This thesis aims to evaluate part of the public, academic and institutional discourse, which founded the legitimizing morality of racial quotas. Initially, two distinct theoretical currents are highlighted, both from Anglo-Saxon and Germanic origins, which dominated part of the public discourse on the subject, namely: the liberal theories of distributive justice and the theories of recognition. Based on the exponent authors of each of these theories, namely: John Rawls, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, we seek to understand whether these authors can articulate a set of ideas and values that can support not only the morality of racial quotas, but also provide instruments that help designate the goals and reach of these policies. In this sense, three hypotheses were considered: racial quotas are policies that can be summed up in the normative scope of theories of distributive justice; racial quotas can produce a type of intersubjective recognition capable of generating symbolic and structural changes beyond mere distribution; racial quotas are a type of public policy capable of reconciling the objectives set out in both theories, regardless of their eventual inconsistencies or conformity. By reconstructing the genealogy of the philosophical discourse that founded the legitimacy of such public policies, it is also sought to reconstruct the promises and the potential that racial quotas have, making use of the idea of immanent criticism as a method of investigating social reality. Thus, it is pointed out as a conclusion that affirmative actions, especially racial quotas, can have mixed effects that represent redistributive improvements of fundamental social and material resources in a chain, as well as recognition in a broad sense, including structural changes in access to their resources.