hostile to socioeconomic rights like that of Robert Nozick's? Moral philosophers may be preoccupied with the delicacies of Nozick's or Rawls's model-theoretic conceptions. But these conceptions are so remote in their abstraction from the compelling matters that proponents of socioeconomic rights have to address-life and death, sickness and health, poverty and human flourishing-that they are best left to languish in their ivory towers where they will not distract us from the more urgent concerns of human well-being. I think saying that would be a mistake. The structural relation between socioeconomic rights and theories of justice is certainly a fascinating intellectual conundrum. But it is of more than academic interest. The claim that there are socioeconomic rights, that they really are human rights, that they deserve to be taken as seriously as, say, civil and political rights, and that the failure to fulfill them is in the same normative category as rights violations like torture, censorship, disenfranchisement, or detention without trial is controversial even on its own ground. Politically it is attacked by those who claim priority for property rights and market structures, by those who deplore the way in which welfare provision privileges the lazy and the feckless over the responsible and the deserving, as well as by those who simply believe in other fiscal or macroeconomic priorities in what they say is a world of limited resources. These attacks cannot be dismissed; they require-and in my view, they can be given-an answer. But they are not adequately answered just by saying that the case for welfare provision is urgent and should command a very high place in the order of moral priorities. Even if one can defend the claim that socioeconomic rights are important, the nature of their priority over other concerns is not self-evident. There are all sorts of priorities in this area of moral and political life, and we need to develop an articulate account of what kind of priority we are talking about. For example, nobody these days seriously imagines an economy, either at the national level or at the international level, in which private property and markets do not loom large, or in which the question of incentives for and rewards to the deserving are not thought important, or in which there is not a multitude of other claims on the public purse-or a host of other macroeconomic concerns-competing with demands for welfare provision. Though these considerations obviously compete with claims about socioeconomic rights, they are not to be dismissed simply on account of their being inimical to the latter claims. They need to be given their due in an overall account of what the organization of the basic structure of a society, national or international, ought to respond to. Formulating such an account, articulating and elaborating it, is precisely the task of a theory of justice. 776