Alisdair MacIntyre • Essay 11: The political and social structures of the common good • So what is the problem? The problem is what kind of political and social society enables us to achieve both individual and common goods? MacIntyre lists 3 criteria: 1. Independent reasoners must be allowed to influence political decision making, which will require institutional forms of deliberation to which the reasoners will have access, and the procedures of decision making must be generally accepted, so the decisions made are recognized as the work of the whole community, 2. In a community where 'just generosity' is one of the central virtues independent reasoners should receive something proportionate to what each contributes. However, for the most dependent, 'children, the old, the disabled' who receive something in accordance to what they need coming from the ability of those who can contribute; 3. The political community must make a voice in the communal deliberation, for those whose reasoning is limited or non-existent, these persons must be represented by proxy. • Alisdair MacIntyre • He makes a rather striking claim that this better form of political association will not be found in either the nation state or family, but in the intermediate institutions. Then he tries to explain why not. • Nation-state: 1. no common good, 2. the nation state does provide common security and other shared public goods, but these are not the common goods of a genuine nationwide community. • Family: the family is not a place for practicing the virtues because a family functions well when it is a bridge to participation in other types of association: work places, school, parishes, sport clubs, etc. • So it must be some form of local community. Alisdair MacIntyre • Within these communities, those who are in a position of dependency will participate in a community directly or through the proxy. Most importantly, those who are dependent must be recognized as individuals who can teach us how to acquire certain virtues, they must not be treated simply as object of someone's benevolence. • to act as a proxy for someone disabled is not the same as acting as a parent for a child because you don't ask a child what it would do because it doesn't know. Except for someone who is severally disabled we need to solicit the opinions of disabled not substitute our own. • Every adult has a responsibility to engage in political deliberation but this kind of deliberation has nothing to do with the modern nation state. So again he stresses that the nation state in not unimportant but the virtues can only be practiced in the local community. • But he also stresses that local communities are not good per se if they are not infused with proper virtue or shared deliberation. • So now: what kind of local communities are good? MacIntyre says we need comparative studies of many local communities. Alisdair MacIntyre • 1. Shared deliberation is not perfect but it should function in such a way that it should correct its own mistakes, 2. Such communities should fight against the emergence of competing interests, so in particular economic interests should be subordinate to social and the common goods; he means reducing income inequality, restricting labor stress such as layoffs, the insulation from market forces; 3. Some of the defining characteristics of the well functioning local communities are how well it treats children, the old and the infirmed.