Moral Conflict and Political Consensus

Abstract

When citizens reasonably disagree about the morality of a public policy, on what principles can they agree to conduct their public life? The hope of liberal political theory, and the basis of the most common solution to the problem of moral conflict in a pluralist society, is that citizens can still agree on principles that would remove decisions about the policy from the political agenda. Liberals typically invoke higher-order principles (such as neutrality or impartiality) that are intended to transcend disagreement on specific policies: these principles purport to determine which issues are appropriate subjects for public policy and which are not. When there is no reasonable basis for resolving the moral conflict on an issue of policy, the principles preclude state action on the issue and leave each citizen free to act on the basis of his or her own morality (to the extent possible without state action). A consensus on these principles thus insulates the political process from fundamental moral conflict. We want to challenge, at least in part, this familiar liberal way of dealing with moral conflict. The consensus on these higher-order principles that liberals propose is not sufficient to eliminate moral conflict from politics, and a more robust set of principles is necessary to govern the conflict that inevitably and legitimately remains. The higher-order principles that constitute the core of the consensus, we suggest, must permit greater moral disagreement about policy and greater moral agreement on how to disagree about policy. Two kinds of higher-order principles should be distinguished, corresponding to different purposes that the consensus is supposed to serve. First, there are what may be called principles of preclusion, which serve the more familiar purpose of determining which policies deserve a place on the political agenda in the sense of being a legitimate subject for legislation. These principles preclude fundamental moral conflict by denying certain