18. This, and not the principle of 'laissez-faire,' is the true ground of objection to 'paternal government'
19. The theory of political obligation (i.e. of what law ought to be, and why it ought to be obeyed) is not a theory (a) as to how existing law has come to be what it is
20. Nor (b) as to how far it expresses or is derived from certain original 'natural' rights
21. 'Natural' rights (like law itself) are relative to moral ends, i.e. they are those which are necessary to the fulfilment of man's moral vocation as man
22. This however is not the sense in which political obligation was based on 'natural rights' in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, previously to utilitarianism
23. The utilitarian theory so far agrees with that here advocated that it grounds existing law, not on a 'natural' law prior to it, but on an end which it serves
24. The derivation of actual rights from natural (i.e. more primitive) rights does not touch the real question, viz. how there came to be rights at all
25. The conception of a moral ideal (however dim) is the condition of the existence of rights, and conversely anyone who is capable of such a conception is capable of rights
26. Thus the consciousness of having rights is co-ordinate with the recognition of others as having them, the ground of both being the conception of a common good which ought to be attained
27. Rights then can only subsist among 'persons,' in the moral sense of 'persons,' i.e. being possessed of rational will