 What all this actually yields in the way of a legitimate assignment of resources to individuals is a matter of the distributive principles that survive the test of ratification by the general will. Rawlsian, egalitarian and utilitarian approaches are all imaginable under the auspices of this account. The essence of the Rousseau/Kant approach is that society’s deployment of principles like these to evaluate existing distributions is never trumped by the history of entitlements and it is never excluded by the Humean conventions that may have emerged as a cosy equilibrium among those who are actually in possession.