Common Good and Intentionality

Chapter 4 develops the topic of mind synchronization further and delves into understandings of common good. Based on activists’ narratives, we first scrutinize their understandings of common good by offering a fined-grained analysis of the way they conceptualize this pillar of activism. The statistics of Chapter 3 provide a representative picture of the activist’s mind but one that is rather cursory as they reflect raw measurements. In this chapter, we investigate the intricate ways in which common good is understood inductively. In a second step, we examine how activists’ broad understanding of common good enables them to develop mental constructs that orient their action specifically. We highlight the cognitive paths that set activists’ intentionality and orient their action on a number of aspects: toward certain groups of people, on particular social problems, and within a specific field of action.