 Putting respect for others aside, considerations of self-respect, and the social conditions that support a secure sense of self-respect, have been thought to bear on the advisability of perfectionist political action.  Most notably, Rawls claimed that a secure sense of self-respect, and the social conditions that support it, is a fundamental primary good, one that political institutions ought to secure for those subject to them.  Self-respect, Rawls further claimed, requires two elements: (i) a “secure conviction that [one’s] conception of [one’s] good, [one’s] plan of life, is worth carrying out” and (ii) “a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions” (Rawls 1971, 440).