believe that it would count against a theory of justice if that theory were to hold that their income were simply to be made available against their will for the satisfying of other people's needs. These two judgments may not directly contradict one another, but they are in tension, and the task of a theory of justice is to reconcile whatever is important in one with whatever is important in the other, in the context of their application to thousands or millions of individuals in a society or in the world. If this is true, then we should not expect either judgment to survive its consideration in a theory of justice in an unmodified form. Our considered judgments are like inputs into the theory, but the outputs may look somewhat different. Of course that is not inevitable; maybe one or another judgment will emerge largely intact. But a theory of justice offers no guarantees in this regard, and this may be important for how we think about socioeconomic rights. Inasmuch as the case for them is largely intuitive or based simply on the fact that they embody one set of strong convictions that we hold, then we have to be open to the possibility that they will not survive in the form that a simple rights slogan expresses when they emerge from serious consideration under the auspices of a theory of justice. Also, a theory of justice may sometimes be radical or quite revisionary as far as our considered judgments are concerned. People sometimes approach the topic of justice with a pretheoretical conviction that individuals deserve certain things-for example, that hard-working and prudent people deserve the wealth that they have created on the basis of the moral merit evinced in their abstemious industriousness. (This too is sometimes put forward as being in tension with the "intuitions" embodied in claims about socioeconomic rights.) But in A Theory of Justice, John Rawls criticizes such claims. He does not just strike a different balance between the claims of need and the claims of desert; he argues that the latter claims are mostly misconceived. 21 He may or may not be right about that. The point is that a theory of justice cannot promise immunity in advance against such revision to any set of intuitions.22 The role of considered judgments and precepts helps us understand the complexity of the relation between rights and justice. On the one hand, our convictions about rights often present themselves to us as obvious, in a way that does not require much philosophical elaboration: "We hold 21. 22. JUSTICE income). 782 See RAWLS, supra note 4, at 88-89. See LIAM MURPHY & THOMAS NAGEL, THE MYTH OF OWNERSHIP: TAXES AND 173 (2002) (arguing that individuals are not really morally entitled to pretax