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A putative moral prescription is meta-ethically senseless and so cannot be valid if the individuals to whom it is supposed to apply cannot (1) act as it prescribes; and (2) so act because the prescription is valid. So far as the first point is concerned, in other words, "ought implies can": a putative moral prescription is meta-ethically senseless unless the alternatives for action open to an agent to whom it is supposed to apply include the prescribed action. As for the second point, a putative moral prescription is meta-ethically senseless if an agent to whom it is supposed to apply cannot choose in a manner that expresses her or his dissent, in the sense of her or his determination that the prescription is not valid but invalid.

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More than that the meta-ethical character of every prescription prescribes by implication at least one social practice-namelypractice—namely, the specific practice designed to resolve disagreement about the validity of prescriptions, so as to enable common decisions. This practice, which suspends pursuit of other purposes in order to assess the validity of contested moral claims, may be called-using called—using Habermas's term, "discourse"---—"moral discourse." Thus moral discourse is the specific social practice of argumentation, or common critical reflection, in which claims to the validity of moral prescriptions are validated or invalidated by giving reasons.

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As such, this meta-ethical principle is a formative principle of social action, in the sense that adherence to it is explicitly neutral to all moral disagreement. In this, it is distinguished from all substantive prescriptions, adherence to any of which is not thus neutral. But, then, the social practice governed by this formative principle is itself a formative practice, and the rights it prescribes are formative rights.

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The actual content of communicative rights can be derived from the 
necessary conditions of moral discourse as a specific social practice. Such 
conditions include equal freedom for all participants to advance and contest 
any moral claim and to argue for or against it as the siituation may require; 
the absence of internal coercion in the form of strategic activity on the part of 
fellow participants, or-alternatively expressed-uncompromised 
commitment to seek only the truth on the part of all participants; and the 
absence of external coercion that might influence accepting or contesting 
claims to validity. Thus communicative rights include the rights to life, to 
bodily
The actual content of communicative rights can be derived from the necessary conditions of moral discourse as a specific social practice. Such conditions include equal freedom for all participants to advance and contest any moral claim and to argue for or against it as the situation may require; the absence of internal coercion in the form of strategic activity on the part of fellow participants, or-alternatively expressed-uncompromised commitment or—alternatively expressed—uncompromised commitment to seek only the truth on the part of all participants; and the absence of external coercion that might influence accepting or contesting claims to validity. Thus communicative rights include the rights to life, to bodily integrity and movement to tho movement, to the use of personal property, and to conscience, in the sense of the right to choose and act in accordance with one's own understanding of the good. Because these rights have a strictly individualistic character-being —being definable without reference to any human association-the human association—the liberties corresponding to them may be called "private liberties." Of course, even these liberties are not unlimited, even if they cannot be overriden overridden by any moral prescription. Each individual has a right to equal freedom (equal freedom being a necessary condition of participating in the specific social practice of moral discourse); and so the freedom of each is morally constrained by, and is subject to interference in order to prevent her or his invasion of, the rightful freedom of every other. 

But private liberties do no and cannot exhaust the freedoms protected by communicative rights, because they include the right to be an actual participant actual participant in moral discourse. To attend to this right returns us to the question of the actual patterns or institutions of common decision making. In the end, the right to participate in moral discourse is the right to participate in political in political discourse, which is to say, in a particular association or social practice that nonetheless has a general character in that its distinguishing purpose is to order or govern all association in society. Thus the formative principle of communicative respect prescribes a democratic political association. And this includes the right to have democratically determined decisions coercively enforced. But, then, the constitutive principles of this association must be legal in character, in that the institutional process whereby governing activities are properly determined must itself be coercively enforceable. 

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One may say, accordingly, that the proper provisions of a democratic constitution institutionalize the formative principle of communciative respectcommunicative respect. This means that the political association should be constituted as such as a full and free political discourse. A constitution is really democratic if, and only if, it allows the political association to maximize the extent to which making, interpreting, and enforcing political decisions is effected through full and free political discourse. 

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Thus the constitution must also stipulate the right of all individuals or citizens to be participants in the association's decisions. The duties correlative with these rights must be explicitly neutral to all substantive social (moral or political) prescriptions precisel precisely because the discourse is about the pertinence of such prescriptions to legal norms. This means that a democratic constitution provides the one set of legal prescriptions that must be explicitly accepted by each and every citizen as a participant in the political discourse, including discourse about whether the actual constitution is really democratic, and even whether democracy itself is the proper form of the political association. In this way, a democratic constitution also stipulates a set of public liberties, which includes the familiar freedoms of speech, of the press, of assembly and of petition, as well as due process and equal protection of the laws. Also included is the freedom of religion, in the sense of the right of each citizen to choose her or his explicit belief about the most fundamental character of reality and human purpose. The principle of religious freedom in turn implies that constitutional stipulations should do nothing more than institutionalize the formative principle of communicative respect. They cannot properly require of any citizen as a participant in political discourse explicit adherence to any substantive prescription for social action. On the other hand, precisely because the constitution is not substantive, but formative only, the rights-liberties it stipulates may not be overridden by any other moral prescription pertinent to the activities of the state, including religious ones. 

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The universal principle of communicative respect is, in fact, an indirect application of a comprehensive teleological principle. But it might appear that this formative principle as such implies only that there are, or, at least, can be, valid substantive prescriptions, but does not and cannot imply anything about what these prescriptions are. In truth, however, the presupposition that at least some substantive prescriptions can be valid is senseless unless the formative principle of communicative respect also implies what is meant by "valid substantive prescription," i.e., the criterion by which substantive prescriptions can be distinguished as valid or invalid. But any such criterion is itself a substantive moral principle, and a universal substantive principle at that, since the formative principle that implies it is universal. 

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From the standpoint of neoclassical metaphysics, the basic metaphysical notion is "creativity," according to which actualization as such consists in the unification of diverse relations to other real things, actual and possible. In the unique case of the divine individual, who is the primal source and the final end of reality, the relations in question are to all things actual and possible, whereas in all other cases, the relativity involved is not complete, but partial or fragmentary, being to only some things. In either case, however, "the good" in its metaphysical meaning consists in realizing unity ­in-diversity as a contribution to the all-inclusive divine creativity, and the greater good is always the realization of greater creativity. The comprehensive telos or purpose, then, is the actualization of maximal unity-in-diversity in the world and therefore also in the divine reality. 

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Because human activities enjoy opportunities for good that are vastly extended beyond those of nonhuman worldly existence, future human creativity occupies a preeminent place in our pursuit of the comprehensive telos. In.deed, there is a sense in which we act best toward the natural world when we aim at the maximal human future. Recognizing this, we may formulate the comprehensive purpose as a principle for moral decisions as follows: maximize creativity in the human future as such. 

Because the higher possibilities of human achievement are a gift from past human achievements, favorably ordered, the comprehensive telos prescribes the pursuit of our maximal common humanity-in humanity—in the long run. In other words, what should be maximized is the creativity shared between or among human individuals, "common humanity" meaning in this context neither the descriptive characteristics nor the normative rights that are universally human, but rather the common world so far as it is constituted by the communication of distinctively human achievements. To be related to a greater common humanity offers individuals the possibility of making a greater contribution to it, and actualizing this possibility, in turn, amplifies opportunity still further. In this sense, the common world, or (as it may also be called) the human order, has a certain self-surpassing character, although this character is a normative rather than a merely descriptive feature insofar as it identifies what should be the case. 

Our maximal common humanity may be reformulated in terms of conditions of emancipation, understanding by "emancipation" the opportunity to be creative, of which, of course, each individual must decide what use is to be made. Individuals are more or less emancipated, depending on the natural and human context in which their lives are set. Because the order created by human achievements is greater insofar as each individual benefits from and contributes to it, the comprehensive telos prescribes pursuit of everyone's emancipation, everyone's freedom and opportunity to be creative and thereby to make possible the creativity of others. For any given individual, the conditions of emancipation are complex, consisting in part in those that are distinctively hers or his and extending through others specific to intimate and local associations to still others shared with increasingly wider communities. In . their widest form, we may speak of "general conditions of emancipation," meaning by that those that are important or potentially important to the creativity of any individual whatsoever such as, e.g., health, economic provision, education, cultural richness, environmental integrity, and the general patterns of associational life as such. These are the subject matter of justice; and the pursuit of justice seeks to maximize the general conditions for more distinctive local associations and individuals, thereby maximizing everyone's emancipation. 

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Nor is this teleological validation of social practices merely empirical.  all. On the contrary, the comprehensive telos, and thus the pursuit of our maximal common humanity, grounds the meta-ethical principle of communicative respect and the universal social practice of moral discourse governed by it; and this is because being a recipient of communicative respect is a formative condition of emancipation. The comprehensive telos, and thus pursuit of our maximal common humanity, also grounds a democratic political association because such an association is prescribed by the same formative principle of communicative respect. The right to participate in the widest possible moral and political discourse, whereby social practices are legislated and justice pursued, is also a formative condition of emancipation. Moreover, the substantive principle of justice that ought to be convincing in democratic discourse and, through such discourse, ought to control all political decisions is implied by the same comprehensive telos. This is the principle that may be formulated so: maximize the general conditions of emancipation to which there is equal access for all. 

Corresponding to the substantive principle of justice as general emancipation is a universal human right that may be called "the right to general emancipation." In contrast to the formative rights, private and public, properly stipulated in a democratic constitution, this right is a substantive right that may be stated as follows: human individuals as such have the right to the greatest measure of general emancipatory conditions that a legal order can provide or promote equally for all. The associational order or set of social practices legislated by a political association has as its specific purpose securing this universal human right for all individuals or citizens. Moreover, insofar as it succeeds in accomplishing this purpose, the norms of the associational order that it legislates override direct applications of the comprehensive purpose. This means that they are to be observed, whatever the consequences.

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