Pluralismo, democracia e concepção de tolerância em Jürgen Habermas

Abstract

For Habermas, religious and metaphysical doctrines lost centrality in modern societies, which is the reason why the critical and reflexive potentials of language were released at the cost of giving rise to a irreconciliable plurality of lifeforms. Democracy must be the space where pluralism reflects the freedom of everyone to develop her cultural potentials without enduring opression, but also without control of other conceptions of thought and action. The duty of tolerance appears in this context when there is no expectation of agreement on ethical evaluative criteria of the good life and means that agents must resort to a moral agreement on the intersubjectively valid behaviour on the basis of assumptions of a human rights regime, which includes cultural rights. The research begins by inserting tolerance into the political context of the theory of normative models of democracy by Habermas, these models themselves involved in the debate between liberal and communitarians, more specifically having liberalism represented by John Rawls on the one side, and republicanism by Michael Sandel and Charles Taylor on the other. By studying Habermas´ theories of communicative rationality, of modernity and of discourse, one can find support for overcoming liberal and republican views in the viewpoint of a deliberative democracy based on discourses. As Habermas considers democracy a process, he longs to include difference without imposing cultural and historical conceptions of the good on the procedural communicative normative standards. By integrating the perspective of the right in deliberative debates Habermas does not keep them away from democractic will and collective values. The liberal principles of the priority of the right over the good and of ethical neutrality are determined by collective processes of will and opinion formation. In this context, Habermas´ conception of tolerance permitts citizens to reject each other´s life forms, alhtough imposing them to do it in a way that does not contradict moral standards of respect, which avoid discrimiation and authorize the self-realization of cultural life forms compatible with equal liberties for all; they are also obligated to coexist with the rejected life form if it is morally protected by what is stablished in a public consensus, deliberatively reached with recourse of discourses in the public spheres.