Would introducing divorce promote the common good?

According to the media, your main consideration when deciding whether to vote for or against the introduction of divorce in the May 28 referendum is how the result will affect the common good. There was a response that the concept of the common good was too unclear for the purpose. Can you clarify?

Before the British election of 1997, the bishops of England and Wales issued a pastoral letter titled The Common Good, and before the election of 2011 they updated their advice to the electorate, in another letter now titled Vote for the Common Good.

In it the bishops began by stressing that the common good of which they spoke was not the same as the utilitarian concept of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”.

In fact, the underlying idea of this concept, which is that all social or collective goods are reducible to individually enjoyable goods, is all too frequently found especially in books dealing with welfare economics.

For instance, a book by Riccardo Petrella, formerly professor at the Catholic University of Louvain as well as high official of the European Commission, entitled The Common Good, presents a diagram of it like a jigsaw puzzle made up of 21 pieces that actually correspond to the main constituents of what he explicitly calls the welfare state.

Charles Taylor, on the other hand, contrasts this concept, which one of its leading exponents Amartya Sen called Welfarism, to his own concept of what he calls “irreducible social goods”.

Perhaps the easiest way to understand this concept is to think of some personal experience such as the following:

You go to the Manoel Theatre for a performance of a Mozart opera. You get out of the experience a richer joy than on the occasions when you had played a recording of the opera in your own private room.

The added value was not simply due to the different quality of the sound when heard directly instead of mediated through some mechanism or other, but also because your experience was shared with that of several hundred others. They were reacting to the performance with you in virtue of your common sharing in a culture in the identity, of which appreciation of the emotive and intellectual elegance of Mozart’s music was a defining factor.

Irreducibly social goods do not, however, constitute the totality of the common good. The British bishops defined it as “the sum of all those social conditions that allow the human dignity of all to be respected and basic needs to be met while giving men and women the freedom to assume responsibility for their own lives.”

How does this concept of the common good relate to the question of divorce?

At least some of the upholders of the idea that irreducible social goods are to be preferred even to the undoubted good that is individual happiness, would consider the indissolubility of marriage is such an irreducible social good at least in the context of Maltese culture.

Taylor actually gives two examples of irreducibly social goods. The first is that of the French language in Quebec, for which we can readily substitute the Maltese language in Malta.

It is quite usual for legislation to impose the use of a given language in all types of school even against the wishes of parents.

Incidentally I do not agree with philosophers such as Simon Lee, in his book Uneasy Ethics that “human rights… may have to be foregone in the interests of the common good”, because fundamental human rights are inalienable and should not be sacrificed under any circumstances.

However, although there is a fundamental human right to marriage (excluding, for instance, the prohibition of inter-racial marriage), there is no fundamental human right to a second or other marriage if the first is broken down.

It is other lesser rights that it is claimed can be sacrificed to preserve such irreducibly social rights as the flourishing of a language or a kind of family law deemed to be features of a highly-valued national or cultural identity.

The second example given by Taylor is that of “participatory self-rule”, which he distinguished from democracy, defined by him as merely procedures for electing governments. Taylor actually holds more generally that “a society needs some commonly recognised definition of the good life”.

Some others might well maintain that the indissolubility of marriage is an essential element in their concept of a good life, and that the ideal should be upheld by law even at the cost of some individuals being impeded from as free a pursuit of their individual happiness as they might prefer.

Do you agree with the approach that you have des­cribed and that has sometimes been called the communitarian as opposed to the liberal?

I myself prefer to consider as simply as possible, social consequences that are more easily calculable.

For instance, it would be better to have divorce legislation if that would, let us say, prevent a situation in which the majority of children were being born out of unmarried rather than married couples. I have constantly deplored our lack of well-conducted studies that would allow us some fairly reliable evaluation of the likely consequence of any divorce legislation.

The current legislation is being proposed, to use Taylor’s words, for “hyper-Augustinian reasons, that in this fallen world of depraved wills, such a modus vivendi is the least dangerous arrangement”.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.