The Common Good and the Toleration of Evil

Pornography, prostitution, gambling, capital punishment, slavery: each seems somehow evil, and yet—at one time or another—each has been tolerated by governments.  Do these tolerations violate the common good?  Our Philosophical Happy Hour takes up the unhappy question.

How do we live rightly as members of a society when that society is permeated by evils?  There are many points we must consider, to answer this question.  Let us dive right into it.

Understanding the Common Good

The notion of the “common good” has received some small (if notable) attention in recent years, thanks in part to the postliberal political movement.  This movement has emphasized the importance of a good irreducible to individuals or material prosperity.  Modern political associations have tended to other conceptions of the good, that is.  One has promoted a sense of the good as consisting in aggregate welfare, exemplified in socialist and communistic ideologies.  The other has emphasized individual rights and autonomy as the principal good, upon which all others depend—an “atomistic capitalism”.

For the former, the government is responsible for ensuring everyone has access to the good.  For the latter, government must remove impediments for the individual’s ability to pursue the good.  Neither, in the sense proposed here, holds the government as responsible for the common good.  For the common good is one communicable but indivisible—a definition inapplicable to the principles of either socialism or individualism.

Such a common good seems, on the one hand, threatened by certain evils or vices: intrinsically disordered actions or beliefs, or destructive practices.  And yet, simultaneously, a totalitarian governance which stamps out these evils may prevent the communicability of the good.

Justice and the Toleration of Evil

If something is evil, should not the state, the government, the authorities-that-be, prohibit its practice?  A common question, but one which—at least it seems to me—misunderstands the very nature of government.

I would contest that human government is always a matter of conventions.  These conventions are used for judging human actions—not for determining them.  A government does not and cannot create human actions.  Its prohibitions must concern what can be judged, and, subsequent to those judgments, enforced.  Consider, thus, what Thomas Aquinas writes in his Summa theologiae (I-II, q.96, a.2, c.):

…law is framed as a rule or measure of human acts.  Now a measure ought to be homogeneous with the measured, as said in Meta. X, since diverse things are measured by diverse measures.  Whence it is also necessary that laws ought to be imposed upon men according to their condition, because, as Isidore says, “Law ought to be possible both according to nature and according to the customs of the country.”

As Thomas goes on to say, there are many things not possible to children which are possible to adults, and for this reason we measure differently the actions of children; and so too, we measure differently the actions of those who are not perfect in virtue, which is the majority of men.

Put otherwise, our conventions of governance must not presuppose widespread virtue: “And therefore human law does not prohibit every vice from which the virtuous abstain; but only the vices more grave, from which it is possible for the greater part of the many to abstain”.

Conversation and the Common Good

But if law cannot—and indeed should not—prohibit every evil, the work of promoting and protecting the common good cannot belong to law alone.  It requires prudence: a habit of discernment concerning the means of opposing vice and of promoting virtue.  Such discernments are seldom straightforward.  Tolerating an evil too far may permit its spread; prohibiting it may produce still greater disorder and disrupt the ability of many to participate in the common good.  The common good therefore demands not merely correct principles, but wise judgment concerning their application among imperfect human beings.

So join us this Wednesday (12 August 2026, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET) as we discuss the common good and the efforts for realizing it.  Consider the following questions in preparation:

Join us this Wednesday (12 August 2026, from 5:45-7:15+ pm ET) as we discuss the common good and the efforts for realizing it.  Consider the following questions in preparation:

• What makes a good genuinely common rather than merely an aggregate of individual goods?
• How does a government discern what to prohibit, what to permit, and what to promote?
• What distinguishes toleration of an evil from its tacit approval?
• When and why would the prohibition of some evil damage the common good?
• What distinguishes the authority of law from that of custom?
• How can and should prudential virtue enter into our praxis of law and of custom?