ABSTRACT
Although each of us is constituted as an actor in many authoritative practices, some of them are more important to us than the rest. The most important of these are those which are foundational for our sense of ourselves as valued human beings. These are those practices within which, through our participation in them, we are constituted as the actors whom we ourselves conceive of as having moral worth. In such practices we would judge exclusion from them to be damaging to our sense of ourselves as fully fledged ethical beings.
