The Potential Common Good: The Challenge to Education

In Chapter 3 the ideal common good was explained as a philosophical concept, an unattainable ideal used as a standard against which imperfection may be measured. The practical common good is a provisional end, not a final one. Once broad objectives formulated under it have been achieved, the time has come for fresh objectives to be formulated which constitute a reordering of the practical common good, in the light of a realised potential for improvement. The potential common good is thus a practical judgement of what the common good would be like if human beings were improved in various ways according to their potential for improvement: if they were made more rational, more moral, more knowledgeable, though still within the limits of human imperfection. Intellectually and morally there is normally not one potential only, but ever further potentials ahead once some gains have been made. In this perception there is a generalizing of individual differences among persons: more accurately the potentials are individual, not common potentials for a given population. But in the generalized perception, if it were established that the large majority of human beings the world over are a-moral, or act morally only out of fear of social disapproval or to win social approval; are fundamentally persons of desire or appetite rather than persons of reason; and are vastly ignorant of the world about them beyond the home, the workplace and their recreation locations; uninterested in conservation, apathetic about world political tensions and the possible consequences of war, the practical common good would be a heightening of public awareness in each of these respects.