arguing from fundamental premises for something quite specific, such as health care, social security, or minimum income, in a sort of line-item way, proponents of a theory of justice are arguing from fundamental premises for principles, such as the "Difference Principle,"l 4 that are intended to operate at a much more general level. What I am urging when I say that it would be a good idea to bring these bodies of argument into some careful relation with one another is that we need to get a better sense of how the line-item claims that we call socioeconomic rights fit into a bigger picture that takes these fundamental values as seriously as the proponents of socioeconomic rights take them. I emphasize that last point. The aim of this Article is not to haul socioeconomic rights before some tribunal of efficiency or aggregate utility. Critics who regard efficiency or aggregate utility as the be-all and end-all of public policy have already committed serious mistakes: they have an impoverished conception of value, and they pursue the values that they recognize in an inappropriate way by concentrating on arithmetical aggregates rather than on individualized or distributive concerns. Theorists of justice avoid mistakes like these. They may not agree with one another about the proper conception of value for public policy-welfare, primary goods, human capacities, et cetera-or what exactly the distributive structure of an appropriate theory ought to be. But they are committed to evaluating social policy in terms that take individuals seriously and that have the capacity to take the special concerns of poor people seriously. The game is not rigged against the distributive concerns of the theorist of socioeconomic rights like it is in the economic critique. One could say that to ask about the proper relation between a theory of social-economic rights and a theory of justice is to ask afair-asopposed to an unfair-question. Benefits, I believe, will accrue to both sides if theories of socioeconomic rights are brought together with theories of justice. Theories of justice sometimes tend to consign their consideration of specific lines of public policy to an afterthought, tacked onto the main structure and argued for half-heartedly and often superficially. This is certainly true of the comments that Rawls makes about welfare provision and what he calls "the social minimum."" A clearer sense, within a theory of justice, of how particular public policy commitments could rise to the status of rights would improve matters. Such consideration would fully take into account the need to consider the public policy line in question in relation to other competing claims and commitments, but it would also be looking to justify it, in this context, as a right-as something that would 14. 15. 778 See RAWLS, supra note 4, at 65-73. See id. at 244-45.