ABSTRACT
Some commentators find incoherent T. H. Green's idea of good being common. Green's idea of the Common Good as the moral ideal has often been said to be too vague to provide the practical guidance which he claims it can. Green believed that by his day the moral ideal and its conditions were clear enough, to anyone who looked, to enable him to judge conventional morality and see the direction in which further development must be made. Green's argument seems to be that his discussion of Common Good has supplied the "clue" necessary for identifying what is essential and permanent in conventional morality. The earlier criticisms of incoherence and egoism are internal to Green's theory and can be dealt with at the theoretical level, but the present objection draws in material base in which the moral theory operates. Material goods, sources of conflict, are connected with moral agency, since, on Green's view, being good is impossible without doing what is good.
