Basic needs in normative contexts

Abstract

In answering normative questions, researchers sometimes appeal to the concept of basic needs. Their guiding idea is that our first priority should be to ensure that everybody is able to meet these needs—to have enough in terms of food, water, shelter, and so on. This article provides an opinionated overview of basic needs in normative contexts. Any basic needs theory must answer three questions: (1) What are basic needs? (2) To what extent do basic needs generate reasons for action and how are these reasons to be understood? (3) How are basic needs and their satisfaction to be measured? I address these questions in turn. Then I also briefly discuss the theoretical potential of appealing to basic needs in normative contexts. It turns out that future research in this area could benefit from a higher degree of interdisciplinarity and methodological reflection, and that, generally speaking, basic needs theories are more promising than they have often been claimed to be.

A Needs-Based Framework for Approximating Decisions and Well-Being

“…As was also done elsewhere (Pölzler 2021;Crisp 2021, ch. 4.3), I argue that the inclusion of autonomy in the set of BNs rules out extreme forms of paternalism and makes this framework compatible with soft paternalism.…”

“…10 This process necessarily needs to terminate somewhere, i.e. there must be ends for which no further justification can be given (Grisez et al 1987, p. 103;Braybrooke 2014, p. 32;Wiggins 2005, p. 30), which I will call an absolute end (AE) in analogy to the term absolute need used in (Wiggins 2005;Pölzler 2021). An absolute need (AN) is then an instrumental need, which is a means only to AEs.…”

Carbon Pricing is not Unjust

“…Sufficientarians are concerned about those with low levels of resources who fall below some basic or minimal threshold, which justifies redistribution toward those in poverty since poverty on most accounts brings people below that basic or minimal threshold. [ 14 ] Finally, egalitarians believe that it is intrinsically valuable for resources to be equally distributed. For all of these theorists, therefore, distributive justice would be served by redistribution from those with the most to those with the least.…”

The typicality effect in basic needs

“…The absence of research on the typicality effect in this context is striking. Philosophers in this area have attempted to provide simple and robust analyses in terms of individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions (e.g., Copp, 1995;Doyal & Gough, 1991;Braybrooke, 1987;Brock, 2009;Miller, 1999; for an overview see Pölzler, 2021). Yet, if we introspect about the concept of basic needs, a few concrete instantiations of the concept readily come to mind (e.g., water, food, shelter), and it seems plausible that these core basic needs serve as the basis for an abstract prototype.…”

“…For a brief overview of analyses of basic needs seePölzler (2021).17 Hassoun is aware and explicitly states that this argument only works if one assumes a particular conception of harm, namely a conception according to which a person is only harmed by an action if the action makes her worse off than before; and that this conception likely will be rejected by proponents of harm-avoidance analyses of basic needs. Note also that Hassoun discusses these analyses qua analyses of needs, not basic needs in particular.…”