While the language of natural (or human) rights continues to proliferate in contemporary discourse, the intellectual underpinnings of these rights has yet to progress in a widely accepted manner from the Rawlsian arguments that precipitated the most recent state of crisis in liberal thought. From the perspective of contemporary natural law theory, rights are indeed grounded and justified as expressions of a subjective perspective regarding the requirements of the natural law or the demands of justice. While many rights may derive their justification solely from the requirements of a prior natural morality in this way, the partial detachment of subjective rights from a prior moral structure effected by early liberal thinkers such as John Locke contains an important element of truth. Natural rights, such as the rights to one's life, liberty, and external property, are primarily justified by human beings' self-ownership through self-consciousness. This notion is expressed, in an implicit and undeveloped manner, by Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding and his Two Treatises of Government. Self-ownership, rightly understood, both underpins and justifies certain natural rights independently of a prior natural morality, and serves as the basis for responsibility within a natural moral structure. Indeed, a persuasive theory of the natural law is implied by a proper understanding of the same self-ownership that engenders natural rights. In this way, a properly articulated understanding of self-ownership simultaneously justifies and explains liberalism's rights-based orientation, and provides a persuasive basis for supplementing natural rights-based morality with a natural law morality. Natural justice, of the sort that justifies and limits the actions of human governments and guides the activity of individuals, finds complementary bases in both the individual human being and in the common characteristics of humanity. Natural rights and natural law, or modern and pre-modern orientations in moral and political philosophy more broadly, need not be characterized in terms of opposition or even an order of priority; they are, rather, complementary elements that join to form a true conception of natural justice.