Cultural rights and tolerance: a dialogue between Habermas and Forst as a support for a theory of justice

Abstract

Through a reconstructive analysis of the political-juridical philosophy of Jürgen Habermas and Rainer Forst, as well as with the aid of secondary literature, the concepts of cultural rights and tolerance are analyzed. The purpose of the present research is to visualize how Habermas and Forst develop these concepts. To this end the article is divided into two sections, from an introductory justification of the investigation of the objectives outlined. The first section addresses the issue of cultural rights, their meaning, evolution, and how to enforce their guarantee. The second section addresses the concept of tolerance, which Habermas works as a procedural necessity from subjective rights to equal liberties of action, while Forst works on the concept of tolerance from a conception as respect, where the principle of justification of justice will be essential, supported by the public use of reason. In the end, the final considerations point to the fact that Habermas maintains his theoretical edifice of the 1990s, working the possibility of tolerance and guarantee of cultural rights from democratic procedures and political justice, where norms and laws should be rationally accepted in a shared political culture, and Forst seeks a practical-normative course, where practical reason requires morally reasonable and autonomous persons, working the necessity of procedural justification.