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Michalos' Comments on Meeting Needs Disposed of*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

David Braybrooke
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University

Extract

Can x need y without our being in a position to conceptualize y? Nothing, given ten seconds thought, is easier to show. Every man, woman, and child from the beginning of the human race needed Vitamin C as one ingredient in the minimum provisions for their food. It was only in this century, however, that people arrived at the concept of Vitamin C and became able to assert the need for it. On the record, we may expect more such discoveries.

Type
Critical Notices/Etudes critiques
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1988

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References

1 At this point, since there is briefly some call for doing so in answering the comments, I shall begin citing Meeting Needs, always under the abbreviation MN.

2 As recounted in Prices and the Poor (1974)Google Scholar, Bearing the Burdens/Sharing the Benefits (1978)Google Scholar, and many other admirably lucid and incisive tracts published by the National Council of Welfare, Ottawa, that in perfect accordance with the social practice described in MN rely for policy prescriptions on the concept of needs.