ABSTRACT
The reader might be prepared to go along with my argument to this point (that rights are a component of the two global practices in contemporary world politics which I have been discussing) and yet still wish to maintain that human rights are not all that important in that, although rights are an internal component of the practices in question, these practices themselves are not, all things considered, ethically very important for us (or alternatively that they are only important for some of us, a minority). In order to counter this suggestion I shall now make the case that these two practices are exceptional ones in that, for those of us who are participants in them, they are fundamentally constitutive of us as free individuals. There are two steps here. First, I shall show that we are constituted as rights holders within a specific kind of practice – instances of the type which Terry Nardin called ‘authoritative practices’ which are to be clearly distinguished from ‘enterprise associations’. Second, I shall show that the authoritative practices I am discussing are of a special kind; they fall into that class of authoritative practice which have as a defining feature that they are foundational. It is the crucial role of rights within these that I wish to highlight.
