In the aftermath of the enlightenment which emphasized the rights of man, the fact that a world which thinks only of rights will fall apart is something of a problem. But the enlightenment gives no framework for reconciling rights and responsibilities, which has left many people very unsure of how to try to reconcile them. It’s actually quite simple as long as you look at the problem in the right way. The key to the whole mess is that rights come from responsibilities.

Obviously rights come from God, since all things come from God, but they don’t come directly from God. The most proximal intermediary in giving human beings rights is the responsibilities that they were given. Whatever a man has a responsibility to do, he has a right to do.

Consider, for example, feeding himself. A man has a responsibility to feed himself. Because of this, he has a right to the things intrinsically necessary to do it, such as the right to own property with which to get for himself food, the right to do the labor necessary to procure food, and so on.

Now, It is important to distinguish what is intrinsically necessary to fulfill a responsibility from what may be accidentally necessary. If I don’t happen to have any bread on hand, that doesn’t automatically give me a right to your bread because it is an accident of circumstances that you have bread on hand while I don’t. A responsibility conveys the rights that anyone would need in order to fulfill a task, not what would be necessary only for one person in some particular moment.

And this is the origin of all rights. Parental rights originate from the parental responsibility to care for one’s child. Speech rights originate from the responsibility to tell the truth. Religious rights originate from the duty to worship God.

Once you look at rights this way, the problem of reconciling them with responsibilities—or of reconciling conflicting rights—becomes a non-issue. Responsibilities exist in a hierarchy, and so whenever a right and a responsibility conflict, or when two rights conflict, one merely has to look at the responsibility from which the right derives and compare it to the other responsibility—or the responsibility from which the other right derives—and always fulfill the more important responsibility over the less important responsibility.

This also very neatly solves the problem of how to strongly defend rights without becoming a libertine. Because you never want to be this guy: