A good society requires more than virtuous individuals and fair institutions: it requires a mediating moral principle capable of binding persons, communities, and structures into a shared project of human flourishing.

Solidarity names this principle. In both virtue ethics and Catholic Social Teaching, solidarity is the moral and social commitment to stand with—not merely for—others on the basis of our constitutive interdependence, human dignity, common destiny. It's neither sentiment nor charity, but a firm disposition recognizing that our own good is inseparable from the good of others and the whole.

The "common good" is the sum of social conditions that enable people, as communities or individuals, to reach their fulfilment more completely and easily. It is not an aggregate of private preferences nor the imposition of a totalitarian dogma, but the relational flourishing of persons-in-community—a "unity-in-diversity" through ordered relation to the whole. Actualising the good demands both institutional justice and a moral ethos capable of sustaining it.

Here solidarity becomes indispensable: virtue alone cannot scale beyond intimate bonds; institutions alone cannot motivate the commitments they presuppose. Liberal autonomy reduces society to personal rights without obligations; utilitarian impartiality flattens people into aggregated bearers of utility; Rawlsian proceduralism presupposes thick normative commitments it cannot itself generate; agonistic theories dissolve common good into endless battles over power. None provide the motivational, relational, and structural architecture required to hold diverse societies in a shared moral journey toward justice.

Solidarity succeeds where modern ethics fail because it links personal virtue to systemic transformation. It forms agents capable of recognising injustice and acting for others’ integral development, and it orients institutions—laws, markets, welfare, civic associations—toward mutual support rather than competition or domination. Unlike empathy, solidarity obliges transformation of oppressive conditions; unlike moralism, it avoids paternalism by grounding obligation in shared dignity; unlike communitarianism, it transcends parochial boundaries through universal scope; unlike Marxism, it preserves moral agency needed for constructive common life.

This is where secular virtue ethics begins to scale: the Aristotelian philia politikē is liberated from a limited Athenian polis, recognising that eudaimonia requires commitments transcending private aretē.

Thus, solidarity is necessary—not just helpful—because without it, virtue remains isolated, the common good remains abstract or dogmatic, and institutions lack moral energy to be just. Only solidarity enables the conversion of private moral formation into collective agency, to build a society where the flourishing of each is inseparable from the flourishing of all.

#Leadership #CommonGood #MoralPhilosophy #Solidarity #VirtueEthics

This post is part of a trilogy: