Despite the ubiquity of talk about rights in philosophical and legal discourse, there is little agreement about what it is to have a right.  I argue that the most prominent accounts of rights misconstrue the normative question that rights are meant to answer.  I then identify a normative question that has gone largely unnoticed by theorists despite the profound way in which answering it shapes our everyday lives: with what may I act?  I go on to show how competing conceptions of what rights we have may be understood as competing answers to this question.