Carlo Maria Martini, in his Travel in the Vocabulary of Ethics, writes that: "The ‘common good’ is composed of two words: good and common. ‘Good’ stands for the compound of the things that we yearned for ourseves and for people we are tied to. ‘Common’ comes from Latin cum munus that means a task done together, fulfilled together." Then, the common good is what is the heritage of all or, even better, what guarantees and encourage" well-being and human progress of (for) all citizens".
By expanding this definition, in a conversation on RAI Philosophy, Stefano Rodotà underlined that common goods express the inalienable rights "which do not coincide either with private property or with State property", including the right to life and also the right to knowledge, specifically, on the net. So the net is one of the last-generation common goods that - unlike the past when relationships were still confined by space / time variables - is today "a good that involves sharing and active participation in production of knowledge. This involve that it can not be privatized or restricted".
The common good is, in general, a concept-system of values that refers to a humanism that can not fester in personalities, and which requires a re-reading in the ecological and g-local key of the phenomenology of man-to-world relation, recalling not only the principle of justice but also that of solidarity.