 Merci, Jacques, de cette introduction aussi de bienveillante et même flatteuse, and now I go to English. I'd like first to take advantage of my position here to reply to the question that was raised by Dennis about the proliferation of so-called rights. And I just, the point I wanted to make is this, that those who advocate these rights, which would be of course positive rights requiring people to do something, present them as if they were added unto the set of negative rights. So they speak as if they were saying the following, well, we've got all these negative rights. Isn't that wonderful? Now let's add on these positive rights to them. But of course, people as intelligent as you know full well that these are not additions to the negative rights that people have, but they are subtractions from the negative rights that people have. My positive rights for you to do something for me contradicts your negative right not to do something for me. So I think that's an important thing to understand because it pulls the rug out from under the suggestion that they are adding on to our rights whereas they are in fact diminishing those all important negative rights. I want also to underline my agreement with the previous speakers, Doug Rasmussen and Father Sirico. I was hoping to find something to disagree with, I'm very disappointed but that's the price you pay, I guess. Let me begin by raising the question as to why there has been at least a seeming conflict between the Catholic Church and classical liberalism. Why so many Catholics in important positions have viewed it with a certain amount of suspicion. There are several reasons why this has happened. One of course goes back to the French Revolution itself which not only fought, which was not only waged in order to assure human liberty but was also at least among many of its protagonists an anti-Catholic group and Catholics found it difficult psychologically to separate the wheat here from the chaff. They did not see that the libertarian aspect the freedom aspect of the French Revolution was separable from the anti-religious aspect. They also considered, they also had the belief that if you were a liberal you were also a moral relativist and they rightly in our opinion were opponents of relativism and finally you had the problem of economic ignorance. Much of the economic knowledge that had been developed within the Catholic Church during the late medieval and Renaissance period was forgotten as a result largely of the French Revolution but partly also of the abandonment on the part of Catholics of scholastic philosophy. Another problem was that much of this rich development of economic thought had taken place in Spain. Spain was ceased in one sense to be a part of Europe at a certain period in history and so there was very little contact. You may if you ever get the chance you ought to look at the book which was written by Alejandro Chaffewin on that the doctrine of distributive justice in that period and many modern Catholics would be very much surprised at some of the points that these people were making and they had a very sophisticated grasp of economic principles. So much then by way of explanation not by way of justifying it but as the Talstoy said to comprendre c'est to pardoner. As you've already heard one of the accusations against classical liberalism is that it is guilty almost of almost a Hobbesian individualism. The idea that the war of each against all and the idea that what the state does is to bring about a truce in this war of each against all. This of course is quite different from the Lockean concept of the state of nature in which human beings are essentially social beings. Beings who cannot survive except in virtue of their ability to cooperate peacefully with each other. I think Hayek it was Hayek that made the point that the Hobbesian position is ultimately untenable simply because if it had been true there'd be no one around today to talk about it. Locke's opinion was that the normal situation for humankind is a situation in which they live at peace with one another where criminality is the exception rather than the rule. There's absolutely nothing in classical liberalism that suggests or lends credence to the idea that we are anything but a but social animals. Marx one time made the correct judgment that the individual is the social and it's not a question of are we individuals or are we social beings but we are individuals who essentially live in relationships with other people. The topic the explicit topic of this talk is the is the common good and social justice. I'd like to begin by trying to spell out what the common good is not. Some people would have would distinguish the what is good for the members of society from what is good for the society. Mrs. Thatcher one time said that there is no such thing as society a proposition that needs to be distinguished I think she was right in saying that society is not a thing that it is not a thing over and above the members of society. The expression was unfortunate in that it gave the at least suggested to some people that we were not social animals that our social aspect was not important which of course it is and I don't think she disagreed with that. But it's certainly the case that when you have all the members of society you've got society. You don't have the members of society plus society. A collection and society is one kind of collection is not an entity that is over and above the things that are collected. It is the collected things having a certain relationship with each other to suggest that that collections were entities over and above the collected and the collected items would in fact entail an infinite regress that could be shown as follows suppose you have a have a collection of two beings. Now if the collection itself is an entity we now have the two beings plus that collection and so we have a collection of three beings now. Now of course if the collect that collection is over and above the things collected we immediately have another collection giving us four beings and there's no way of calling a halt to this process. Well why am I doing this? Is it to demonstrate that I am a philosopher? Well yes that too but not only that it is to it is I'm bringing