664 HUMAN RIGHTS QUARTERLY Vol. 39 scarcity may justify “impossibility” in cases where there exists a shortfall in the provision of the specified goods. Both steps, however, carry with them certain complexities. Taking the first step first, the type of social welfare to which individuals have a right could be referred to as a basket of social goods, services, and facilities (from here onwards referred to as the welfare basket) that is specified precisely, conceptually valid, and empirically appropriate. But the crucial question that immediately follows is: On what basis is the basket’s content prescribed? Perhaps it could be left up to duty-bearers themselves to determine the content of the welfare basket: the goods, services, and facilities prioritized with respect to the particular social issues with which each duty-bearer is faced.33 It could be determined with reference to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights “minimum core,” which entails “a minimum core obligation to ensure the satisfaction of, at the very least, minimum essential levels of each of the rights is incumbent upon every State party.”34 Or, it could be defined empirically, through a technical exercise that prioritizes those goods, services, and facilities deemed most important to meet the most basic of social needs and that can be feasibly scaled-up to population coverage.35 These different methods notwithstanding, in determining the content of the welfare basket, there is no real need to take sides on which method does the job best. One can be, for present purposes, non-partisan since the only requirement of conditional social rights is that an assumption as to the kind of social welfare these rights guarantee can indeed be made. The basket could be narrowly or expansively defined and, as the foregoing examples suggest, it seems there is more than sufficient methodological wind to fill the sails. Taking the second step for determining the content of social rights, however, is perhaps more perilous. In determining the content of human rights, the basic objection to the admittance of resource conditionality is that with it comes implicitness that the so-called human, social, and economic constraints necessarily render full attainment of the welfare basket impossible. According to the impossibility objection, ascribing intrinsic resource conditionality to the description of social rights inevitably imposes only a “weak”36 duty on the duty-bearer to 33. Philip Alston, The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, in The United Nations and Human Rights: A Critical Appraisal 491 (Philip Alston ed., 1992) (suggesting that the content of social rights be clarified by an examination of “the approaches adopted by States themselves in their internal arrangements”). 34. General Comment No. 3, The Nature of States Parties’ Obligations, adopted 13–14 Dec. 1990, U.N. ESCOR, Comm. on Econ., Soc. & Cult. Rts., 5th Sess., 49th & 50th mtg., ¶ 10, U.N. Doc. E/C.12/1990/8 (1990). 35. See, e.g., World Health Organization, Improving Health Outcomes of the Poor: The Report Of Working Group 5 of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health (2002) (adopting an empirical approach to prioritization with respect to the right to health). 36. David Beetham, What Future for Economic and Social Rights, 43 Pol. Stud. 41, 57 (1995); Griffin, supra note 8, at 35–37.