CONCEPT
Overlapping Consensus
Rawls's concept from Political Liberalism for the form of agreement citizens holding diverse comprehensive doctrines can nevertheless reach on political principles — a shared commitment reached from different paths of reasoning.
Overlapping consensus is Rawls's answer to a problem that became increasingly important in his later work: how can a just society be stable under conditions of reasonable pluralism, where citizens hold different comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines? Rawls's solution was that stability does not require agreement on the deep foundations of moral reasoning. It requires only that citizens, reasoning from their various comprehensive doctrines, converge on a shared set of political principles. A Catholic, a secular humanist, a Muslim, a utilitarian, and a Kantian may reach the same conclusion — that basic liberties must be protected, that institutions must benefit the least advantaged — through different paths of reasoning. The consensus is "overlapping" because it exists in the region where the different comprehensive doctrines happen to agree, not because any one doctrine has triumphed over the others.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept has substantial implications for the governance of the AI transition. The current debate about AI ethics