Just as in our introductory chapter, “Orientations,” and at the end of this essay in our concluding chapter, “Envoi,” so too now we need to return with some of our initial, tentative findings from our first readings of the European high modernist poetry of suffering to the basic and quite general problem that any eventual common and harmonized European social policy must finally address satisfactorily. That problem is how we might come to know the just principled bases of any such common social policy and thereby be able to achieve consensus among the current 27 members of the European Union. Central to resolving that general problem is understanding the nature and the kinds of moral intuitions that most oft en ground our most considered opinions.

One of the fundamental problems such a common European social policy will have to deal with is the currently much disputed and particular issue of general access for all children to health services in any one of the EU countries. We should first look at some of the details of this problem and then consider in the light of these details some of the suggestions of our interim findings so far. The gaps in those findings may help point us to those areas that will require second thoughts in the second part of this essay.