when they have previously been given a fair share as far as the requirements of distributive justice are concerned. However, it is widely believed-certainly as a matter of pretheoretic considered judgmentthat these distinctions are not altogether irrelevant for a theory of justice. It is possible, I guess, that a theory of justice might repudiate these distinctions altogether. Sometimes Rawls gives that impression in his comments about desert. And neither the argument for the Difference Principle nor the Rawlsian social minimum argument I outlined in the previous Part seems to pay any attention to the question of individuals' own responsibilities for their membership in the worst-off group. 74 Still, we might insist, a theory of justice is inadequate if it says nothing to address this question or allay the concerns that it raises. Even if it is believed that choice and responsibility should not matter at the extremity of need, still some account must be given of the intuitions that underlie these concerns about choice and responsibility and of why these intuitions do not always have the importance that their proponents say they have. Some theories of justice have made these distinctions fundamental. In Ronald Dworkin's account of equality of resources, for example, we are to think in terms of a model in which each person is assigned an equal share of resources-configured by processes that treat the person as an equal in determining how things should be divided or how nonfungible items should be treated.75 But once resources are assigned, we assume that holdings will quickly become unequal as a result of various processes: Some may be more skillful than others at producing what others want and will trade to get. Some may like to work, or to work in a way that will produce more to trade, while others like not to work or prefer to work at what will bring them less. Some will stay healthy while others fall sick, or lightning will strike the farms of others but avoid theirs. For any of these and dozens of other reasons 76 some people will prefer the bundle others have in say, five years, to their own. Some of the hardest work required by Dworkin's model then involves distinguishing, among these various ways in which people's holdings might become unequal, those that represent the results of fair choicesinvestments, gambles, preferences for leisure over work-and those that represent brute bad luck. It has always been Dworkin's position that one does not treat people as equals if one requires that they be insulated from the consequences of their own free choices. People who worked or saved in order that they would have enough resources for a rainy day are 73. RAWLS, supra note 4, at 273-77. 74. See, e.g., RONALD DWORKIN, IS DEMOCRACY POSSIBLE HERE? 103-04 (2006). 75. Ronald Dworkin, What Is Equality? Part 2: Equality of Resources, 10 PHIL. & PuB. AFF. 283 (1981). 76. Id. at 293-94. 798