A full understanding of rights requires a grasp of the points of view of all involved in a right-duty situation, and so requires a grasp of rights-based, duty-based and justice-based approaches. Having outlined a rights-based approach to a situation in which those involved act “aright” (as Finnis puts it), let us next consider what a duty-based conception in this context can look like. Finnis described the move from Aquinas's conception of right as based on justice to Suárez's conception of right as related exclusively to the beneficiary, but he did not associate with this a parallel move that might be made in which Aquinas's position might be transformed by interpreting a just situation entirely from the point of view of the ower of the duty rather than from the point of view of the beneficiary.

As we saw in the earlier presentation of John Locke's position, Locke (unlike Hobbes) writes of “natural laws”, which impose naturally enforceable duties in the required sense, and a duty-based approach is also central to Kant's moral philosophy. In the light of this, that which is “just” would appear to be a person-neutral term describing a good or fair situation, “right” would appear to be a term describing that situation entirely from the point of view of one of the protagonists in so far as that person is a beneficiary, with “duty” a term describing that situation entirely from the point of view of the other in so far as that person faces some demand or cost correlated with the right of the other.