Necessary Goods: Our Responsibilities to Meet Others' Needs

This collection of eleven essays (eight of which have been previously published) focuses on the role of the concept of need in individual and social decision making. What claims do the needs of others make on us? What responsibilities might we have, both individually and collectively, towards those needs? Most of the writers represented here agree that need-claims have moral force, but disagree about what might ground that moral force or significance. For instance, for O’Neill and Goodin it is ‘vulnerability’, for Braybrooke ‘utility’, for Nussbaum a ‘thick vague conception of the good life’ and for Brock herself it is ‘autonomy’. A number of important issues are pursued in the essays including: (1) the difficulties relativism-about-needs would make for using the concept of need in social policy making; (2) how one might distinguish real needs from imposter ones; (3) whether the right to have one’s basic needs met is a universal one and; (4) what kinds of expectations one might reasonably have for the role of politics in the lives of individuals. Unsurprisingly there is no consensus on these issues. However, Brock (p. 15) notes two significant points of commonality which emerge from the essays. Firstly, the needs which matter morally are bounded by ‘the idea of the necessary, the essential, the indispensable, and the inescapable’ and, secondly, if such needs are not met ‘we are unable to do anything much at all and certainly are unable to lead a recognizably human life’. Although a great number of the essays have appeared elsewhere, their collection into a single volume is particularly handy. The philosophers appearing here, such as Braybrooke, Nussbaum, O’Neill, Goodin and Wiggins, are leading thinkers in the field and represent a broad spectrum of opinion. The book would be useful for any upper-level course in political philosophy.