Editing Common good (section)

==In democratic theory==
[[File:Salus publica suprema lex esto (cropped).jpg|thumb|''[[Salus populi suprema lex esto|Salus publica suprema lex esto]]'', "The common good is the supreme law", in the [[Federal Palace of Switzerland|Swiss Parliament]]]]
{{See also|Public opinion}}
In [[deliberative democracy]], the common good is taken to be a regulative ideal.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Elster|first1=Jon|chapter=The Market and the Forum: Three Varieties of Political Theory|title=Philosophy and Democracy|date=2002|publisher=Oxford University Press|location=Oxford}}</ref> In other words, participants in democratic deliberation aim at the realization of the common good. This feature distinguishes deliberative democracy from aggregative conceptions of democracy, which focus solely on the aggregation of preferences. In contrast to aggregative conceptions, deliberative democracy emphasizes the processes by which agents justify political claims on the basis of judgments about the common good. [[Epistemic democracy]], a leading contemporary approach to deliberative democracy, advances a [[cognitivism (ethics)|cognitivist]] account of the common good.<ref>{{cite book|last1=Landemore|first1=Hélène|title=Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many|date=2012|publisher=Princeton University Press|location=Princeton}}</ref>