The Global Common Good as a Practical Problem

Placing discourse on the common good in the broader context of Vatican II’s call to dialogue reflected in Gaudium et Spes, David Hollenbach describes the council’s approach to navigating the tension between universality and particularity as a “dialogic universalism.”Footnote ¹⁹ In his own approach toward a “global common good,” he advocates for commitment to the common good as a vision that challenges pluralistic societies, particularly American society, to transcend mere tolerance of difference.Footnote ²⁰ In terms reminiscent of Lonergan’s “cycle of decline,” discussed further in the following, Hollenbach writes: “When difference generates conflict, fear grows. And such fear makes further conflict more likely. This raises the spectre that we have fallen into a downward spiral in which awareness of differences leads to conflict, which in turn leads to fear, more conflict, more defensive boundaries, and onward to deepened perceptions of difference.”Footnote ²¹ In this context, a living sense of “common life” reflective of “a good in common” recognizable both by the individual and in the social body is unlikely.Footnote ²² Nonetheless, “In an interdependent world the idea of the common good must take on a more universal definition.”Footnote ²³

Environmental degradation, described by Hollenbach as both a transnational and local problem, particularly calls for a “widening” “definition of the community” that one cares about—for the challenges of environmental degradation do not recognize borders.Footnote ²⁴ Although describing Hollenbach’s approach to the common good, as well as Lisa Cahill’s, as seemingly “ecologically insufficient,” Willis Jenkins affirms that “their practical epistemology of the good implies that their understandings would expand as problem-solving, solidaristic relationships discover broader dimensions of moral truth.”Footnote ²⁵ As Jenkins describes, an emphasis on solidaristic praxis for the common good, especially in light of planetary problems, gives rise to “middle axioms,” such as “truth and reconciliation” and “sustainability” that are both transnational and contextual.Footnote ²⁶ As inductive, middle axioms emerge from the practices of particular communities “in ways that facilitate ongoing social encounter.”Footnote ²⁷

Copeland, I suggest, exhibits a practical epistemology of the good in general that invites a widening, in Hollenbach’s terms, or a broadening, in Jenkins’s terms, of the common good through solidaristic praxis. In particular, Copeland, informed by Lonergan, provides a heuristic lens for navigating the tension between the universal and particular in a manner that challenges a disengaged or disembodied rationality, as described by Charles Taylor, that fuels a “technocratic paradigm” that wastes life in both its human and nonhuman forms, as described by Pope Francis.Footnote ²⁸

Copeland’s Development of Lonergan for the Common Good

Framing the common good as a problem is, for Copeland, a call for an authentic expansion of its range of meaning. This authentic expansion requires questioning the common sense of the common good, namely, who the consensus reflects and whether it lends toward solidarity with the other or enables the continuing exploitation of both bodies and land.Footnote ²⁹ “The realm of common sense,” as defined by Lonergan, “is the realm of persons and things in their relations to us.”Footnote ³⁰ While the turn to interiority and “one’s subjectivity” through questioning “is a heightening of intentional consciousness,” reflective of a theoretical grasp of both “commonsense procedures” as well as “the differentiation of the sciences and the construction of their methods,” the subject of common sense remains nonetheless constant.Footnote ³¹ The self-knowledge gained through this differentiation of consciousness permits the subject, in her common sense, to “come to understand other ordinary languages and their varieties of common sense.”Footnote ³² In other words, as differentiated consciousness is able to recognize diverse theories and procedures appropriate to diverse disciplines, so too is it capable of recognizing diverse first-person languages and modes of common sense, while retaining the perspective of the unique subject. Copeland’s approach performs the work of cultivating fruitful tension in the personal and social understanding of the common good so that its underlying common sense is questioned insofar as it reflects biases resistant to such differentiation and so that genuinely shared values reflective of authentic self-knowledge may emerge. In this way, following the tradition of liberation theology, the work of questioning is ordered toward transformative praxis for both individuals and social bodies.Footnote ³³

Copeland employs Lonergan in this manner in an earlier essay on the common good in Catholic social teaching. She applies the transcendental precepts of attention, intelligence, reasonableness, and responsibility to the question, or the problem, of the common good, and interrogates the ways in which the social constructs of race and land are reflected in “our vision of the common good,” wherein I take “our vision” as signaling “our common sense,” namely, “our” ordinary language or discourse.Footnote ³⁴ Following Lonergan, the subject achieves authenticity by discovering and living out values that reflect a broadening horizon of concern within a process of conversion as one develops vital, social, personal, cultural, and religious values.Footnote ³⁵ In moving from vital to social values, there is an appreciation for the collaboration and care generated by family, community, and society. Learning cultural values lends the subject to new expressions of meaning, broadens the smaller networks that initiate the subject into social life, and creates fertile ground for the further discovery of personal value. In authentically living out value, the person becomes “an inspiration and invitation to others to do likewise.”Footnote ³⁶ Finally, at the “summit,” are religious values where, as Gordon Rixon describes, “God transvalues every other value and envisions the ultimate good as neither the good for the self, nor the community, nor even all humanity, but the good of the created cosmos.”Footnote ³⁷

