This project is coordinated from Mexico, and has involved conferences in Puebla, Barcelona, and Notre Dame, Indiana. I presented papers to the latter two conferences, in 2017 and 2018. A book presenting the fruits of our collaboration, Measuring the Common Good: Theory and Practice for Development, is in production. My chapter applies the instrument we have developed to the evaluation of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, and how this newly instituted structure might realise common goods for the people of Mindanao, southern Philippines.
This work has grown out of my specialisation on the topic of common goods. Whereas most current action theory in practical philosophy concentrates on the individual agent, and only subsequently moves on to forms of collaboration, the Aristotelian tradition considers cooperation from the beginning. Whoever acts, according to Aristotle, acts for some good; whoever cooperates, acts with others for goods in common. Common goods are the objects of cooperative action.
My doctoral research at the University of Innsbruck concentrated on the philosophy of Justice, but my subsequent research and publications have dealt with the wider political context and the notion of common good. In 1996 when teaching political philosophy in Dublin I published A Politics of the Common Good. The main argument in this book was to demonstrate that a liberal political philosophy would be enriched by having a concept of ‘common good’. Liberal thinkers tend to avoid notions of the good and of common goods. A second book in 2008, A Grammar of the Common Good (London, Continuum), explored what could usefully be said with the language of common goods. Further development of my thought came to fruition in my 2015 book Global Ethics and Global Common Goods (London, Bloomsbury).
Working in the Philippines in 2015 and 2016, I saw the need to present the ideas in a format relevant to the Philippine experience. While my philosophical work on the topic of common goods was always motivated by the desire to mediate the richness of the Catholic intellectual tradition to contemporary secular debates, my academic writing did not explicitly cite Scripture or assume shared faith in the audience. In the Philippines, however, it was important to root the political and social analysis in the Catholic worldview and to show the relevance of scriptural sources to the articulation of common goods. In an attempt to make the material more immediately available to a Philippine audience, I wrote a short book in which I meditated on the words of Jesus from John’s Gospel, ‘I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full’. The timing of this book, published by the Ateneo de Davao University Press, was opportune, since it coincided with the coming to office of President Rodrigo R. Duterte. Philippine Common Goods: A Good Life for All (2016) has chapters on the economy, the environment, the political and constitutional structure (always a topic of debate in the Philippines) as well as the violent campaign against the drugs pushers and cartels.
Further publications on the topic have included Recovering Common Goods (Dublin 2017), and chapters in Together for the Common Good (SCM Press, 2015) and in Reclaiming the Common Good: How Christians can help re-build our broken world (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2017). This topic continues to be the principal focus of my research with applications to Economics, Business, The European Union, and themes of Solidarity and of Justice.
