When we think about what justice requires us to do for other people, we often find ourselves pulled in opposite directions. On the one hand, human beings are needy and vulnerable creatures who cannot live decent, let alone flourishing, lives unless they are given at least a minimum bundle of freedoms, opportunities, and resources. They must have freedom to think and act, the opportunity to learn and to work, the resources to feed and clothe themselves. Where people lack these conditions, it seems that those who are better endowed have obligations of justice to help provide them. On the other hand, human beings are choosing agents who must take responsibility for their own lives. This means that they should be allowed to enjoy the benefits of success, but it also means that they must bear the costs of failure. If people have poor or otherwise inadequate lives because of decisions or actions for which they are responsible, then outsiders have no obligation of justice to intervene. It might still be a worthy humanitarian objective to provide aid to those who are responsible for their own impoverishment, but it is not a matter of justice, and it would be wrong to compel people to pursue it.

This dialectic between respecting people as beings with essential needs and respecting people as responsible agents is played out in many contexts, for instance in debates about the form that the institutions of a welfare state should take within a political community.