre”.⁴⁵ For instance, the Portuguese constitution of 1933 enshrined values such as freedom of expression and association that the authoritarian regime of the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar scarcely intended to implement.⁴⁶ This variance suggests that an appropriate threshold for a value to qualify as public value should incorporate a high level of compliance, not merely explicit adoption through a constitutional text.⁴⁷ Furthermore, public values should be reasonably representative of the citizens that they are meant to bind. Note that, in some polities, the values of a particular social group are brutally imposed on other citizens. Consider, for example, the case of the Sunni rule of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, in which a religious minority shaped the values of the whole community. This systemic discrimination of a group of citizens jeopardises the ability of public values to function as a standpoint that can be plausibly regarded as the common good. As we shall see, this suggests that any plausible conception of the common good presupposes the fulfilment of certain fundamental rights.

Let me now turn to the interpretation of public values. Interpreting public values means deliberating about alternative ways of putting them into practice and making corresponding choices. This specification is crucial because, as I have mentioned, values are only points of reference – that is, they are generic and abstract by definition. To illustrate the point, consider the public value of solidarity. Once a political community has endorsed this value, it must decide how it will be realised. For example, solidarity may be translated into universal access to healthcare, a progressive taxation system or access to unemployment benefits. In turn, the healthcare system may be run by the state or the private sector and offer more or less comprehensive coverage. In the specific context of Western democracies, these choices have led to the development of distinctive models of democracy and social welfare that aim at realising similarly democratic public values.⁴⁸ It should be added that this process of interpretation takes place through a variety of channels. For instance, at the EU level, the value of solidarity has been interpreted through a wide range of legislation, policy measures, judicial decisions, and public debates.⁴⁹ Note that this requirement to interpret public values is not a shortcoming. Rather, it ensures they become a widely internalised moral standpoint. Multiple channels of interpretation also exist in states that, despite not having written constitutions, possess functioning “constitutional orders”.⁵⁰

Finally, it is worth addressing briefly the issue of moral change. The fact that societies undergo moral change, at times leading to what have been dubbed “moral revolutions”, is undeniable.⁵¹ A constitutional order is able to accommodate such calls in at least two ways. First, the interpretation of the existing public values by judges, policymakers and citizens may evolve as a result of the resetting of the moral compass of society. For instance, many democracies have legalised same-sex marriage by expanding their interpretation of the values of equality and liberty.⁵² Second, more radical changes may be institutionalised through effective constitutional amendments or even the redrafting of the constitution. Note that none of these options is merely hypothetical. For example, the Constitution of the United States has been amended 27 times.⁵³ Similarly, in 1958, France – already a consolidated democracy – elected to rewrite its constitution in the face of profound social and moral change.⁵⁴ It should be added that the public values enshrined in constitutions and international agreements may themselves induce moral change, as during the transition from communism to democracy in several former communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, public values allow us to capture a community’s conception of the common good without prejudice of moral change.

Cultural values versus public values

How does this conceptual framework relate to the uses of values in public discourse? In recent years, values have featured increasingly in European politics. President Emmanuel Macron of France went as far as to say that values are “the most precious feature of a nation, which keeps it alive and makes it great”.⁵⁵ Yet many public officials do not share the understanding of public values presented above. Instead, they refer to what I dub cultural values – that is, points of reference that offer guidance on what is “good” and “bad” based on the social and cultural practices of a specific group. To illustrate the point, consider the EU immigration crisis. In many heated public debates on this matter, the leaders of a few far-right parties conveyed the message that immigrants were undermining “our values”, by which they meant cultural categories of values such as “national values”, “Christian values” and “Western values”. Yet these categories remain underspecified. For example, according to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, “Hungarian values” can be equated with “Christian values” – even if, as an observer has pointed out, “the policies of Orbán’s government don’t seem to be particularly Christian”.⁵⁶ This fluidity suggests that cultural values are poorly codified. In what follows, my goal is not to claim that cultural values are meaningless but rather that they do not offer a consistent basis to approach the common good.

