A Skeptical Postscript: Some Concluding Reflections On Consensus

From the foregoing essays, it should be clear that there is little or no substantive consensus regarding consensus. Nor is there about its implications. From everyday life, it should be clear as well that there is no consensus about the moral significance of sexuality or of third-party technologically-assisted reproduction. Different religious and cultural groups offer different understandings of why one ought to have children and how one may go about producing them. Yet, in nearly all of the essays, there is nearly a consensus that the agreement of individuals is important in framing morally authoritative public policy. Against the background of the foregoing essays, one can see why this should be so. If one cannot draw authority for common action from the will of God or from a content-full understanding of moral rationality, one can straightforwardly derive it from common agreement. The difficulty is then that one seems to have so little about which one in fact agrees. It is not just that there is substantive disagreement in large-scale secular societies regarding morality or the good life. There is also substantive disagreement about what is just, about how one should balance interests in equality and liberty. These latter disagreements seem to threaten the very possibility not only of a substantive, but even of a procedural ethic. It does not seem possible, not simply as a societal fact, but as a matter of philosophical principle to agree how one would go about agreeing. What is at stake is the possibility of a universal narrative, a morality of moral strangers, a morality that can be shared by individuals of different moral communities, as well as those of ill-defined, cosmopolitan moral inclinations. Within particular moral communities, there are substantive views regarding the probity of third-party technologically-assisted reproduction. The question is whether enough is shared so that moral strangers can still be bound together in a morality, although they have different substantive understandings of the good life, of morality, of what is just, and of what are appropriate ways of reproducing.