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The article focuses on the relation between human dignity, rights, and responsibilities. Topics discussed include analyzing the relationship between rights and responsibilities by thinking beyond civil liberties, green paper titled "Rights and Responsibilities: Developing our Constitutional Framework" issued by the British government, and use of the Human Rights Act for interpreting common law and the right to freedom of religion.

The article comments on the central to the political theory of John Locke, Great Britain's empirical philosopher, in which he claims that individual property rights are possible in a pre-political state of nature, and that these are based, not on the consent of mankind, but on the unilateral appropriative acts of those who are to have the rights in question. At first sight, it seems as if Locke favors the former alternative. Time and again, he stresses that man enters political society to preserve his property. The government, he argues, is obliged to secure every ones property by providing against those defects that made the State of Nature so unsafe and uneasie.