Indeed, cultural values have several shortcomings when it comes to establishing a common moral standpoint in a given society. To begin with, the lack of codification that I have alluded to empowers political actors to shape the meaning of cultural values according to their interests and needs. Consider, for example, the terrorist attack against the headquarters of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in January 2015. In the aftermath of this tragic event, Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally contrasted a self-serving understanding of “French values” to those of the Islamic world.⁵⁷ While French values were said to be strongly attached to a culture of freedom and toleration, Islamic values were linked to violence and fundamentalism. Paradoxically, the Islamophobia that this recurrent type of public discourse helped generate reportedly caused an increase in anti-Muslim acts in France, thereby further challenging the values that the terrorists had targeted in the first place.⁵⁸ Furthermore, cultural values are not usually subject to scrutiny and are not easily contestable. For instance, in oppressive societies, certain discriminated social groups, such as women and LGBTIQ people, may lack a real chance to challenge dominant worldviews and standard cultural practices. This lack of contestability indicates that the cultural values of a large social group should not be directly labelled as public values.

Understanding public values as the values that the political institutions of a nation-state have explicitly endorsed has several advantages compared to the alternative of defining them as the cultural values of an “imagined community”.⁵⁹ First, unlike any unwritten set of cultural values, public values are clearly listed in official documents, and their meaning is interpreted by political institutions in formal proceedings. This publicity provides a clear and widely acknowledged basis for a shared understanding of the common good. Second, as I have shown, public values are contestable and can change. Accordingly, in the presence of representative political institutions, public values will likely not be merely equivalent to the values of a dominant ethnic or religious group. Third, rather than taking a cultural identity for granted, which is a problematic assumption in today’s increasingly multicultural societies, public values are the outcome of the social construction of a shared civic identity. This perspective accommodates the fact that in every state, many individuals with different cultural backgrounds abide by the same common moral code.⁶⁰ In fact, the large majority of the Islamic community of France, which represents 8.8% of the French population, complies with the French public values, regardless of their cultural background and religious beliefs.⁶¹ Finally, as the following sections will show, understanding national values as publicly endorsed values allows us to investigate the overlaps and disjunctions between “our values” and “the values of others” in a systematic manner.

This line of reasoning suggests that framing the normative diversity across borders in terms of a “clash of civilisations” offers us scant help in making sense of the moral outlook of the international system.⁶² Different national communities may uphold diverse values, but this is not necessarily a by-product of their contrasting cultures. If this were the case, how would we explain the common list of public values endorsed by the citizens of Switzerland, a country comprised of French, Italian and German-speaking cantons? In fact, the function of explicit and contestable public values as a common standpoint of goodness is what allows highly diverse states to make sound collective choices. Crucially, this argument can be extrapolated: if it is possible to articulate a common standpoint for the nation-state, despite the diversity within it, then nothing should prevent us from thinking that there could be common standpoints beyond borders. While the degree of institutionalisation of values is admittedly lower beyond the nation-state than within, a rich array of international treaties, agreements and conventions provides grounds for (at least minimalistic) regional and global standpoints of the common good. As we shall see, even countries with very different moral outlooks have worked together to fulfil certain basic requirements of the common good.

The common good at the regional and global levels

Public values beyond borders

In the last decades, an extensive institutional framework has emerged through the signing of international agreements. Many of these voluntary agreements are morally loaded, revealing the fact that a few public values are shared across national borders. For instance, the 191 states that have ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons have jointly endorsed the values of peace, security and cooperation.⁶³ Note that this treaty is not just a statement of good intentions; indeed, it is subject to regular reviews that recommend follow-up actions.⁶⁴ Similarly, the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment commits its 173 members to the value of human dignity, establishing a common understanding of this value, particularly by setting certain mandatory requirements concerning the treatment of individuals, which are monitored by the Committee against Torture.⁶⁵ In turn, the 182 states that are part of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination endorsed jointly the values of equality and non-discrimination.⁶⁶ On the grounds of this convention, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has developed a comprehensive jurisprudence on discriminatory practices.⁶⁷ By joining these conventions, the signatory states have expressed the view that a good world is one without war, torture and racism. In doing so, they have built a shared – even if minimalistic – understanding of goodness.