Within this process, questions for reflection reach beyond the viewpoint of the subject for an objectivity that nonetheless reflects the subject who is asking the question, namely, “whether or not this really is so or that really could be.”Footnote ³⁸ In other words, the movement from subjectivity to objectivity, reflected in questions “about objective value” or what is “truly good,” remains subject-centered. Moral conversion is then enacted as one “changes the criterion of one’s decisions and choices from satisfactions to values,” and so “[lives] by the answers” to one’s questions about the truly good.Footnote ³⁹ In this way, the good is understood and desired as more than personally good, and as reflective of free and authentic personhood. By contrast to the framework of disengaged rationality, as will be taken up in the following, this approach retains the personal aspect of the subject in the movement toward objective value.

The transformation of the subject takes place within the currents of history, and Lonergan describes two vectors for human development within which the particular marks of time, place, and person are reflected. First, the creating vector affirms a beginning in experience; gradually, further understanding is achieved, which yields balanced judgment and fruitful courses for action. This gradual development calls for creativity as new situations are encountered, inviting further understanding, judgment, and activity on the part of individuals and social bodies.Footnote ⁴⁰ Second, the healing vector marks “development from above downwards,” where transformation occurs as the fruit of “falling in love,” namely, where experiences of genuine love, human and divine, orient the person in her daily living.Footnote ⁴¹

Authentic development requires both vectors to be operating within history. On the one hand, creating without healing “is distorted and corrupted by bias” because the movement from experience and understanding to rendering judgment and determining courses for action is not free from “the inattention, oversights, irrationality, irresponsibility of decline,” namely, the distortions of bias that resist self-transcendence and fuel an undifferentiated self-centeredness in the social processes of history.Footnote ⁴² On the other hand, inauthentic expressions of love distort genuine healing and can easily become forms of coercion or violence.Footnote ⁴³ And so, human subjects “have to acknowledge their real guilt and amend their ways. They have to learn with humility … that the task of repentance and conversion is life-long.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The transformation of the individual is thus joined not only to a social dimension in shared experience, but to a historical dimension within which the personal and social life-long task of repentance and conversion unfolds.

Copeland’s visioning of the common good entails a simultaneous judgment of personal, social, cultural, and religious values that are attentive to history and reflect the ongoing task of repentance and conversion. To present the common good as a problem is to present it as “a living, dynamic and participatory present reality” that asks: “What do we mean by common? Who defines what is common and by what criteria?”Footnote ⁴⁵ This questioning is simultaneously personal, social, cultural, and historical; it demands personal and social commitment that is attentive to what is occurring, and discerns responsible and fruitful courses for action that correspond to the reality of who we claim to be: “What values animate our vision? Can we articulate these clearly and distinctly? Are we willing to struggle and sacrifice for a new vision of the political order?”Footnote ⁴⁶ Finally, this questioning springs from both moral and religious sources, and works on the personal and social conscience to animate the building of authentic relationships: “Are we willing to confront sin and evil within the Christian community? Are we willing to open our lives to create a context for the coming Reign of God, and by what values and practices can we do so?”Footnote ⁴⁷

The common good is worked out by questioning the common sense of social bodies and by seeking solidarity with the suffering; in other words, by discerning where the good of the social order is not yet common. Using the notion of “horizon,” defined as “‘a maximum field of vision from a determinate standpoint,’” in her later thought, Copeland describes how bias is reflected in and reinforced by one’s horizon: “What and who is outside the range of that field is eliminated from my knowledge and interest, care and concern.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The challenge of the common good is to ensure not only the gradual expanding of a horizon—taking in a broader field of “knowledge and interest, care and concern”—but for this expanding horizon to be practiced authentically, attentive to individual and group forms of bias that are causing individuals and groups to overlook or refuse encounters with “others.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Aligning principle with practice requires a praxis of solidarity that questions the horizon out of which persons and social bodies operate, cultivating conditions for exposing and uprooting bias in order to work toward healing. Here, the healing vector supports the solidaristic praxis that authentically expands horizons by renewing common sense. By dissolving bias, love works against the fomenting of individual and group forms of bias that, in Lonergan’s terms, reveal a “shortsighted common sense” that “plods around in ever narrower vicious circles.”Footnote ⁵⁰ By contrast, the love of solidaristic praxis encounters others through recognition of “other ordinary languages and their varieties of common sense.”Footnote ⁵¹ Here, religious faith, hope, and charity are called upon for a self-transcendence that expands horizons of “knowledge and interest, care and concern,” thus forming a subject in self-knowledge, and in imitation of God’s love.Footnote ⁵²

