[VOL. 48: 773, 2011] Socioeconomic Rights and Theories ofJustice SAN DIEGO LAW REVIEW not treated with equal dignity if they are required to subsidize people who did not work or save, despite being conscious of what the consequences of that would be and despite having had the opportunity to do so. As Dworkin puts it in his most recent book, ideals of equality and justice must treat us as having in the first instance a responsibility to determine by our own choices how our lives should go. 77 But opportunities for work or savings may not have been equal; people may be handicapped or struck by illness, and in these instances a plausible case can be made for social assistance that does not involve an affront to the dignity of personal responsibility. What the extent of that assistance should be is determined in Dworkin's model by imagining various markets, actual and hypothetical, for insurance. People who begin with equal holdings are imagined also to have had a fair and equal opportunity to insure against bad luck, such as illness or unemployment. If such insurance opportunities are not available-again through no fault of their own-then they are said to be entitled to the assistance that they would have received in a fair insurance market had such a market existed. The details of this account need not detain us here. What is important to understand is that these model-theoretic assumptions-an equal initial assignment of resources, responsibility for chosen outcomes even when these are unequal, and the provision of either an equal opportunity to insure against brute bad luck or the payouts that a fair insurance market would have provided-work in the infrastructure of the theory to provide perspectives for thinking about the actual hazards and inequalities of the real world. Dworkin is not arguing for the setting up of any particular social insurance mechanisms as a matter of policy; instead he is using these devices as a way of thinking through the tangled issues about choice, luck, and responsibility that he believes are unavoidable in a theory of justice. Dworkin's is just one theory; there are other theories of justice that engage in similar analysis. And there are some-like Rawls's theory, as we have seen-that give these issues much less prominence. It may. seem that a proponent of socioeconomic rights-someone who takes seriously Article I1(1) of the ICESCR: "[T]he right of everyone to an adequate standard of living for himself and his family" 78 -should always favor theories of the latter kind over theories of the former kind. But 77. 78. See RONALD DWORKIN, JUSTICE FOR HEDGEHOGS 330 (2011). G.A. Res. 2200 (XXI) A, supra note 2, at 50. 799