Yet the overlap of public values on the international stage goes beyond basic moral standards. Indeed, the so-called “like-minded states” often feature remarkably similar moral outlooks.⁶⁸ For example, liberal democracies such as Norway, Australia and Japan endorse analogous public values, including the rule of law, freedom of speech and accountable government. Even if their interpretation of these values may differ, they clearly share a similar “grammar of the common good”.⁶⁹ Sharing a range of values allows these countries to assess certain international developments from a similar standpoint. For example, a large group of democratic states have jointly condemned human rights violations in China, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Similarly, communist states such as Laos, Cuba and Venezuela share a constellation of public values denouncing the wrongdoings of capitalism and imperialism. Crucially, many like-minded states have joined international organisations that in themselves presuppose certain common values.⁷⁰ In fact, some of these organisations have the explicit purpose of advancing a particular set of values. Consider, for instance, the Council of Europe, which aims to promote human rights, democracy and the rule of law.⁷¹

This moral convergence is nowhere as visible as in the ongoing processes of regional integration. Regional associations, such as the EU, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur), are grounded on and governed by voluntary international agreements that generate significant normative commitments for their signatories. Indeed, EU membership is conditional on endorsing the values listed in the EU treaties. Building on Ian Manners’ research, the next chapter will claim that EU values are sustainable peace, social liberty, consensual democracy, associative human rights, supranational rule of law, inclusive equality, social solidarity, sustainable development and good governance.⁷² In turn, the ASEAN Charter advances, among others, the values of the rule of law, good governance, democracy, the promotion and protection of human rights and the promotion of social justice.⁷³ Along the same lines, Mercosur has enacted protocols regarding the protection and promotion of democracy and human rights, which foresee the possibility of suspending the membership of non-compliant states.⁷⁴ Accordingly, as I will argue in Chapter 2, it is plausible to speak of “European” values, “Southeast Asian” values and “South American” values if the latter are equated with the values publicly endorsed within the respective regional frameworks.⁷⁵

This line of argument suggests that it is possible to articulate meaningful conceptions of the common good beyond the nation-state. In the context of the relations between like-minded states, particularly within regional associations, potentially thick shared understandings of the common good may be identified by referring to the values enshrined in the international agreements upon which these organisations are grounded. By applying this strategy, we may speak of the common good of the EU without facing serious charges of conceptual indeterminacy.⁷⁶

In turn, we can consistently speak of the global common good by referring to the values explicitly endorsed by a large majority of world states.⁷⁷ Despite the diversity of national conceptions of the common good, significant normative overlaps can be found. I have already mentioned the widespread recognition of goods such as non-proliferation, human dignity and non-discrimination, but many other examples of transnational moral consensus could be added. For instance, most states regard environmental protection as a morally desirable goal. This commitment has allowed them to establish common decarbonisation targets, regardless of their disagreements in other domains. The point that a degree of consensus is possible amongst morally diverse states is powerfully illustrated by the fact that the Paris Climate Agreement brought together countries with contrasting moral outlooks, ranging from Israel and Pakistan to Laos and the Holy See.⁷⁸

Of course, this cooperation does not obscure the serious moral disagreements on the international stage. For example, when it comes to the value of human life, states have positioned themselves on different sides of the fence. While 90 countries have endorsed the Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which seeks to abolish the death penalty, 110 states have taken no action towards its adoption.⁷⁹ More generally, the moral outlooks endorsed by certain states are noticeably in tension with each other. Consider, for example, the case of the United States and Iran. The American public values of religious toleration and freedom of speech seem to be at odds with the values of the “sovereignty of truth” and “Qur’anic justice” prescribed by the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.⁸⁰ Moreover, these contrasting understandings of the common good have generated serious political tensions. For instance, during the Iranian Revolution, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dubbed the United States “the Great Satan”. Decades later, President George W. Bush famously labelled Iran as part of an “axis of evil”.⁸¹ Such examples raise the following questions: How should countries or regions with different conceptions of the common good interact? To what extent do these disagreements jeopardise the pursuit of the common good at the global level? The following sections will address these questions in detail.

Clashing conceptions of the common good

In this section, I will claim that states have a moral duty to respect each other’s conceptions of the common good, provided that the conceptions at stake fulfil a crucial requisite. By respecting a state’s conception of the common good, I mean (i) abstaining from any deliberate attempt to interfere in the domestic affairs of another state with the purpose of changing its public values and (ii) maintaining, to the extent possible, certain basic international conditions that allow the conceptions of the common good of other states to be realised. I shall refer to these two moral claims as the principle of pluralism. However, I will argue that the duty to comply with this principle is contingent on the fulfilment of a critical requirement – that the conception of the common good of a given state does not bring about the infliction of impermissible harm on its citizens or the citizens of other states. For the purpose of this discussion, I understand impermissible harm as a gross and systemic violation of fundamental rights as codified by international law. For example, the Nazi aspiration of creating an ethnically homogeneous and territorially enlarged German community through the suppression of minorities and the conquest of other nations would not be defensible on pluralistic grounds.⁸² I shall dub this requisite as the principle of respect for fundamental rights. I will discuss these principles in turn.

