Abstract

A framework derived from Jürgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms is utilized to address the question of how claims for minority rights, that emerge from ethical-political discourses, may receive public recognition. The major difficulty in this regard turns upon discrepancies between the interpretations of minority cultural needs by the members of a given community and interpretations of the same needs on the part of those outside of the community in question. I argue that the best way to assess across cultural “barriers” the credibility of the outcomes of substantive discourses does not involve minimizing requirements for their deliberativeness, as some recent publications claim, but rather strictly differentiating between the procedure and substance of the deliberation.