We share a planet on which a person’s home can become a military objective, another person’s labor can become a source of private wealth, and a living forest can become more valuable on an account sheet after it has been cut down. We have become remarkably accomplished at pursuing advantage. We need to ask what that accomplishment is doing to our common life.
Is this the world we want to live in?
There is beauty here, and pleasure, and extraordinary generosity. People care for one another every day. Those possibilities belong in our assessment of the world. They also give us reasons to challenge arrangements that make living harder, more precarious, or impossible for others.
Consider a few features of our present situation. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that global military expenditure reached approximately $2.9 trillion in 2025, its eleventh consecutive annual increase. Meanwhile, the UN’s humanitarian report on Gaza warns that funding shortages will reduce food distributions and meal production, while restrictions on equipment and spare parts impede essential services. These figures and conditions deserve to be considered together. What do they reveal about our ability to mobilize resources, and the purposes for which we mobilize them?
The World Meteorological Organization reports that 2015 through 2025 were the hottest eleven years on record. The conditions sustaining our lives are changing while we continue to struggle over who gets to possess, extract, control, and consume.
These situations have different histories and causes. Each demands careful investigation. Across them, however, I see a recurring question: whose well-being counts when decisions are made, and whose suffering can be charged to the cost of someone else’s success?
A nation’s security is invoked to justify the destruction of another people’s conditions of life. An enterprise’s profitability is treated as sufficient reason to leave others with polluted water or exhausted land. A policy succeeds for its intended beneficiaries while those bearing its costs disappear into an abstraction.
I cannot accept advantage as an adequate measure of success when it depends upon making other lives expendable.
The common good has to reach beyond the good of the powerful, the fortunate, or even the majority. It includes people who have little influence over the decisions shaping their lives. It includes other living beings and the earth that sustains us. A serious account of our welfare must attend to those relationships.
An economy should be judged by how well it enables people to live, including those whose age, disability, or circumstances limit their ability to earn. Political authority should be answerable to ALL the people subject to it. Decisions about land and water must account for the living systems they affect and the generations who will inherit their consequences. These standards have practical implications for public provision, ownership, working conditions, and the limits placed on private power. We have to work through those implications.
This brings us to a question about ourselves. What are we giving our lives to?
We are born into a natural cosmos that supplies no promise that justice will prevail or that kindness will be rewarded. We arrive among living beings with needs, vulnerabilities, and competing interests. We also find ourselves capable of attention, imagination, and deliberate action.
I intend to exercise those capacities.
Fear and the desire for advantage have power in us. So do affection, curiosity, generosity, and the ability to reconsider what we are doing. We can examine an impulse before giving it authority over our conduct. We can cultivate habits that help us respond differently. We can organize our common life so that care has practical support.
Calling domination natural does nothing to establish its worth. We still have to decide what we will encourage, what we will resist, and what we will undertake to change.
As a child, I remember hearing the nursery rhyme about Simple Simon. Simon asked the pieman for a taste. The pieman wanted a penny. Other people seemed to accept that encounter as perfectly reasonable. I remember being troubled by it.
I wanted to live in a world where people helped one another taste things.
That concern stayed with me. It accompanied my strong desire to serve and my search for a community in which service could become a shared way of life. I have learned a great deal through that search, including how often an institution’s stated purpose and its daily practices can diverge.
The question remains immediate: what kind of world are we making through the way we live?
Everyone participates in answering it. We give time and effort to earning a living, raising children, accumulating wealth, acquiring influence, tending a place, or helping someone get through the day. Necessity constrains many of our choices. The work someone does may tell us very little about what they value or what alternatives they have.
Even within those constraints, the vocational question remains worth asking. What moves us? Which commitments do we want to become dependable in us? Where can we act together to increase the possibilities available to others?
A concern for life has to become effective in how we respond. Outrage can move us to protect someone. It can also make another person’s humiliation feel satisfying. We need the discipline to recognize that temptation in ourselves while confronting the actions that occasioned our anger.
Truth-seeking requires us to investigate claims, identify responsibility accurately, and allow evidence to correct us when correction costs us an argument or unsettles our loyalties. Our own side deserves the same scrutiny we direct toward its opponents.
Agapē-gratia asks us to attend to another’s welfare and practice pardon even under pressure. Protection and accountability remain necessary. Our response must help secure safety and repair while interrupting the expectation that suffering must always be repaid with suffering.
These capacities require formation. We learn to listen while angry, accept correction without treating it as an assault, and recognize a stranger’s need. We fail, examine what happened, and begin again. Communities can help us sustain that practice and hold us accountable for it. We can prepare ourselves to make a good response more dependable.
When something outrageous happens, we bring that formation with us. We still need to investigate, deliberate, and decide what to do. Our commitments shape whose lives we notice and what means we are willing to employ.
Agapē-gratia can require a forceful public challenge to domination. Care for those being harmed calls for protection, resistance, and changes in the arrangements producing the harm. Forgiveness leaves us responsible for securing safety and making repair. Truthfulness requires us to identify responsible actions and institutions accurately. It also requires us to correct our own account when the evidence demands it.
The desire to serve the common good gives us difficult work. It supplies no automatic policy. We have to consider consequences, learn from those affected, and judge whether our efforts accomplish what we intend.
We have power to do this work. That power is unequal, and entrenched interests can resist change with formidable resources. Recognizing those realities helps us choose where and how to act.
We can organize workers and neighbors, protect vulnerable people, support independent investigation, change laws, and build institutions accountable to those they affect. We can withdraw cooperation from destructive practices and develop forms of mutual provision. Some work demands public confrontation; some requires years of patient construction. Collective action can give a commitment possibilities that an isolated individual does not possess.
A more generous common life already exists wherever people undertake to make it exist. People share food, care for someone who cannot repay them, protect a habitat, and gather around responsibilities they accept together. These practices offer experience from which to build. We can ask what enables them to endure, how they can reach further, and what larger changes would support them.
We cannot guarantee the outcome. We cannot secure certainty about the future or purify ourselves of every conflicting motive.
We can take responsibility for the direction of our efforts.
I want to participate in making a world where people can live with dignity, where other beings have room to flourish, and where care for the earth has weight in our decisions. That desire gives me reason to learn, to practice, to confront what destroys life, and to join others in changing it.
Is this the world you want to live in?
What do you see that needs changing?
What are we willing to give ourselves to making possible?