Let us begin with the principle of pluralism. Why should states respect each other’s conception of the common good? A key reason behind this claim is that a conception of the common good is an important instrument of self-determination. In a broad sense, “self-determination refers to a community’s right to govern itself independently”.⁸³ Respecting self-determination means that there are things that we should not do to sovereign states, “even if for their own ostensible good”.⁸⁴ By coercively imposing its public values on another political community, a given state would undermine that community’s ability to define autonomously the key goals that it aims to pursue. This does not mean that nothing should be done to promote moral change beyond borders. For example, refraining from “liberal imperialism” does not necessarily imply abstaining from advocating democratic values in the international sphere.⁸⁵ To be sure, it is plausible to conceive a world “where democracy spreads through dialogue and incentives, not coercion and war”.⁸⁶ In particular, non-state actors such as NGOs and think tanks are well positioned to take part in non-hierarchical, non-paternalistic “democratic iterations” because they do not hold coercive power against the states where they would like to promote change.⁸⁷ This suggests that respect for moral diversity is compatible with improving the global moral outlook.⁸⁸

What, then, does pluralism entail? At first glance, respecting the diversity of the conceptions of the common good presupposes compliance with the familiar norm of non-interference, according to which states should not meddle in each other’s domestic affairs.⁸⁹ Yet, abiding by the pluralist principle also requires varying degrees of cooperation between countries with conflicting moral outlooks.⁹⁰ Note that if states refuse to engage with each other on the grounds of their moral disagreements, certain basic conditions for realising the common good in their domestic spheres may not be fulfilled.⁹¹ The case of the United States and Cuba is illustrative. Here, two constellations of public values have been in conflict for decades. Given Cuba’s geographical location, the functioning of its institutions is highly dependent on its economic relations with the United States. By embargoing trade with its island neighbour, the US government has significantly constrained Cuba’s ability to realise the level of social welfare underpinning its public values.⁹² A more extreme case is the current overuse of natural resources, which may ultimately leave little room for any state to pursue its conception of the common good. Hence, in a highly interdependent world, fulfilling the principle of pluralism presupposes the willingness of morally diverse states to work together.

Yet, the imperative of pluralism should be conditional on the fulfilment of certain fundamental rights, understood as the basic and inviolable rights and freedoms codified in international law.⁹³ Why is the observance of these rights so important? As has been widely argued, statehood generates duties for political institutions in their relations towards their citizens.⁹⁴ Even for a political thinker with authoritarian sympathies, such as Thomas Hobbes, membership in a polity is desirable only if it fosters individuals’ chances of self-preservation.⁹⁵ These duties suggests that systemic violations of the fundamental rights of citizens are incompatible with any plausible understanding of the common good.⁹⁶ For example, authorities in countries that conduct arbitrary arrests, torture and the assassination of minorities on a regular basis cannot reasonably defend these practices by referring to a local understanding of the common good. What is at stake in these cases is not moral diversity but mass violence. While the systemic failure to comply with basic standards of decency does not automatically authorise the use of last-resort means such as humanitarian interventions, it may give grounds for the international community to actively seek a change in the status quo.⁹⁷ Therefore, the principle of pluralism should not apply to what John Rawls has referred to as “outlaw states”.⁹⁸

This view raises at least two difficult questions: (i) What rights should be regarded as fundamental? (ii) How to set the threshold beyond which fundamental rights violations should no longer be tolerated? Here, I can only provide some general guidelines.⁹⁹ Regarding the first question, it should be noted that in the last decades, several international treaties and conventions have codified a number of fundamental rights, including the right to life, bodily integrity and due process.¹⁰⁰ The question remains as to whether a more extensive list of fundamental rights is needed, one that would include, for instance, social rights and democracy.¹⁰¹ Yet, for the specific purpose of flagging practices that are not worthy of respect under the principle of pluralism, the list of fundamental rights to apply should be relatively parsimonious, or it will risk mirroring the conception of the common good of one particular group of states.¹⁰² Regarding the appropriate threshold to apply, the common denominator across different agencies that monitor compliance with fundamental rights is that violations should be gross and systemic.¹⁰³ These international bodies have developed a comprehensive body of case law concerning what counts as a gross and systemic violation. As the multiple international agreements mentioned above illustrate, there is a robust consensus around the list of fundamental rights currently recognised in international law.