Copeland describes bias as “the more or less conscious and deliberate choice, in light of what we perceive as a potential threat to our well-being, to exclude further information or data from consideration in our understanding, judgment, discernment, decision, and action.”Footnote ⁵³ At the individual level, excluding data is to “overlook or refuse opportunities to encounter those who are ‘different.’”Footnote ⁵⁴ This exclusionary practice has consequences for both the individual and social body: “In yielding to individual bias, these women and men not only stunt their personal affective and cognitive development, but their distorted experience becomes the foundation for aberrant understanding of others, impairs social relations, and affects cultural representation.”Footnote ⁵⁵ As distorted values inform experience, the discovery of further values, and human discourse both formal and informal, bias feeds a “cycle of decline” or a spiraling deterioration in the social order.Footnote ⁵⁶

A cycle of decline, however, is not explained solely in terms of individual bias, namely, an egoistic refusal to broaden one’s understanding by asking “further questions” that transcend what Lonergan deems an “intelligent selfishness” that settles for “egoistic solutions.”Footnote ⁵⁷ There is also group bias, which, like individual bias, “rests on an interference with the development of practical common sense.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The distinction of group bias lies in its “[operating] in the very genesis of commonsense views” by colluding with power to determine which insights or courses of action that respond to concrete situations are pursued; in this way “truly practical insights” become operative when they “either meet with no group resistance or else find favor with groups powerful enough to overcome what resistance there is.”Footnote ⁵⁹ As Copeland describes, “Group bias finds decisive, even violent expression in ethnocentrism. Within a racially bias-induced horizon, members of the privileged group are conditioned to withdraw from unnecessary experiential contact with ‘other’ non-privileged members of society, thereby depriving themselves of the possibilities of human and humane relationships.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In the failure to attend to individual and group bias, there is an increased likelihood of finding reflections of myself (or ourselves) in another self (or group like ours), in a distorted fashion. This self-referential tendency becomes joined to like-minded individuals, not according to a shared good that creates the spontaneous possibility of new and authentic friendships, but according to a shared bias that reinforces a biased horizon and refuses opportunities to encounter those beyond it.Footnote ⁶¹ The common sense that emerges from a racially bias-induced horizon has particular consequences for practices of subsidiarity: “With its penchant for ‘the quick-fix’ and the short-term solution, the general bias of common sense colludes with group bias to disregard innovative and good ideas that might come from non-privileged groups.”Footnote ⁶² In this way, those who suffer most the consequences of distortion in the social order are most likely to be ignored in the working out of practices of subsidiarity meant to serve the common good.

The praxis of solidarity, by contrast, entails seeing, being affected by, and responding to the other as human and as unique: “Inasmuch as solidarity involves an attitude or disposition, it entails recognition of the humanity of the ‘other’ as human, along with regard for the ‘other’ in her (and his) own otherness. The principle of openness flows from this recognition and regard.”Footnote ⁶³ Further, an emphasis on receptivity places a moral demand upon the principle of openness: “Openness implies receptivity, that is, a willingness to receive the other and to be received by the other in mutual relationship, to take on obligation with and to the other.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The praxis of solidarity requires authentic encounter, the fruit of openness and receptivity to other sources of meaning and value that express, embody, and seek the good, both for themselves and the human community.

To resist encounter with the other is to be closed to further discovery of meaning and value, thereby stunting the growth of the subject and her or his horizon of care and concern. This growth requires setting oneself within “a context of other meanings and other values,” within which a cycle of mutual recognition and exchange can occur, creating possibilities for the good to emerge as something genuinely shared.Footnote ⁶⁵ This cyclical process facilitates the questioning of meanings and values, and this questioning creates conditions for healing, especially through recognition and resistance of bias.Footnote ⁶⁶

Encountering the Other Subject

To encounter the subject in her or his particularity requires an ability to grapple with contingency, even as one grapples with the question of what is universally true for all human beings. Extending this question to the entirety of the created order also requires moving between the particular and universal through the subject or living being, and hence through the contingent nature of creation and encounter. Here, I turn to Taylor’s discourse on disengaged rationality, which assists in specifying the challenge of contingency for a modern frame of reference. Dialoguing with Bilgrami introduces the extended form of the question for the entirety of the created order through the category of land.