it up because it's relevant to this idea of the common good. If the only things that there are are individuals then the only things for which something can be good or for that matter bad are individuals. So if there is a common good that common good is a good for the individuals. The question is not whether we go for individuals as opposed to a common good but rather what we have to show is that this common good is in fact a good for individuals and I prefer to speak not use the phrase not the common good but rather the good in common the good that is common to each individual in the society rather than a good for some imaginary whole that is over and above and transcending the individuals and by the way the common good has to be a good. I say this because people are always speaking of the common good as if it were some sort of malach that to which we have to sacrifice for us the only time the common good ever gets mentioned is to is to explain to you why you can't have something. Well what kind of good is that? Now the scholastic ethicians correctly by opinion identified the common good as peace and prosperity and they looked on this as a condition for all other goods. They weren't saying that peace and prosperity was not a good for the individuals in society but what they were saying it is a good that all of us need to have if we are to have these other goods. I already suggested they brought up mention the remark of Hayek that if the Hobbes theory of nature had been true none of us would be around to discuss it. All of us are in need of this good of peace and prosperity and oddly enough oddly enough even those people who do things which militate against the common good. The marauder the thief can flourish only in a society where most of us aren't thieves. The thief is parasitical on the non-predatory activities of the rest of mankind otherwise it wouldn't be anything to steal and so even people like that are forced to opt for a type of society in which the cards are stacked against their activities. In other words we can't all be thieves. Those who would deny that this was a good are subject to the Aristotelian retortion that they're forced to affirm the very good they would fight against. The pursuit of the common good requires cooperation the cooperative activities of human beings. Since man is a social animal since most of us cannot go it alone we are all of us in need of the cooperation of our fellow human beings and the question is how this cooperation is to be obtained and the liberal position has always been is that it is to be obtained by individuals in that society persuading other individuals to cooperate. So we have such groupings as the family we have trade we have all those things in which people in are pursuing their own ends are furthering the ends of other human beings. One of the wonderful things about the free market is the extent to which it makes free riding a possibility. We have certain economists are always horrified at the thought that in some tiny corner of this universe somebody or other is guilty of free riding but the fact is that all of us are free riders and we are free riders we're enjoying the fruits of other person's labor which was not forced because in doing so they were pursuing their own ends and but in doing this each of us enriches if pursuing our own ends in a peaceful non-fraudulent manner each of us fulfills the ends of the desires of other human beings whether we are benevolent or not as Adam Smith suggested he of course was not against benevolence but what he pointed out is that the liberal order harnesses our self-interest thus forcing it to or tending at least to force it to serve the interests of other people. Economic theory has shown and practice has shown that the only way to get the kind of cooperation that produces peace and prosperity is by not coercing people into cooperating because after all central planning as it is euphemistically called is coercion. You are planning planning the lives and activities of other persons and this with or without their consent and we see now even if we had been unable to understand the theory sufficiently well we have seen to what that has led in practice. Now I think that the arrangements of society are something that has to be chosen even though within that framework we don't engage in central planning but we have to in other words I want to suggest this that not everything that comes about through spontaneously is good. It's not the spontaneity that makes it good it's what comes about and what kind of society we have must it seems to be a matter of either decision or at least acquiescence that it is a state of affairs that requires the sanction of the participants in that and of course we know that even this is one of the things that humans pointed out to us that even a tyrannical society cannot exist except unless there is the belief of a substantial number of its members that it is legitimate. I think the Soviet Union collapsed in the last analysis not because it didn't have enough police people not enough soldiers but rather because it lost the legitimacy that had been accorded to it before. Finally I think my time is drawing to an end I want to say a few words about the term social justice. They were the term as a new term that is to say it appeared only in the last century and I believe the person who first used it was an Italian Jesuit named Taparelli and it made a sort of official appearance in an encyclical called quadragasimo which was the work of another Jesuit named the Nelbruning and signed by Pius XI. It's worthy of note by the way that Nelbruning who I think finally died but he died only recently and at the end of his life he noted that he now had a number of misgivings about what went into that that encyclical. The encyclical uses the word social justice but does not unfortunately doesn't provide a definition of that word and so we are left wondering what we have what we are dealing with. Somebody suggested the other day that perhaps this is a case of a christening without an infant the the question the difficulty can be put as follows. Suppose you you all know don't you what commutative justice is where each person gives to the other what is due in other words you live up to your