Who should bear the burdens of the common good?

Regardless of how thick the moral agreement between a given group of states is, the pursuit of their common good may bring about intricate disputes about who should bear its burdens.¹⁰⁴ On the one hand, there may be grounds to sacrifice the interests of a particular state for the sake of others. To illustrate the point, consider a scarce resource, such as lithium. Assume that the government of Chile – which possesses 55% of the world reserves of this mineral – bans any exports of it to stimulate its national industries.¹⁰⁵ This policy would possibly increase the well-being of Chilean citizens by attracting foreign investment and creating better jobs. Yet, it would also likely retard the development and market uptake of green mobility solutions, which are highly dependent on lithium batteries, thus jeopardising the fight against climate change.¹⁰⁶ This scenario suggests that Chile is morally required to share its lithium reserves with other states.¹⁰⁷ On the other hand, it would seem morally wrong for a given region to seek its common good by means of imposing disproportional sacrifices on a particular state.¹⁰⁸ Yet such an outcome clearly obtains when, for instance, Western states promote high environmental standards in their territories by dispatching decommissioned ships to scrapyards in Bangladesh for polluting and hazardous disassembly. This example suggests that the common good of a given state or region should be pursued only to the extent that doing so does not imply inflicting impermissible harm on others.

Yet, what does impermissible harm mean in the context of interstate relations? While discussing this issue in the context of domestic state–citizen relations, I emphasised the moral requirement to respect fundamental rights. Now, if the fundamental rights of citizens are so significant from a normative standpoint, there is no reason to think that those of non-nationals should simply be ignored.¹⁰⁹ This point is particularly relevant for our discussion because the behaviour of a given polity may, in certain cases, dramatically condition the fulfilment of fundamental rights in other polities. An illustrative example is armed conflict. By invading Ukraine, Russia seriously breached the fundamental rights of Ukrainian citizens. This reasoning can duly be extended to several other domains. For instance, the current international division of labour, which has largely been shaped by Western states and multinational firms based in them, has consistently led to the violation of workers’ fundamental rights in many developing countries.¹¹⁰ Consequently, some states are at present able to ensure high levels of welfare for their citizens at the expense of the curtailment of fundamental rights elsewhere. Therefore, the limits to the pursuit of the common good of a state or region can be plausibly formulated in the following way: the common good of a given state or region should only be pursued to the extent that it does not imply gross and systemic violations of fundamental rights of the citizens of other states or regions.

A question that follows is how the trade-offs between the common good of different communities could be adjudicated while ensuring high standards of protection of fundamental rights across borders. As we shall see in the following chapters, the EU case offers a promising way forward. Realising the common good of the whole EU often requires sacrificing the interests of a particular member state. For example, ensuring the sustainability of the public finances of most member states required the Irish government to abandon its policy of tax heavens for digital companies, from which the Irish economy has benefited greatly. By the same token, any serious improvement in the working conditions in poor world regions may imply lower profit margins for EU companies and a potentially lower level of economic growth in the common market. Note that the EU possesses a comprehensive institutional framework where these and other trade-offs can be debated democratically, and compromises can be negotiated. Indeed, institutions such as the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament allow for a transnational debate concerning the distribution of the burdens of the common good. Furthermore, the institutional architecture of the EU polity comprises a supranational court which offers legal protection to the fundamental rights of the nearly 450 million individuals who live across the EU. As I shall claim, this form of regional integration facilitates the pursuit of the common good at the global level.