The praxis of solidarity that enables authentic encounter follows, in Copeland’s terms, from “a new question [that] orients Christian reflection on anthropology: What might it mean for poor women of color to grasp themselves as human subjects, to grapple with the meaning of liberation and freedom?”Footnote ⁶⁷ Copeland’s theological anthropology thus begins from the narratives of emancipated women who suffered at the crossroads of ideologies of sexism and racism in a system that imposed, and continues to impose in modern-day forms, a discriminatory application of the very teaching that affirms the common origin and equality of all human persons in God.Footnote ⁶⁸ Blocking intellectual beings from participation in education in order to stifle intellectual development, and blocking spiritual beings from participation in worship in order to stifle spiritual formation, slavery “deformed” “convictions central to theological anthropology,” namely, “that human beings, created in the image and likeness of God (imago Dei), have a distinct capacity for communion with God; … have a unique place in the cosmos God created; and … are made for communion with other living beings.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Drawing on the discourse of liberation theologies that exposed the seeming generality of the terms “person,” “human subject,” or “modern subject” as “the White, male, bourgeois European subject,” Copeland posits that “this [new] question holds foundational, even universal, relevance for the faith of a global church seeking to mediate the gospel in what, quickly and ambiguously, has become a global culture.”Footnote ⁷⁰ This new question affirms and maintains particularity so as to “unmask” a false universalism and, through this unmasking, authentically order solidarity to the other “in her (and his) own otherness.”Footnote ⁷¹ In this way, the praxis of solidarity resists the projection at work in “the dynamics of domination” that structure a global order where bodies are subjected to and exchanged within the “(dis)order” of empire.Footnote ⁷² With the memory of these bodies, Copeland re-members “the body broken and resurrected for us,” which memory animates the praxis of solidarity as it meets particular bodies, and opens the possibility that “a new and authentic human ‘we’ emerges in this encounter.”Footnote ⁷³ This approach, I argue, grounds an awareness of contingency that challenges the status quo of a disengaged rationality, such as described by Taylor, and therein prepares for an expanded common good that recognizes the entirety of the created order.

Disengaged rationality resists an openness to “other” sources of value because it resists the contingency of encounter, which insight helps to specify the challenge that Copeland’s discourse presents to a modern frame of reference. In short, the kind of subjectively engaged approach to foundational or universal claims offered by Copeland is in direct contrast to the objectivity characteristic of the modern “buffered” self, which is achieved by disengaging precisely from this kind of subjective engagement.

Taylor diagnoses the modern buffered self with an inability to feel the tension created by diverse positions, which coincides with an inability to think outside of one’s stance or position; and this generates a closed stance that refuses to engage with positions that compete with one’s own.Footnote ⁷⁴ The fruit of this closed stance is a general malaise of discontent; the remedy is to be moved to self-reflexivity in a way that adequately reflects the agency of both self and other, or that can cope with moral “cross pressure.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Notably, Taylor argues that the moral impetus behind the closed stance is a gradual disavowal of the place of the body in Christian understanding.Footnote ⁷⁶ Further, this movement out of the body, or “excarnation,” in Christian belief and practice coincides with a “fetishism of rules and norms” in modern ethics, where “rational self-control” takes the place of contingency.Footnote ⁷⁷ Through the co-inherence of excarnation and rational self-control, we have traded in a personal, incarnate God whose sacred presence was felt, for a political or moral God who substantiates our claims to a certain kind of identity.Footnote ⁷⁸ Preferring to avoid this cross pressure that is generated by competing views, we avoid complex feelings by denying complex entanglement. In Copeland’s terms, rather than expand one’s horizon by authentic encounter with “others,” a bias-induced horizon is reinforced by refusing encounter with those perceived as threatening.

By contrast to a disengaged rationality that denies complex entanglement with particular others, Copeland turns toward the other who is most vulnerable to the contingencies of the created order, namely, the poor woman of color. In so doing, she recalls a metaphysical truth claim about the contingency of the entire created order, as well as a theological truth claim about the inherent dignity of each person in that order. In this way, what is universal is made personal. An emphasis on the personal nature of universal truth claims resists what Taylor presents as the powerful and perverse homogenizing at work in a disengaged model that forces the reality of everyday experience “to conform to what this stance can pick up” rather than allow the stance to be “adapted to the nature of the reality concerned.”Footnote ⁷⁹

By contrast to a closed, buffered, or disengaged stance, a disposition of open responsiveness resists such homogenizing by feeling tension, and thereby expanding the horizon for human meaning:

If, however, “our feelings, or understanding of human meanings” are the obstacle preventing us from understanding another person or group, then there is a call “to be challenged by the ways they fail to fit into our recognized range of meanings, [so] that we can begin to discern how this range has to be broken open and transformed if we are to understand them.”Footnote ⁸¹ And yet, how does one “adapt to the nature of the reality concerned” when the “recognized range of meanings” remains framed by the bias that blocks transformation? Framed in terms of the problem of the common good, how does one account for the space between the common sense of the common good, on the one hand, and the lived experiences that have not yet been adequately woven into this common sense, on the other? This raises, then, the question of the good that is not yet common and how the concept of the common good can adequately reflect this tension in a fruitful manner, namely, how it disposes toward the question, rather than the presumed answer, of the common good.

