the good life for human beings which a condition of need or
harm directly frustrates. But this is not a weakness of the con-
cept in advance of such a conception being elaborated. It is only
a weakness if we have good reason to believe that such an
account could not be given or, if it could be given, the concep-
tion of harm were too broad to serve the purposes of articulating
a theory of justice, if, for example, one thought a person harmed
were they to fail to get whatever they desire. But one has no
reason to believe either of these things absent a strong argument
for them.
Having distinguished instrumental and absolute needs, we have
opened up a conceptual space which permits other questions to
be asked. Needs vary in their gravity and their urgency. Fred’s
need for a heart bypass operation is more grave than Sylvia’s
need to have her broken leg splinted and plastered, but Fred’s need
can wait, being less urgent. A need may be judged basic if a
person cannot go unharmed unless it is met, given fundamental
and unalterable facts about the world and the typical human
constitution.^30
There are good reasons for believing that the concept of needs
and their satisfaction does not exhaust the concept of human well-
being^31 or human flourishing. We can perfectly well imagine a
community of scholars trading off some years of their lives in
order to refurbish a library. We can understand the scientist who is
so ambitious to advance knowledge that he performs a risky
experiment on himself. Parents may buy a computer or hi-fi for a
handicapped child rather than a wheelchair if they judge that that
is what he most wants. Nonetheless, in the particular context of
justice, where what is at issue is the distribution within a society
of generally transferable goods and services, it is proposed that
the principal, i.e. governmental, agencies of distribution should
pay direct attention to the issue of how far basic needs are met.
Here, what has been called the Principle of Precedence – that
the needs of a population take priority over their preferences or
anyone else’s – finds its home.^32 No distribution can be just if it
fails to meet the basic needs of citizens, if some minimum stand-
ards are not met in respect of the provision of goods and
services.
Basic needs do not represent a fundamental value. The case for
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE