The Ethics of Need

Agency, Dignity, and Obligation

Sarah Clark Miller

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136596667
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Political Philosophy

The Ethics of Need: Agency, Dignity, and Obligation argues for the philosophical importance of the notion of need and for an ethical framework through which we can determine which needs have moral significance. In the volume, Sarah Clark Miller synthesizes insights from Kantian and feminist care ethics to establish that our mutual and inevitable interdependence gives rise to a duty to care for the needs of others. Further, she argues that we are obligated not merely to meet others' needs but to do so in a manner that expresses "dignifying care, " a concept that captures how human interactions can grant or deny equal moral standing and inclusion in a moral community. She illuminates these theoretical developments by examining two cases where urgent needs require a caring and dignifying response: the needs of the elderly and the needs of global strangers. Those working in the areas of feminist theory, women's studies, aging studies, bioethics, and global studies should find this volume of interest.

1 The Moral Significance of Needs

Now sit we close about this taper here,

And call in question our necessities.

—William Shakespeare, King Lear

What is it about certain needs that merits moral attention and foregrounds them as subjects of human concern? Establishing that something has moral significance is a way of highlighting such a concept or event as deserving some measure of human care, concern, and response. Saying that needs have moral significance amounts to marking them for ethical evaluation and examination. To some, it is far from obvious that needs are normative in any sense. This chapter aims to clarify the connection between normativity and needs. A second underlying goal of this chapter arises from the observation that the concept of need has gone largely unexamined in the care ethics literature.¹ Given how central human need is to care ethics— after all, need is often the impetus of the event of care—this oversight is curious. I aim to rectify this issue by providing a full analysis of needs, thereby laying a foundation for a thorough exploration of the relationship between needs and care in the rest of the book.

Some needs have undeniable normative force. The hunger of the starving stranger, the homelessness of the refugee, and the loneliness of the widower call for a response from those who encounter them. Their hunger, displacement, and forlornness carry an intuitive sense of the moral significance of these needs. Yet why do these needs have moral weight? To what do we attribute their moral salience? How do we distinguish needs with moral weight from those without? One objective of this chapter is to answer these questions by exploring different forms of need, and, more specifically, by considering how and why certain needs are morally significant. The cacophony of need claims characteristic of contemporary social and political discourse lends a sense of urgency to the project of understanding and differentiating various forms of need. In light of the knowledge that not all need claims are created equal, this understanding represents an essential first step in determining which needs justify access to resources and rightfully require a response from moral agents. In short, it is essential to be able to determine which needs are real or true, as well as to establish what constitutes the most foundational or basic needs. We also need to be able to understand the moral intuition that accords needs priority over desires and preferences. This marks a second main task of this chapter.

The inquiry in this chapter moves from form to content, which is to say, from the task of delimiting various forms of need to describing the content of morally significant needs. Can those needs that are morally significant—that is, fundamental needs—be met with the resources and goods we require to sustain ourselves as living beings, or do they require a more extensive response involving that which is necessary for agency and for leading a distinctly human life? What are the features of the most foundational or basic needs? Are they what we need to survive and continue living or the seemingly stronger requirements of that which we need for agency or flourishing? In addition to tending to these important questions, I will also address the vital matter of the interaction of needs and social influence, exploring the role social influence plays in creating needs, as well as determining which needs are foundational and justifying why they might require a moral response.

My core assertion is that a particular kind of need, namely fundamental need, has moral significance. I begin by differentiating fundamental needs from other forms of needs as I explore various distinctions regarding need. Then, I differentiate need from the concept with which it is most frequently confused, namely, desire, demonstrating the superior moral significance of needs over desires. I subsequently establish the moral significance of fundamental needs through a discussion of the specific harm that accompanies the denial of a fundamental need, that is, the harm of compromised agency. In the context of this discussion, I also provide an expanded definition of agency and an argument for the good of agency. Next, while analyzing the structure of a claim of need, I expound on the normative insight found at the limits of the relational formula. Amassing the findings of the chapter, I then provide a comprehensive definition of fundamental need. Finally, having established and discussed the moral significance of fundamental needs, I offer the list of The Fundamental Needs of Agents, commenting briefly on the reasoning behind the inclusion of each item.²

A final preliminary note regarding the relationship of the content of this chapter to the overarching argument of the book: the identification of the moral weight of a group of needs does not automatically translate into a moral obligation to respond to their presence in other people. The existence of an individual’s morally significant need cannot be said to guarantee entailment of an obligation on the part of others to meet this need. Further argumentation is required to establish the entailment of obligation, along with the appropriate associated discussion defining the scope and content of such an obligation. Chapter Two provides this argumentation and discussion.

1 FORMS OF NEED

An introductory analysis of various kinds of needs will provide guidance regarding which concepts to whittle away to reveal a core explanation of what fundamental needs are and why they are morally important. Another aim of this discussion is to establish key terminological distinctions I will draw on throughout the book. This overview also provides the opportunity to situate my concerns within a broader perspective.

Beginning with an initial overview of the ultimate target of my analysis, namely, fundamental needs, may be useful. As I will argue later in this chapter, fundamental needs are needs that threaten agency in the sense that if they are not met, the serious harm of compromised agency will result. Unlike non-normative needs, fundamental needs must be met in order to establish, maintain, or restore agency. During the span of a finite human life, many different fundamental needs will arise, and agents will require the assistance of others to help respond to these needs. Fundamental needs include physical requirements such as nutrition, water, and shelter. They also consist of psychological and social needs such as education, inclusion, and security. Gillian Brock, provides an overview of the moral significance of fundamental needs. She writes, “the needs that matter morally are bounded by the idea of the necessary, the essential, the indispensable, or the inescapable. Furthermore, if the needs are not met, we are unable to do anything much at all and certainly are unable to lead a recognizably human life. Meeting the morally relevant needs is central to our abilities to function as human agents.”³ Brock establishes a link between morally relevant needs and agency, a tie I take to be central to a comprehensive understanding of the connection between fundamental needs and moral salience.

Although serving as the central focus of this work, fundamental needs are only one kind of need. Theorists slice up the concept of need in a number of ways, offering numerous depictions of the essential differences between distinct kinds of need in the process. One major contrast is between needs that are normative and those that are non-normative. I primarily treat the former in arguing that certain needs have moral force. The concept of need can also have a sense of necessity not bound to any moral implications, as in the following statements: “Students need to take the LSAT in order to apply to law school” and “This pasta needs to boil for eight minutes to be cooked al dente.” Statements such as these indicate conditions required for something else to be the case or to occur. In contrast with normative needs, they carry with them no sense of proposing or asserting that someone ought to carry out any action in response to another’s need. In these statements, need functions non-normatively.⁴

Categorizing needs as either absolute or instrumental offers another way of examining needs in terms of their normativity or lack thereof. One theorist who employs the absolute-instrumental needs distinction, David Wiggins, explains the motivation behind this differentiation the following way: “We have then to assign at least two senses to ‘need’ if we are to assign the right significance to the sorts of thing people use the word to say and to understand the special argumentative force of needs claims.”⁵ Absolute needs (sometimes also referred to as categorical needs), which must be met in order for people to avoid harm and to continue to function as a human agents, carry a normative sense. Instrumental needs, which relate to some end other than avoiding harm and maintaining agency, do not have normative force. I may need to paint the peeling shutters on my house in order to make it less of an eyesore for my neighbors (an instrumental need), but I need the house itself as a form of protection from the elements to maintain my agency (an absolute need).⁶

A parallel distinction holds between derivative and non-derivative needs. Garrett Thomson provides helpful definitions of these terms: “A derivative need is one which a person has by virtue of his needing something else.”⁷ Then, by contrast, a non-derivative need is one that a person has “not in virtue of his needing something else.”⁸ An example will clarify the demarcation between the two. I need warm clothing to survive a harsh winter. But I need money in order to purchase warm clothing. Thus, I need money in order to purchase warm clothing so that I can survive a harsh winter. In this case, needing money (a need I have in virtue of needing warm clothing) is a derivative need. Needing warm clothing in this context is a nonderivative need.

Providing further clarification, Thomson sets forth another way of differentiating between derivative and non-derivative need claims: “When A needs X derivatively in order to V, the question ‘But do you need to V?’ is appropriate and to the point. Yet when A’s need is non-derivative, this question must be somehow inappropriate and beside the point. Otherwise the need for X would have to be derivative after all, contrary to supposition.”⁹ Applying this insight to the winter clothing example, we can see that questioning whether one needs to survive the winter does in fact register as an inappropriate question. This marks needing warm clothing as a nonderivative need.

