Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR),2 and in national instruments such as Articles 26-29 of the South African Constitution's Bill of Rights. Now the articles just mentioned are legal or quasi-legal provisions. I really want to ask about the principles they embody or seek to embody. What is the relation between something like the principle that everyone has a right to social assistance if they are unable to support themselves and the principles typically comprised in a theory of justice? By a theory of justice, I mean something that does the sort of thing that John Rawls did in his book A Theory ofJustice4: set out and defend some very general principles governing the basic structure of society in regard to their impact on the life prospects of and the enjoyment of primary goods by individuals. I do not by any means regard Rawls's work as canonical. Later in the Article, I shall refer to two alternative theories, at least one of them quite stridently opposed to Rawls's. But Rawls's work affords a fine example of the sort of thing I mean by a theory of justice, and it makes clear the difficulty of the question I want to ask. Rawls's theory is certainly not hostile to the idea of welfare provision, but principles of the kind alluded to in the previous paragraph do not feature among Rawls's principles of justice as fairness-among the two complex principles that constitute his conception of justice.5 Why is this? The most plausible explanation is that socioeconomic rights, or principles embodying socioeconomic rights, are usually formulated at the wrong level of generality or abstraction to be included among the most fundamental principles of a theory such as Rawls's. But then we should ask, What is the relationship between abstract principles of justice and these somewhat less abstract principles requiring welfare provision? For the purpose of answering this question, Rawls's theory has the advantage of being quite complicated in the set of abstract principles that it yields, in its internal structure, and in the system of argumentation associated with it. His theory is built up on the basis of certain-by now familiar-model-theoretic ideas, such as the original position6 and the veil of ignorance. 7 It comprises a number of meta-ethical conceptions about reflective equilibrium and the relation of a philosophical construction 2. International Covenant on Economic, Social 2200 (XXI) A, Annex, U.N. Doc. A/6316, at 50-51 example, rights to social security, to special protections freedom from hunger). 3. S. AFR. CONST., 1996, arts. 26-29 (declaring, adequate housing and health care services). 4. See JOHN RAWLs, A THEORY OF JUSTICE 52-78 5. Id. at 52-56. 6. Id. at 181. 7. Id at 130-60. 774 and Cultural Rights, G.A. Res. (Dec. 16, 1966) (declaring, for for mothers and children, and to for example, rights of access to (rev. ed. 1999).