¹ This is not intended to be an exhaustive list. One vocabulary which I have not mentioned here, but which is closely related to those which I shall be discussing, is that of capabilities-see M. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) for further details.

² See Wiggins, D. ‘Claims of Need’ in his Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in Philosophy, (Oxford: Blackwell 1987), 1–57Google Scholar esp. 6; Thomson, G., Needs (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1987)Google Scholar; Frankfurt, H. ‘Necessity and Desire’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1984), 1–14Google Scholar. I should perhaps emphasise that none of these writers thinks the difference between preferences merely and desires can be accounted for just in terms of their urgency—and nor do I.

³ For further discussion of these points see the exchange between Frankfurt op. cit. note 2 above and Goodin, R. ‘The Priority of Needs’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45 (1985) pp 615–626Google Scholar. Interesting further discussion of these issues can be found in Brock, G. ‘Morally Important Needs’, Philosophia 26 (1998), 165–178.Google Scholar

⁴ O'Neill, O., ‘Hunger, Needs and Rights’ in Problems of International Ethics, Luper-Foy, S. (ed.) (London: Westview, 1986)Google Scholar reprinted as ‘Rights Obligations and Needs’ in Necessary Goods: Our Responsibilities to Meet Others’ Needs Brock, G. (ed.) (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 1998) 86–106Google Scholar (page references to this reprint).

⁵ Why does the fact that two forms of normative discourse come into conflict(if they do) matter? Part of the reason will have to do with the practical consequences of adopting one form of discourse or another. But if the conflict is deep (in the sense I have suggested, and in the sense which O'Neill's arguments seem to suggest) then it may be impossible to use both vocabularies without falling into incoherence. This strikes me as particularly significant for someone who wants to give the vocabulary of needs an important role in normative political discourse, since the vocabulary of rights is so deeply embedded in that discourse as to be for all practical purposes inextricable. (I am indebted to Sandrine Berges for pressing me on this point.)

⁶ O'Neill op. cit. note 4.

⁷ In what follows I concentrate on what O'Neill (op. cit. note 4) has to say about general obligations—what she says about special obligations strikes me as mostly correct.

⁸ Wiggins op. cit. note 2, 7–10.

⁹ For some skepticism about the significance of the distinction, see Barry, B., Political Argument: A Reissue with a New Introduction. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.)Google Scholar In my view Barry's critique of Wiggins relies on attaching too much importance to the claim that ‘needs’ has two distinct senses, and not enough to the idea that different kinds of need claim can have different sorts of significance. As far as the first claim is concerned, I am not sure that questions about how many senses a word has always admit of determinate, context independent, answers. But in any case there seems no clear inference from the claim that ‘need’ is univocal to the claim (which Barry goes on to make) that claims about certain kinds of need are not morally distinctive.

¹⁰ I have altered Wiggins’ example for purely rhetorical purposes.

¹¹ Cf Wiggins op. cit. note 2, 7–8.

¹² At least, in a situation where the person addressed was unable to eat. In other circumstances it might be merely inane.

¹³ Brock, G., ‘Justice and Needs’ Dialogue 35 (1996), 81–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁴ Doyal, L. ‘Basic Needs’ in Necessary Goods: Our Responsibilities to Meet Others’ Needs Brock, G. (ed.), Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield (1998), 66–86.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Someone who has argued recently for this view is Charles Jones: Jones, C., Global Justice—Defending Cosmopolitanism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar Although I am in agreement with many of the points he makes, my own strategy for responding to O'Neill's objection is rather different.

¹⁶ Gewirth, A.Reason and Morality (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978).Google Scholar

¹⁷ Sterba, J., ‘From Liberty to Universal Welfare’ in Necessary Goods: Our Responsibilities to Meet Others’ Needs Brock, G. (ed.), (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield 1998), 185–216.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Jones op. cit. note 15.

