This article presents a moral orientation that can serve as a "commonly shared" foundation for developing moral consciousness in (postmodern) multicultural democratic societies. To this end, I distinguish between two prevailing generic views of moral education--"thin" and "thick"--and claim that the tensions between them contribute to the sense of crisis of moral education (and public schooling in general). I begin by showing these tensions through a discussion of representatives of each side of the thin-thick dichotomy, as well as through Lickona's integrative account. After discussing the complications of each view, I present PARTS--Postconventional Authentic Relation-to-Self--as a normative perspective that is able to reconcile the two generic views. I show the merits of PARTS by discussing the notions of moral judgement and motivation. (Contains 15 notes.)