contracts you don't steal you pay your debts that sort of thing that is what is due that each person owes to the other person. Now imagine a world in which every act is an act in accordance with commutative justice if that is the case is there some is there something lacking to justice is there some other kind of justice that needs to be added on is there some other just act that is left out of the reckoning and I think the problem the problem is that this people find it difficult to find these acts well is there is there some sense in which we can allow that term to be used I think we can if we regard social justice not as another kind of act but rather as a state of affairs we can speak of a just society meaning a society in which just acts are favored and unjust acts are disfavored and a society that is organized in such a way as to make that possible so we could speak then of a just society and use the word social justice in that sense to say that social justice obtains where you have a society in which the common good which is obtained and the common good of course is obtained by the practice of justice now just to end this how how was this practice of justice to be to be obtained in in the good society well again to go back to the Middle Ages when you or the the Renaissance there when these Catholics were moral theologians were talking about economic problems one of the things they railed against was the privileges that existed in the society of that day enabling enabling people to do that which if done by anybody else would be criminal actions to seize the seizing the seizing the wealth of others and they pointed out that this sort of thing especially when it took the form of heavy taxation was destroying the was destructive of the prosperity of society and also of its peace tampering with the currency or something that they reprobated the failure of a society to be peaceful and to be prosperous has been largely the into no small degree the result of interventionism what are some of the the why has the well for why for example has welfare become such a problem mostly because of interferences in the labor market people are in need of welfare mostly because of unemployment the fact that they are unable to get employment that they are unable to obtain employment because their earning power is not is not sufficient to justify the minimum salary that is permitted permitted by the by the state and so that means it's not worth anyone's wild to employment to employ them and so they they are victims we know that and we know that in the union of South Africa this policy of imposing minimum wages was in was deliberately put there in order to dis-employ non-whites it wasn't that the people who did this were ignorant of economics they understood it all too well at the best way to ruin somebody is to make it impossible for that person to market his or her goods and services because that's the only way in which we can expect others to give us things if we can give if we can exchange our goods and services for them so to make it impossible for these people to do these things is to make it impossible for them to flourish humanly well i think we can leave the rest of the questions i have to apologize that father sadowsky to have asked to shorten this speech but we have still some more by the grass mason and don't forget that we will discuss also and we can intervene again with the nature of angelo petrony on the morality of welfare states of we we could take more precision on this point deck some short comments yeah i have some very brief comments one of the things that you should be aware of that's happening here is that you are being presented this morning with some new ways of thinking about liberalism and this is important that you pay attention to this because the critics of liberalism keep on saying certain things over and over again one is quite often as they say that liberalism assumes that human beings are atoms that we don't live together with or among others faults everyone up here has been arguing just the opposite and in fact in my paper it is the sociality of human beings that makes rights necessary if we were not social beings we wouldn't need such a concept furthermore every one of us has object has embraced the idea that morality moral knowledge is possible that the good can be something objective so none of us are libertines subjectivist or ethical relativists yet we all find liberty central to the political order father sadowsky has just gone through and quite marvelous way really a discussion of the concept of the common good of the political community normally when people hear the common good of the political community what you want to do is grab your wallet and run for your life the concept is meaningful if properly employed employed in such a way that remembers that individuals are ultimate and we're talking about relationships furthermore the notion of justice is something that a liberal can use but justice understood as a virtue and justice understood as a as a as an as an entire structure of a political system which father sadowsky called peace and order which i called which i defined in terms of a theory of rights finally my comments all in my comments was something i learned from another Jesuit father francis wade at marquette university in milwaukee wisconsin he was fond of the story of talking about someone who was limited in their medical ability they learned how to do an appendicitis how to take out an appendicitis therefore when anyone came to them for assistance all they knew how to handle was an appendicitis so everyone who came to them had an appendicitis so many people when they learn one truth be it in ethics or politics or economics assume that that one truth answers all questions sorry that's not the case and what we've been talking about this this morning is the ways of placing well at least at least what we think are some important truths in different order so that you understand that economics answers one sets of questions that virtues answer another set of questions that writes after an answer another set of questions and if you want to begin to understand and defend liberalism you've got to remember that there are many distinctions and many answers thank you