 The common good differs from the various notions of the good that play a foundational role in welfare consequentialist accounts of political morality. Among the notions in the latter category, we can include: the sum of pleasure over pain, total satisfaction of rational desire, aggregate welfare adjusted for distributive considerations, welfare prioritarianism, equality of welfare (in certain formulations), Pareto optimality, and so on. Unlike the common good, these notions make no essential reference to the requirements of a social relationship. They set out fully independent standards for the goodness of actions, motivations and states of affairs, and the independent character of these standards allows them to serve as foundational elements in a normative theory that has a consequentialist  structure.[2]