[VoL. 48: 773, 2011] Socioeconomic Rights and Theories ofJustice SAN DIEGO LAW REVIEW argumentation about justice; we may find a given theoretical position plausible or implausible-intuitively plausible or implausible as we say-because of its consonance or dissonance with one or more of these considered judgments. These judgments need not be just the sentiments of private individuals. They may have the status among us of "precepts ofjustice"--commonsense truths shared to a certain extent in the culture even among philosophers. 9 There is no doubt that claims about socioeconomic rights are supported by many of these judgments and precepts. Many of us believe, for example, that if a child is in danger of starvation in a society with a prosperous economy and if the child's parents are incapable of supporting it, then there ought to be some provision for social support and that staterun agencies have a responsibility to see that this is provided. Many of us would regard it as a serious objection to a theory of justice if it implied that this need not be done or that it should not be done.20 Of course, nobody's considered judgments are self-validating. For one thing, considered judgments about provision for need may have to be reconciled with other considered judgments of ours that seem to pull in an opposite direction. Many people hold the view, pretheoretically, that individuals are entitled to the fruits of their labor-such as the income that others have paid them for work they have done-and they 19. See id. at 31-32. 20. A lot of the early hostility to Robert Nozick's theory stemmed from the fact that Nozick gave the impression that such provision might be unjust or at any rate not required by justice. People thought that if Nozick's was just one theory competing for our attention, this might be a reason to look elsewhere for theoretical illumination on the topic of justice. See Brian Barry, Book Review, 3 POL. THEORY 331, 331-32 (1975) (reviewing NOZICK, supra note 10). [T]he intellectual texture is of a sort of cuteness that would be wearing in a graduate student and seems to me quite indecent in someone who, from the lofty heights of a professorial chair, is proposing to starve or humiliate ten percent or so of his fellow citizens (if he recognizes the word) by eliminating all transfer payments through the state, leaving the sick, the old, the disabled, the mothers with young children and no breadwinner, and so on, to the tender mercies of private charity, given at the whim and pleasure of the donors and on any terms that they choose to impose. This is, no doubt, an emotional response, but there are, I believe, occasions when an emotional response is the only intellectually honest one. . . . [A] book whose argument would entail the repeal of even the Elizabethan Poor Law must either be regarded as a huge joke or as a case of trahison des clercs, giving spurious intellectual respectability to the reactionary backlash that is already visible in other ways in the United States. Id. 781