Needs and Justice

Abstract

Under the theory of justice as a balance of benefits and burdens, needs are relevant to just distribution only in so far as they express actual burdens, not in their own right. To the extent to which unmet, important needs are a burden in one’s life and constitute an important impediment to achieving one’s life-plans, they should be considered as creating a disequilibrium of benefits and burdens. But it is not the existence of any needs that is a proper reason for compensatory action. It is not even the existence of any important unmet needs that is a sufficient reason for a compensation. After all, the need for love, self-respect or self-realization is important but the fact that it is unmet is not a sufficient reason for social compensation. On the other hand, unfulfilled needs for basic food or shelter or education or medical protection give rise to a legitimate claim for their provision because it is typically within human power to satisfy those needs in the course of social action and, as long as they remain unsatisfied, a person suffers major obstacles in his life, including obstacles to his individual action in satisfying all his other needs. The main difficulty lies, of course, in determining which important needs, when unmet, constitute such a burden as to justify collective intervention leading to a restoration of the equilibrium. Only some needs call for such action; the indiscriminate treatment of all needs as requiring satisfaction in the name of justice would, besides everything else, put seriously in question the possibility of distribution according to desert which, as I have suggested earlier, has primary importance.