Another important needs distinction—between episodic and persistent needs—cuts across all other distinctions thus far raised. Normative and non-normative, absolute and instrumental, and derivative and non-derivative needs may all be episodic or persistent. David Braybrooke characterizes the difference between the two, explaining that when someone experiences an episodic need, they experience a current state of deficiency. Some need in them is not being met at present. Persistent needs, however, “refer to a need that has been met all along, and that is going to go on being met. In … the persistent cases, there is an implication about deficiency; but it is not one that, as in the episodic cases, concerns an actual deficiency. The implication is rather that should the need cease to be met, a deficiency of some importance would appear, which anyone interested in having the need met might be expected to call attention to.”¹⁰ Although Braybrooke’s distinction is somewhat useful, the line he draws between episodic and persistent needs is ultimately blurrier than he renders it. A case of starvation demonstrates this objection clearly. If we employ Braybrooke’s distinction, it appears that a starving individual experiences the need for food simultaneously as an episodic and a persistent need. For the entirety of her life, food has been and will continue to be a persistent need. In the particular moment under consideration, however, she also experiences the need for food as an episodic need, one with Braybrooke’s characteristic of a current state of deficiency. Perhaps one could revise Braybrooke’s definition of a persistent need to include both senses of deficiency: both actual and possible future deficiency (arising if certain conditions are not met). Or perhaps Braybrooke would be amenable to the notion that the distinction he draws actually identifies two different senses of need that can arise in a single instance of need. In any case, the distinction appears to require further clarification and signals the necessary complexity of a theory of need.

The interaction of needs and the social yields the next major needs distinction. Various theorists characterize needs as authentic or inauthentic, true or false, or natural or socially imposed.¹¹ For the sake of discussion, we can merge these three sets of distinctions—although they are not identical—into one general dichotomy. The distinction concerns the difference between that which a human originally, actually needs and that which is cultivated in her or him as a result of participation in a particular social context or historico-cultural period. Quickly following on the heels of this distinction, however, are complicating factors that challenge the possibility of rendering a fully consistent account. For example, can any need really be said to be “natural” if societies not only play a strong role in producing a particular form of response to biological needs but also actually transform the nature of such biological needs in the process of meeting needs? Is the need for coffee for the purpose of being caffeinated enough to compete in a productivity-obsessed work culture a true or false need? If it is a false need, should it be met? Social forces of oppression and domination further complicate the matter. If a need is cultivated in a situation of oppression and is obviously inauthentic, though nevertheless present as a need that must be met lest considerable harm result, is there a moral responsibility to meet such need? For example, is a young woman’s need for female genital mutilation/cutting—the absence of which will result in extreme social ostracism and isolation—a need that should be met? Is another young woman’s need to diet and exercise obsessively in order to achieve a societal standard of thinness, lest she become a social outcast, a need that those who care for her should help her to achieve? To what extent should moral agents give normative attention to meeting present needs in an unquestioning fashion, rather than to challenging powerful interests that cultivate inauthentic needs in societies, such as those designed to generate further capitalistic profit? Do inauthentic needs have any moral significance? I leave these intriguing questions unanswered, with the promise of addressing them throughout the text.

A sense of perspective taking informs a key needs distinction between expressed and inferred needs. Expressed needs are needs that moral patients are consciously aware of having. In contrast, inferred needs are needs that moral agents caring for needy others realize that the moral patient has, apart from any expressed awareness of the need on the part of the patient. Working within the care ethics paradigm, Nel Noddings further characterizes this distinction: “An expressed need is internal: it arises in the cared-for either consciously or behaviorally. If an inference is made, it is made directly from observation or sensory reception of the cared-for. In contrast, an inferred need proceeds from the carer’s framework. It may include meticulous consideration of the cared-for’s condition, available resources, and cultural demands in which carer and cared-for are immersed, but it does not arise directly as a want or desire in the cared-for.”¹² Expressed needs are those arising internally from the person experiencing the need; they are needs that a person in some way conveys to those caring for her.¹³ When encountering expressed needs, a caretaker will engage her skills of inference only limitedly, if at all. A different process surrounds inferred needs. With inferred needs, the perspective of the carer, rather than the cared-for, is primary. In the absence of the expressed needs of the cared-for, the caretaker must thoughtfully consider what her charge’s needs might be. The needs of infants serve as an emblematic instance of inferred needs. In their pre-linguistic state, infants are incapable of issuing clearly articulated expressed needs. Caretakers must therefore infer their needs, be it for food, sleep, medical care, or physical closeness.¹⁴

The distinction between expressed and inferred needs nicely captures an aspect of need I will later emphasize, namely, the idea that we do not always realize that we need what we need. Nor, for that matter, do we always want what we need, as in the case of people who, despite knowledge that it would greatly benefit their health, refuse to exercise. We can, then, need something and not realize we need it, and, in fact, even desire its opposite.¹⁵

2 DISTINGUISHING NEEDS AND DESIRES

Beyond the task of demarcating the concept of need internally, demonstrating how need is conceptually distinct from neighboring concepts is also an essential endeavor. The seemingly close relation of concepts such as desires, wants, and preferences muddy the conceptual waters, making it difficult to discern exactly what a need might be.¹⁶

My focal point here will be the crucial disti...