Taylor’s critique of disengaged reason provides an initial way of responding to this question: the tensive or cross-pressured space calls for an “agape” shaped ethics, which positively affirms the inherent relationship between embodied existence and contingency. Agape, a “paradigm bodily emotion” or “gut feeling,” reveals the neighbor and the moral act demanded by the situation: “Who is my neighbour? The one you happen across, stumble across, who is wounded there in the road.… But to hear this, we have to escape from the monomaniacal perspective in which contingency can only be an adversary requiring control.”Footnote ⁸² To neglect the moral weight of an embodied response is to resist the conditions of created existence and to ignore the spontaneous invitation to moral growth that reveals itself in encounter with particular others, the fruit of which is borne out in the ability to “adapt to the nature of the reality concerned.”Footnote ⁸³

This ability to respond to the reality at hand resists the qualities and ideals carried by disengaged rationality, namely, “the prestige and admiration surrounding the stance itself, with the sense of freedom, power, control, invulnerability, dignity, which it radiates.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Responding to Taylor, Bilgrami makes explicit how these ideals and values of disengaged rationality are not simply descriptive of the human subjects who inhabit them, but also “provided the justifications for the rapacious conquest of distant lands, not merely on the grounds that they were just more stretches of brute nature to be mastered for profit and gain, but because the inhabitants of those lands were infantilized as people who lacked precisely this rationality, lacked the right attitudes toward nature (which made it possible to take this predatory attitude toward it).”Footnote ⁸⁵ This rationality, therefore, is conjoined to a system of colonization that transcends personal attitudes or dispositions by structuring systems of exchange that exploit both peoples and lands. As Copeland also emphasizes that the exploitation of land is conjoined to the exploitation of poor bodies forced into an exchange with hegemonic power players: “To meet the artificially created demands of consumption and business, the land metaphorically and literally was turned into ‘an energy reservation or giant industrial park’: Appalachia, a ‘field of powerlessness,’ its people used and discarded.”Footnote ⁸⁶

By focusing on the enfleshed other as the site of encounter, Copeland exposes the inherent contradiction of a disengaged, and disembodied, rationality that operates via the oppression of certain kinds of bodies, which live and work in relationship with the land. The dominant, or dominating, view of a disengaged rationality feeds on fear of bodies, producing and sustaining inauthentic moral and spiritual superiority through a “tendency to idealism, suspicion of ambiguity, and discomfort with matter.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In both theory and practice, it resists the truth of being created. An emphasis on embodiment puts the concept of the common good to the work of seeing and practicing the problem, or task, of human living in the social order. As the problem of the common good is ordered toward solidarity with the poor and suffering, the “others” of history, it resists bias and expands the range of meanings and values that inform its common sense. In this way, there is movement from the particular to the whole through the embodied, or particular, subject and especially through solidaristic encounter with the other to whom the good of society is not yet common. This movement through the particular, I have argued, signals a turn to the contingent, which resists disengaged rationality and moves toward authentic encounter for common good.

Recognition of contingency, which speaks to the entirety of the created order and to the dignity of each person within that order, provides a basis for expanding the common good to the earth as one of “our poor,” as Francis invites. An expanded sense of the common good, namely, to the entirety of the created order, requires recognition of the interwoven discarding of human others on particular lands or within inhabited ecologies, as well as a means of valuing other (and all) human and nonhuman beings. The integral ecology presented in Laudato Si’, as I now turn to, invites an approach that attends to the interwoven suffering of human and nonhuman others, and calls to solidarity with the poor and the earth through recognition of diverse and interrelated good, expressed through diverse and interrelated forms of agency.

Interrelated and Common Good

The integral ecology of Laudato Si’, and the broader vision of reality it engenders, places relationship at the center of thinking, with a common originating relationship of creature and Creator. As the encyclical describes, teaching on the common good affirms that each person, made in God’s image and likeness, possesses human dignity and is ordered to coexistence in community; the community itself becomes recognized as a good that facilitates the flourishing of the whole and its diverse members.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this way, the second chapter of the encyclical, “The Gospel of Creation,” which emphasizes the human vocation of responsibility for the earth and human community as emerging from Scripture, lays the groundwork for the third chapter, “The Human Roots of the Ecological Crisis,” and the practice of integral ecology that follows, which invites renewed relationship with the entirety of the created order. The formal presentation of “Integral Ecology” in the fourth chapter is then followed by “Lines of Approach and Action” and “Ecological Education and Spirituality” in the final two chapters. I focus on the fourth chapter of the encyclical in order to display the pattern of reflection to which integral ecology invites as continuous with the foundational understanding of the human vocation that grounds teaching on the common good.

Integral ecology affirms teaching on the common good and extends its “common sense” so that each organism, created by God, “is good and admirable in itself” and is ordered to coexistence in an ecosystem; the ecosystem itself then becomes recognized as a good that facilitates the flourishing of the various organisms in an ecosystem and the ecosystem as a whole.Footnote ⁸⁹ In light of the good of each person and community, organism, and ecosystem, the relationships among human communities and ecosystems also requires consideration of the good of each and of the whole: “There is an interrelation between ecosystems and between the various spheres of social interaction, demonstrating yet again that ‘the whole is greater than the part.’”Footnote ⁹⁰ In this way, the first section in the integral ecology chapter demonstrates the outworking of an extended common good beyond the human or social dimensions, and includes the integral definition of “environment” that knits the human and environmental dimensions more closely together.