Towards a global common good

As I have argued, most states in the current international system share at least a limited set of public values. This common set allows for a common moral standpoint from which they regard certain conditions and goals as desirable – the standpoint of the global common good. Why, then, do they often fail to address challenges such as climate change and global inequality? What seems to be currently missing is not a moral consensus around the undesirable nature of these outcomes but the appropriate institutional setting and incentive structure to address them.¹¹¹ This gap has increased since nationalism has become “more prevalent in global politics in recent years”.¹¹² Indeed, we seem to be facing a collective action problem: while at the normative level, most states agree that they should take more decisive action regarding these and other common challenges, they are usually unable to build the coalitions and mobilise the economic resources needed to address them. At the same time, even the most progressive democracies have resisted applying their high standards of respect for fundamental rights beyond their citizenries. Consider, for instance, the inhumane conditions of the Guantanamo prison and a few asylum centres in the EU member states.¹¹³ As I will claim in Chapter 3, this mismatch between the endorsement of common values and the lack of means to realise them suggests that a more consistent pursuit of the common good will imply institutional reforms at the supranational level.

It will be a central contention of the following chapters that the most effective strategy to promote the common good beyond borders is upscaling the ongoing processes of regional integration. Regional organisations such as the EU, ASEAN and the Mercosur facilitate moral convergence, policy coordination and burden-sharing. Indeed, their institutional frameworks host regular political and technical dialogues through which shared understandings of the common good can be developed and put into practice. To the extent regional integration brings about repeated interactions between states, it creates sizeable incentives for taking one another’s interests seriously.¹¹⁴ Since membership in these organisations presupposes state neighbourhood, they are particularly well positioned to address challenges with a strong regional dimension, such as mobility of people, water management and energy supply. Furthermore, regional organisations tend to develop schemes of cooperation based on reciprocity, such as free trade and free movement areas, which typically comprise the recognition and enforcement of at least a few fundamental rights of foreign citizens. Crucially, regional organisations play an important role as aggregators of preferences. This role is critical for the pursuit of the global common good since it is easier to negotiate compromises among a few regional players than among the nearly 200 world states.

The strategy to advance the global common good through regional integration underpinning this book takes the status quo as a starting point but stresses two critical domains for improvement.¹¹⁵ First, the competences of the existing regional organisations need to be updated and expanded in the face of the multiple challenges raised by globalisation. While comprehensive institutional frameworks already exist at the regional level, these frameworks possess limited means to deal with current challenges such as international tax evasion, water scarcity, social dumping and cyberterrorism.¹¹⁶ Indeed, the scope of regulatory and enforcement mechanisms required to address these problems effectively is clearly higher than the status quo. Second, the functioning of regional institutions needs to be strongly geared towards the common good. In other words, these institutions should not be held hostage to the struggle of national interests. As we will see in Chapters 3 and 4, this objective could be achieved by (partially) emancipating regions from national governments – that is, by democratising them and creating direct links to citizens – and increasing their capacity to respond to global challenges. This change would legitimise regional organisations to become the main actors in key global frameworks such as the United Nations, thus facilitating the pursuit of the global common good.¹¹⁷

Nevertheless, the strategy of advancing the global common good through regional associations will need to be complemented by an upgrade of the global institutional framework. In fact, many states do not belong to any regional block, and some regional associations are too loose or too weak to significantly advance the common good. Accordingly, strengthening the mandate and resources of global institutions such as the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation is key to effectively address many of the challenges mentioned above.¹¹⁸ Reforming these institutions would certainly not be an easy task, but it could be achieved if citizens increasingly pressed their governments to act upon such challenges.¹¹⁹ Indeed, as I will claim in Chapter 5, the prospects of ambitious reforms of the global framework depend ultimately on a genuine concern for the global common good by the citizens and their willingness to act upon it. In this regard, regional integration may teach us important lessons on how transnational bonds can be strengthened, which could then be replicated at the global level. Hence, acting at both regional and global levels will be required to advance the common good.

Conclusion

I have argued that the common good is a useful concept for contemporary political theory whenever equated with the public values of a given political community. Public values are enshrined in the fundamental laws of a polity, notably constitutions and international agreements, and are interpreted by public debates, policymaking practices and judicial decisions. I have claimed that public values offer a common moral standpoint from which relevant collective choices can be made despite moral and cultural diversity. Public values need to be endorsed explicitly by the political institutions of a community; they are not equivalent to the values embedded in cultural practices and are not attached to a particular ethnic or religious group. Furthermore, I have claimed that there may be overlapping public values across borders, particularly between states that have concluded international agreements. I have argued that the international diversity of the conceptions of the common good should be respected, provided that the governments comply with the fundamental rights recognised in international law. Finally, I claimed that in a pluralist international system grounded on respect for fundamental rights, the chances of achieving the global common good could be maximised through regional integration.