Solidarity and “Us” in three contexts: human, societal, political

Abstract

This article examines the senses in which solidarity is a matter of acting “for our sake” and what its relationship to human flourishing is, in the three contexts of human solidarity, political solidarity and societal solidarity. It distinguishes between bottom-up and top-down relations between our good and my good and links these to different aspects of well-being. <br/>In the moral context of human solidarity and “the party of the humankind”, the idea of “all for one and one for all” illuminates some aspects of morality that do not come to fore in standard individualistic moral theories, which do not need the notion of solidarity in answering the questions they pose. Political solidarity is in two ways related to moral relationships: all forms face the question of whether they are morally justifiable, but some are further motivated by prevailing injustice and wrongness. In the context of social solidarity, there are two positions that should be prevented from arising: the contributorily excluded and the extremely wealthy. In addition to questions of justice and morality, what is at stake are considerations of social solidarity, and via that, the relational aspect of flourishing of the individuals. <br/>