The term overlapping consensus refers to how supporters of different comprehensive normative doctrines—that entail apparently inconsistent conceptions of justice—can agree on particular principles of justice that underwrite a political community's basic social institutions.
Rawls elaborates that the existence of an overlapping consensus on conceptions of justice among major social groups holding differing—yet reasonable—comprehensive doctrines is a necessary and distinctive characteristic of political liberalism.
These latter features distinguish his idea of an overlapping consensus from a mere modus vivendi, which is a strategic agreement entered into for pragmatic purposes, and therefore potentially unprincipled and unstable.
[3] The overlapping consensus could in sum be said to "depend, in effect, on there being a morally significant core of commitments common to the 'reasonable' fragment of each of the main comprehensive doctrines in the community".
[4] It has been argued that reasonable forms of religious and moral public education may be agreed by considering which common values and principles may be determined through overlapping consensus between those of otherwise incommensurable comprehensive doctrines (e.g. those of a given religion and secularists).