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Fundamental Needs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2017

Garrett Thomson
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Extract

The concept of need is promising and alluring because of three factors:

1. Needs are objective because it is a discoverable matter of fact what needs a person has and yet this fact has a bearing on what one ought to do. The concept is both factual and evaluative.

2. Needs are matters of priority; what we need usually overrides other reasons for action.

3. Needs are unimpeachable values. We cannot say truly that a person ought to have different needs and, in this sense, they are fundamental.

In this paper, I shall be concerned primarily with explaining the third of these features. I am interested in fundamental needs, but not necessarily basic or minimal needs, such as those pertaining to survival. Furthermore, I shall not be concerned directly in the strength of claims to need on other people, but rather on oneself. I shall use ‘need’ in such a way that the term indicates a disposition and does not imply a lack. I need food even when I am eating.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 57 , December 2005 , pp. 175 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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References

1 Wiggins, D., Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar, and Thomson, G., Needs, (London: Routledge, 1987)Google Scholar, Chapter 1.

2 Griffin, J., Well-Being, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google ScholarPubMed

3 See Platts, M., Ways of Meaning, (London: Routledge, 1979)Google Scholar and ‘Morality and the End of Desire,’ Reference, Truth and Reality, (ed.) M., Platts, (London: Routledge, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 Freud, S., ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes,’ Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of S.Freud, Vol. 14, 111, (International University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

5 Thomson, op cit., Chapter IV.