The common good and the politics of community

In the last twenty years in Ireland, we have witnessed debates - notably about abortion and divorce -
which featured not only radically opposed viewpoints but also significantly different vocabularies.
Many advocates of divorce legislation, for example, spoke of the individual's right to remarry,
focused on individual freedom as the most important value at stake, and opposed state intervention
in matters perceived to be of personal morality. Their opponents spoke of the common good and
the fabric of society, and argued that the state should support social institutions that embody the
values of the community. At least at the polarised extremes of this debate, inhabited by so-called
'fundamentalist liberals' and 'authoritarian conservatives' the protagonists often seemed to talk
different languages, built respectively around 'individual freedom' and 'the common good'.