The manner in which the good of each and the good of the whole is understood is differentiated according to the kind of system and interrelation between systems under consideration. This is evident in Francis’s definition of “environment” as “a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it.”Footnote ⁹¹ Nature, in this understanding, is more than “a mere setting in which we live”; rather “We are part of nature, included in it and thus in constant interaction with it.”Footnote ⁹² On the one hand, nature acts as a broader category that includes human society; on the other hand, nature is a reality with which society interacts. Because of the commonality and differentiation between nature and society, the complexity of an ecosystem is considered both in itself and with human communities, exhibiting a kind of agential power that interacts with human agency in the evolution of cultures and social systems and the emergence of values.

Francis’s discussion of cultural ecology and an ecology of daily life that follows the opening section show the continuation of this knitting together of the human and the environmental dimensions. Human values that emerge from cultures, such as the “historic, artistic and cultural patrimony” that relies on the foundation of “each place,” the “cultural treasures” and “language of the people” that reflect local cultures, and the Indigenous communities and cultural traditions that nourish identity and values;Footnote ⁹³ the circumstances that shape the lived experience of human communities, such as “our rooms, our homes, our workplaces and neighbourhoods;” and the manner in which these spaces are designed and organized to facilitate beauty, as well as “adaptation to the environment, encounter and mutual assistance,”—together reflect Francis’s integral definition of “environment.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Expressions of culture and quality of life not only depend on the health of the environment, but are reflective of the health, or lack thereof, of the environment. Environmental exploitation and degradation that exhaust resources and “undo the social structures which, for a long time, shaped cultural identity and their sense of the meaning of life and community,” speaking especially to local and Indigenous communities, as well as “the chaotic realities that people have to endure in city life,” are co-injurious to human dignity and the natural world.Footnote ⁹⁵ The explicit and brief section on “The Principle of the Common Good” that follows the multi-dimensional treatment of ecology thus reminds the reader of the centrality of human dignity, while also inherently joining integral ecology to the principle.Footnote ⁹⁶ The “summons to solidarity and a preferential option for the poorest of our brothers and sisters” should, by this point in the encyclical, resound as a cry of the poor and a cry of the earth, as reflective of the injustice of global inequality, as well as the need for justice between the generations, which the final section of the chapter takes up.Footnote ⁹⁷

The good of each organism is not the same as the good of each person; and yet, each organism, as each person, is good in itself and in relationship. Further, the whole to which the organism or the person or both belong, as ecosystem, society, or environment, are not the same; and yet, each is good according to the “manifold connections” that exist within each system. The “manifold connections” that express the kinds of good proper to the realities within each system, and the common good that exists in the coming together of these various goods, reflect a common and differentiated movement outward that is proper to all living beings. This outward moving dynamism reflects the exitus of all creation from God as source, and the reditus, or return, of all creation to God as end, while maintaining a certain priority of the human being’s capacity for knowledge and love of God, and the communion that flows from this capax Dei, as reflected in the closing paragraphs of the encyclical and its express turn toward spirituality:

Francis begins here with the outward moving dynamism of all living creatures, in which the recognition that all living beings tend toward the good is conjoined to an understanding of fulfillment and flourishing as occurring in relationship.Footnote ⁹⁹ This common tendency proper to all living creatures is nonetheless differentiated according to the nature of each species.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Francis then turns to the particular human manner of this outward moving dynamism, or seeking the good in relationship. Notably, the capacity for “communion with God, with others and with all creatures” is particular to the human person in a universal manner. As Copeland emphasizes in her treatment of the turn to the subject, evoking a generic human person cannot be taken for granted as standing for all human persons. Hence, attending to the particularity of the human experience, like attending to “the manifold connections between creatures,” requires more than the assertion of metaphysical or theological truth claims; it requires encounters among persons, or embodied subjects, within systems.

Integral ecology, I want to suggest, invites an approach that attends to the particularity of encounter within systems, both human (“social” systems) and ecological (“natural” systems). In light of the reditus of all creation to God, integral ecology invites an end-to-end reasoning, as opposed to a means-to-end reasoning, in the relationship between human and natural ecologies. An end-to-end reasoning does not ask exclusively about the usefulness of nonhuman nature for specifically human ends, but considers how the good of each reality is reflected in the interaction: “It is essential to seek comprehensive solutions which consider the interactions within natural systems themselves and with social systems.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ In this way, care for the natural world, or care for the vitality of all that exists, enters the heart of the human vocation, which is called “to till and keep” the good of the natural world as good in itself and in relationship with social (human) systems.

