Human beings are dependent on one another not only for the higher achievements of cultural life we have been discussing but also for the necessities of material and economic well-being. For this reason, recovery of an active social commitment to the common good is a critical element in serious efforts to reduce poverty and advance economic justice. Poverty continues to be an entrenched fact of life for many people in Western societies today and it is vastly more widespread globally. Chapter 2 of this book has argued that the poverty of American core cities is a problem that an ethic of tolerance alone cannot handle. This chapter will argue that a revival of commitment to the common good and a deeper sense of solidarity are preconditions for significant improvement of the lives of the poor in large cities of the United States. The focus here will be on how effective efforts to alleviate the plight of the American urban poor call for public commitment to solidarity and the common good. Social allegiance to the common good can tackle poverty in a way that that the prevailing American ethos of individualism and tolerance cannot. The next chapter will extend this analysis to the larger international setting.

Commitment to the common good will not, of course, settle all the policy debates concerning poverty in the United States or elsewhere. But the lodestar of the common good can guide movement along a path toward better lives for the poor.