Much modern thinking about the welfare state operates within a citizens’-individual-rights approach, emphasising individual autonomy and freedom, alongside citizenship-based social rights. However, the problems we are facing today, such as the epidemic of loneliness and a growing sense of alienation that is fostering polarisation and radicalisation among segments of the population as they experience a lack of belonging and community, suggest that we need a different framework.

Drawing on the classical Christian ethics of Arthur F. Utz, who was Swiss by birth but joined the German Dominican Province, the lecture suggests that the common good, as understood within the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, could provide an interesting, different input into that more effective framework. The lecture will look at the common good ethics of Utz and suggest how it maintains (and strengthens) the valuable focus of modernity on human freedom, while also providing the framework for a more effective response to today´s needs.