An integral ecology that understands persons in relationship with the natural world by attending to the particularity of each reality thus requires a sufficiently dynamic conception of the common good that reflects (1) the reality of being created, and the diversity of creation; (2) human distinction (i.e., human person as imago Dei); and (3) human difference (i.e., diversity in culture) that redounds unto the diversity of creation. Taking a broader view of the common good that reflects a universal communion, as Francis writes, “is not to put all living beings on the same level, nor to deprive human beings of their unique worth and the tremendous responsibility it entails.”Footnote ¹⁰² It is from the core of what is uniquely human and humane, to recall Copeland’s language, that the common good is articulated and redounds unto human interaction, informing not only social relations among persons and groups, but also structures of relating to the broader animal and natural world. As Francis writes: “We have only one heart, and the same wretchedness which leads us to mistreat an animal will not be long in showing itself in our relationships with other people. Every act of cruelty towards any creature is ‘contrary to human dignity.’”Footnote ¹⁰³

This dynamic between particularity (or distinction) and seeking communion grounds human governance of creation. The particular call to human beings within the order of creation springs from a grammar of existence and participation that has its root in divine simplicity and that in creation causes diversity: “The universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God. Saint Thomas Aquinas wisely noted that multiplicity and variety ‘come from the intention of the first agent’ who willed that ‘what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another,’ inasmuch as God’s goodness ‘could not be represented fittingly by any one creature.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The good of each creature is grasped in relationship because there is no single creature, including the human creature made to God’s image, that fittingly represents that which is ultimately, and divinely, good in itself. To grasp the relationalities among all living things, which requires a simultaneous grasp of distinctions among living things, is to grasp something of the mystery of the divine: multiplicity in creation mysteriously signifies divine relationality.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

An emphasis on relationship, or interrelatedness, that grasps distinction evokes the “mandate to ‘have dominion’ (Gen 2:15) over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), to ‘till it and keep it’ (Gen 2:15),” by understanding the particularity of the human vocation as yoked to the Creator who gives life to all that exists.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Recalling the distinction of the human vocation as treated in the second chapter of the encyclical, in distinguishing between destructive forms of dominion, on the one hand, and responsibility for the earth God created, on the other, Francis appeals to human agency within this ordo of creation: “The harmony between the Creator, humanity and creation as a whole was disrupted by our presuming to take the place of God and refusing to acknowledge our creaturely limitations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The failure to acknowledge our creaturely limitations before God, especially as participants in God’s care for all creation, has catastrophic consequences for both human and nonhuman creation. As Francis writes in Querida Amazonia, “The cry of the Amazon region reaches everyone because ‘the conquest and exploitation of resources … has today reached the point of threatening the environment’s hospitable aspect: the environment as ‘resource’ risks threatening the environment as ‘home.’”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Drawing on the wisdom of the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon region, Francis invites a view of the natural world that is as personal as a home and disrupts an othering of the natural world that leads to the exploitation of both the natural world and the human bodies that inhabit it. In this way, integral ecology resists the disengaged and disembodied rationality present in the globalized mindset Francis has deemed the technocratic paradigm for, as Castillo writes, “the praxis of domination … does not flow from the human vocation properly understood. Rather, this praxis results from the human person’s rejection of that vocation, which results in the person’s estrangement from God, neighbor, and earth.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ An understanding of interrelatedness, by contrast, works on the human heart to cultivate gratitude for God’s gift of creation, within which human agency finds its proper place, transforming how we see our environment.

Interrelated Agency and Solidarity for Common Good

Taking responsibility for our environment, encompassing both human and natural ecologies, requires a praxis of solidarity that attends to the cries of the poor and the earth. To hear and to respond to these cries is to resist “distorted anthropocentrism” in its false sense of superiority and destructiveness toward creation and neighbor.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In this way, integral ecology places the praxis of solidarity before the concept of the common good, so that the preferential options for the poor and for the earth animate encounter and build common good. As emphasized in the first part of this article, this work of encounter, or the praxis of solidarity, requires recognition of the contingent nature of the created order. Further, insofar as the encounter that leads to common good is extended to the natural world, there is an even greater need to acknowledge differentiated and collaborative agency.

The broader vision of integral ecology evokes an interconnectivity that relies on diverse forms of existence and diverse ecologies for its substance and logic. In order for the common good to meaningfully incorporate the good of the natural world, there is a need to expand its malleability so that it can “adapt to the nature of the reality concerned” rather than force the reality at hand “to conform to what this stance can pick up,” as considered previously in treating disengaged rationality. Turning to the natural world as part of common good requires attending to the dynamic manner in which ecosystems operate, and especially the shift toward a “non-equilibrium worldview,” where ecosystems are studied as temporally open ended and include humans as a component.Footnote ¹¹¹ By recognizing the myriad possibilities of interconnections within natural ecosystems, social systems, and environments, a fruitful tension that reflects the flux of nature is introduced into the logic of the common good.Footnote ¹¹²

At the same time, the malleability of the concept of the common good requires a nucleus of meaning, which remains human-centered, to provide its foundations and enable the work of encounter. While remaining human-centered, an expanded common sense of the common good attends to the good of each reality involved in the interaction, where the reflexive exercise that yields normative judgment is governed by the emergence (or lack thereof) of “common” good, namely, good for each of the realities involved in the exchange for common good. An emphasis on relationship, as stressed previously, is therefore ordered to the emergence of this common good that then performs a normative role in structuring systems and relationships among ecologies. The emergence of the common good expands the range of meanings and values that inform its common sense, thus reflecting a broadened horizon of “knowledge and interest, care and concern” to the human other, to recall Copeland’s language, and to other-than-human beings.

