Responsible Agency and Morally Protected Goods

Contemporary ethical theories ordinarily presuppose agents who can recognize reasons, make claims, undertake commitments, and answer for their conduct, yet they often leave underdescribed the normative structure of accountable interpersonal agency itself. This paper develops a practice-grounded account of that structure. It begins from the antecedent moral standing of persons and asks how that standing is specified when persons engage one another through assertion, testimony, promising, accusation, justification, excuse, apology, contestation, and repair. The argument distinguishes five questions that constitutive analyses frequently conflate: practice identity, standards of correctness, protected moral interests, wrong-making structure, and normative authority. It then develops basic second-personal standing, truth-answerability, fidelity in undertakings and persistent responsibilities, and norms governing warranted reliance as practice-specific requirements, while treating trust as a relational achievement rather than a universal condition of address. The paper also distinguishes reciprocal basic standing from asymmetric role authority and identifies the ethical jurisdiction of accountable standing in cases involving deception, manipulation, coercive bypass, blame, contestation, and the exercise of institutional power. The resulting position is deliberately limited. It neither derives the moral status of persons from practice nor offers a comprehensive moral realism or theory of distributive justice. It reconstructs the moral requirements internal to accountable interpersonal practices and explains why their violation constitutes manipulation, betrayal, subordination, or abuse of authority. A companion account of entrustment addresses the further question of how responsibility for protecting morally significant goods becomes directed toward particular agents.