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The proper provisions of a democratic constitution institutionalize the 
formative principle of comunicative respect. This means that the political 
association is constituted as a full and free political discourse: full in the sense 
that the discourse takes no moral principle or norm, including the formative 
principle of communicative respect itself, to be immune to criticism; and free 
in the sense that all individuals who are subject to the common decisions of 
the association have an equal right to participate in it. Full and free discourse 
in this sense characterizes the process by which governance of the political 
association is determined. 

The proper provisions of a democratic constitution institutionalize the formative principle of comunicative communicative respect. This means that the political association is constituted as a full and free political discourse: full in the sense that the discourse takes no moral principle or norm, including the formative principle of communicative respect itself, to be immune to criticism; and free in the sense that all individuals who are subject to the common decisions of the association have an equal right to participate in it. Full and free discourse in this sense characterizes the process by which governance of the political association is determined. 

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A democratic constitution should institutionalize the state and stipulate the decision-making procedures through which officials of the state are selected and legislation is enacted, interpreted, and enforced. The constitution should also stipulate the process by which the constitution itself can be changed, allowing that whether any actual constitution is really democratic is itself subject to debate. Although these general requirements for a constitution do not imply any specific set of political institutions, still no constitution is democratic, whatever its detailed provisions, unless they allow the political association to enact, interpret, and enforce its decision through and free discourse.

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Properly speaking, then, a democratic constitution provides the one set of legal prescriptions that must be explicitly accepted by all citizens as participants in the political discourse about whether the actual constitution is really democratic and even whether democracy itself is the proper form of the political association. Thus the constitutional rights of citizens are those that all political participants must explicitly accept in order to have a political discourse about what all political participants must explicitly accept in order to have a political discourse about-and about—and so on; and it is this character that makes the rights formative. Accordingly, a democratic constitution must also stipulate (in addition to the set of private liberties or rights implied by the formative principle of communicative respect) a set of public liberties or rights, which includes the familiar freedoms of speech and of the press, the freedoms to assemble and to petition, and the rights to due process and to the equal protection of the laws. Also included is the right to religious freedom, understood as the right of each citizen to choose her or his explicit belief about the most fundamental character of reality and human purpose. In fact, the right to religious freedom in this sense may be understood as the inclusive constitutional right of democratic citizens, because all other constitutional rights are conditions of it. 

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The right to religious freedom itself, however, implies that constitutional stipulations should do no more than institutionalize the formative principle of communicative respect, because they cannot properly require of any citizen simply as a political participant explicit adherence to any substantive principle of social action. 

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Democracy makes no sense, however, in the absence of something other than the formative principle of communicative respect about which citizens may and should engage in full and free discourse. This something is how the political association shall in fact be governed, and thus the activities of the state and the laws governing all actions within it. 

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Assuming, then, that all properly political principles may be said to be "principles of justice," we may also say that the character of justice is compound or self-differentiating. Its substantive principle necessarily implies formative implies as an abstract aspect of itself the overriding formative principle of a democratic constitution, while, conversely, this formative principle in turn as an abstract aspect of itself the overriding implies the turn implies the substantive principle of justice as its concrete ground. And this is so even though it is no business of a constitution as such to stipulate any substantive prescriptions.

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The teleological validation of social practices-as practices—as distinct from actions "separately taken"-need —need not be merely empirical. On the contrary, the validation made possible by the comprehensive good grounded in a neoclassical metaphysics validates the meta-ethical, nonempirical principle of communicative respect and the universal social practice constituted by it, i.e., full and free discourse. How so? In that our maximal common humanity prescribes pursuit of everyone's emancipation, and being the recipient of communicative respect is a formative condition of anyone's emancipation.

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Thus there is a universal substantive human right to general emancipation, even as there is a universal formative human right to communicative respect, both rights being indirect applications of the comprehensive teleological principle. But while there is quite properly constitutional properly a constitutional guarantee of the universal formative right and the private and public liberties that it implies, there is no proper constitutional guarantee of any substantive rights, including the right to general emancipation. For to affirm that all human individuals have certain substantive rights that democratic communities are responsible for securing is one thing, while to assert that these rights should be stipulated in their political constitutions is something else.