¹⁹ Other strategies have also been suggested by David Braybrooke (Braybrooke, D.Meeting Needs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar) and David Wiggins (Wiggins op. cit. note 2). For a discussion and criticism of these attempts see Brock op. cit. note 13. I am not sure whether Brock's criticisms of Wiggins are on the mark. In any case, both Wiggins and Braybooke seem to be concerned with our obligation to meet the needs of members of our own political community. But for reasons which I explain below, I am not sure this goes far enough: if I am right obligations to meet needs can extend beyond national boundaries. I express this point with a certain amount of tentativeness, however, since the criticism depends on identifying nations as the most extensive political communities of which we are members. For doubts about this, see Pogge, T.Realizing Rawls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; from a very different perspective Berges, S., ‘Loneliness and Belonging: Is Stoic Cosmopolitanism Still Defensible?’, Res Publica 11 (2005)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Pogge, T., World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Maiden: MA Polity Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

²¹ Jones op. cit. note 15, Shue, H., Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence and US Foreign Policy (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

²² O'Neill op. cit. note 4, 98–9.

²³ O'Neill op. cit. note 4, 105 ff.

²⁴ Jones op. cit. note 15 chapters 3–4.

²⁵ This matters because O'Neill thinks that there is no similar problem about liberty rights. One might resist this conclusion by appealing to the Nozick/Locke view of rights in which rights do not generate a obligation to enforce but only rights (on the part of the possessor) to enforce. (Nozick, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974)Google Scholar; Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government, Laslett, P. (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968)Google Scholar. But even if this can be done, it doesn't really help O'Neill's case, for the upshot is that the success of her argument depends on adopting an account of rights which is (at best) contentious. Nor would it help to conclude that rights discourse as a whole is incoherent— although this might be true, it is sufficiently implausible to motivate us to look for another response to the problem.

²⁶ I should emphasise that at this point I do not take the case to be anything more than prima facie. Arguments in favour of my contention are to be found in section 7. below.

²⁷ I make the concession only for rhetorical purposes—see section 7. below.

²⁸ It might be thought that this claim prejudges the issue between realist and constructivist metaethical views. However, I think that any viable version of constructivism needs to respect this intuition—even if it does so in the sort of weaselly way that Wittgensteinian accounts of mathematics respect the necessity of mathematical judgments.

²⁹ A third more strategic comment may also be called for here. Earlier, I argued that both liberty rights and subsistence rights give rise to apparently unallocated obligations. Although I stand by this claim, in what remains of this paper I shall only be attempting to solve the problem as it arises for subsistence rights. Whether my solution can be used to cope with the unallocated obligations to which liberty rights give rise, and how it might be adapted, are matters which I shall leave for a future occasion.

³⁰ Cf Jones op. cit. note 14; Goodin, R., ‘What is So Special About Our Fellow Countrymen?’ Ethics 98 (1986) 663–686Google Scholar.

³¹ I am grateful to Soran Reader for pressing this suggestion.

³² O'Neill, O., ‘Agents of Justice’, in Pogge, T., Global Justice (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).Google Scholar

³³ Especially if, as Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze have argued, famines, for example, typically arise out of problems with the distribution of entitlements to food rather than simple insufficiency of food. (Sen, A. and Dreze, J., Poverty and Famines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984Google Scholar)).

³⁴ Perhaps it would not fully answer the charge that these obligations might turn out to be unduly burdensome, in the same that way many people have thought that the obligations to which Peter Singer takes us to be subject are too burdensome. (Singer, P., ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 1 1972, 229–243.Google Scholar) But there is no reason to think that my proposal does generate Singer-style obligations on individuals: the stringency of those obligations seems to derive from Singer's focus on what I have called conditional rather than collective obligations. (I am indebted to Sandrine Berges for this point).

³⁵ Gilbert, M., On Social Facts (London: Routledge, 1989)Google Scholar; Simmel, G., ‘How Is Society Possible’ in Georg Simmel: On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

³⁶ O'Neill op. cit. note 4.