The normative role points to the responsibility of human agents to care for all of creation, which agency is assessed by the fruitfulness of the earth, namely, its ability to provide for each community, and future generations, positing both intra- and inter-generational solidarity.Footnote ¹¹³ In other words, while the human agent bears responsibility for the earth, it is the earth herself that declares whether this agency has been exercised responsibly.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This measure for human responsibility is included in the divine mandate “to till and keep” the earth as per the language of Genesis 2:15: “‘Tilling’ refers to cultivating, ploughing or working, while ‘keeping’ means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature. Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ The agential power of nature is thus manifested in its fruitfulness, or its cooperation with the tilling work of human agents—a cooperation that yields intergenerational solidarity by ensuring the earth remains fruitful for future generations. The perpetuation of species, the regeneration of soil, the continued flow of water, the preservation and flourishing of communities—these are the signs of an agential power in nature, diversely reflecting divine goodness. This naming of a “mutual responsibility between human beings and nature” early in the second chapter of the encyclical that foregrounds the human vocation in relation to the earth, thus shows the manner in which Laudato Si’ moves toward an expanded horizon for the common good by reconceiving agency beyond exclusively human agency. This fruitful cooperation between human beings and nature, however, rests on the responsible exercise of human agency in keeping or protecting the earth. Mutual exchange for the sake of the common good, and the shared relationship that informs the common good, thus requires commitment to interrelated good through recognition of diverse forms of agency.

With this recognition of interrelated good and diverse forms of agency, the reader can return to the first chapter of the encyclical, which asks, “What Is Happening to Our Common Home?,” to consider how the problems of pollution and climate change, scarcity of water, and loss of biodiversity, which lead to the decline of quality of human life and global inequality, are met with “weak responses” that fail to recognize the cooperation of nature that occurs when positive interventions are made, namely, rivers that are cleaned up, woodlands restored, landscapes beautified.Footnote ¹¹⁶ While the emphasis here is on the responsibility of human agents to respond to environmental degradation, and the passive tense is used for the elements of nature, this call to human responsibility is called to a recognition of agency that lies beyond the human. This, I argue, is the exhortative and imaginative scope of the encyclical that works on the common sense that underlies the understanding of the common good, namely, one that expands, rather than shrinks, conceptions of agency so that human agency, too, is brought to a fuller imitation of divine love.

An interrelated good requires an integrated approach to the practical outworking of the common good: “We are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis which is both social and environmental. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time protecting nature.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ A broader vision of reality fosters the recognition that destructiveness toward creation harms not only the nonhuman environment, but disproportionately impacts the poor.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Viewing the earth as “among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor” is then a view in solidarity with the earth through recognition of human others, namely, our poor, which recognition is extended to the earth as among our poor. This expanded call to solidarity works on the personal and social conscience to respond to the moral demand made by the poor and the earth, human and nonhuman others, echoing the divine mandate to till and keep the earth for the good of all its creatures.Footnote ¹¹⁹

The interrelatedness of human good and the broader order of created good is particularly evident in Francis’s discussion of “the shared identity of each place,” which is based on history, art, and culture, and develops in relationship with the natural world.Footnote ¹²⁰ Culture as “the language of the people” is not only inherited from the past, but is “a living, dynamic and participatory present reality” and an integral part of what fosters human fulfillment: “Ecology, then, also involves protecting the cultural treasures of humanity in the broadest sense.”Footnote ¹²¹ Francis speaks against the levelling of cultures in global economic strategies that “[overlook] the complexities of local problems which demand the active participation of all members of the community.”Footnote ¹²² By contrast to the “ironclad logic” of the technocratic paradigm—a logic that “progressively approaches and gains control over an external object”—a living culture encounters and creatively engages other sources of meaning and value.Footnote ¹²³ The particularity of encounter resists a universalism that homogenizes and ignores the cultural ecology of a place.Footnote ¹²⁴ In this way, the category of culture works within human communities in a similar manner to how flux functions within ecosystems: as systems within nature move, so it is with human cultures. Further, even as the flux of nature is not separated from the presence of human beings and societies, so human cultures are not separated from the natural world with which they interact and grow. Hence, the diversity in human cultures redounds unto the diversity of creation.

More explicit and immediate attention to the good of the natural world, especially in interaction with human communities and the conversation of culture, generates a fruitful tension that invites ongoing dialogue and reflection. Recognition of difference in human cultures facilitates openness and receptivity to other sources of meaning and value: that of human persons, cultures, and the natural ecologies that shape environments in interaction with human society. Encounter between human and natural ecologies thus expands the common sense of the common good by seeking, recognizing, and sustaining authentic values as the expression of interrelated good. This openness requires a receptivity that recognizes others’ agency: that receives and is received by the “other”; that listens to new ideas; that responds to suffering; and that desires authentic relationship with all creation by seeking communion with God, others, and all creatures. In this way, the climactic sacramental and trinitarian view of the universe that closes the encyclical gathers all created realities together and recalls their ordering to God, in common and distinctly: “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face.”Footnote ¹²⁵