¹ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.

² Brandon is now inclined to invoke his grandfather (Sam Collins) rather than his father, as having the more explicit and trenchant position, but I'll keep them both in view.

³ E.g, Sen, Amartya and others, The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ Op. cit., 25–6, 105.

⁵ The qualification ‘direct’ allows for the application through surrogates that I am about to describe.

⁶ This is true not only of his contributions to The Standard of Living, but also of his later book, Development as Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1999)Google ScholarPubMed.

⁷ G. A. Cohen has said, ‘Sen arrived at what he called “capability” through reflection on the main candidates for assessment of well-being that were in the field [in 1979], to wit, utility, or welfare, and Rawlsian primary goods’ (See Cohen's ‘Equality of What? On Welfare, Goods, and Capabilities,’ in Nussbaum, Martha C. and Sen, Amartya, (eds.), The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 9–29, at 17.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed That's not so; it misdescribes Sen's reflection, even if his reflection was limited to ‘the main candidates.’ Provision for needs (something different from welfare occupied with utility or preferences) was a main candidate, as it had been from time immemorial, though disregarded by most sophisticated thinkers. Moreover, Sen has reflected on needs, and I expect he did so before 1979.

⁸ In an early writing, Marx says, looking forward, ‘To take the place of wealth and poverty as political economy knows it, there comes forward the rich man, fitted out with rich human exigencies. The rich man is at the same time the man who, to live, has need of a totality of human manifestations, the man for whom his own realization is an interior necessity, a need’. (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959), 111–2Google Scholar. The English here is my translation from the French of the Pleiade edition. This is the sense in which Marx is to be understood, late in life, putting forward in the Critique of the Gotha Program the principle, ‘From all according to their ability, to all according to their needs.’

⁹ See, for example, Development as Freedom, 4, 64, 82, 84.

¹⁰ Thus the concept of needs, in the use that I advocate for it, is not open to the fifth of the five criticisms of the concept that Alkire, Sabina (Valuing Freedoms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 166–170CrossRefGoogle Scholar) finds in Sen's writings, the only one to which she thinks final weight should be given.

¹¹ Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, The German Ideology (Moscow, 1964)Google Scholar.

¹² A point made in ‘Equality of What?’, 19–20, by Cohen, detecting an ambiguity in Sen's use of ‘capability’.

¹³ These, related to comparisons of policies, are instances of what Sen, in Development as Freedom, 82, calls ‘distinguished capability comparisons,’ in which ‘concentrated attention [is] being paid to some particular capability variable, such as employment, or longevity, or literacy, or nutrition’.

¹⁴ A comment at the conference in Durham by Bill Pollard led me to recognize that I have brought forward not just one, but two types of surrogate for the term ‘needs’ - not just the term or phrase identifying the plight of the people in need, e.g., that they ‘have run out of potable water,’ but, secondly, this identifying term or phrase combined with a term or phrase that gives ‘a respectable explanation’ of how their plight came about. The surrogate without the explanation will sometimes suffice, especially in very urgent cases. We would move to extract Mencius's child fallen into the well without asking for an explanation about how she got there; and likewise move without further ado to rescue an old woman from a burning house. At other times, with some people, only the combination including the right sort of explanation will be moving.

¹⁵ See, for example, Eemeren, F. H. van, (ed.), Advances in Pragma-Dialectics (Amsterdam: SicSat, 2002)Google Scholar; or the special issue of the journal Argumentation 17(4), 2003Google Scholar, of which I am titular editor; in particular the contributions there from Amsterdam.

¹⁶ Brock, Gillian, (ed.), Necessary Goods (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ See the moving passage in the Preface to Development as Freedom, xiii-xiv, which ends, after saying that the book is aimed at ‘nonspecialist readers’ for ‘open deliberation and critical scrutiny’ in ‘public discussion,’ with Sen saying, ‘I have, throughout my life, avoided giving advice to the “authorities”. Indeed, I have never counseled any government, preferring to place my suggestions and critiques - for what they are worth - in the public domain.’

¹⁸ Is it as elusive in respect to time and place as the historical contract that Locke postulated as the foundation of English government?

¹⁹ In A Strategy of Decision (New York: The Free Press, 1963)Google ScholarPubMed, C. E. Lindblom and I quoted Sydney Smith: ‘Education has many honest enemies; and many honestly doubt and demur, who do not speak out for fear of being assassinated by Benthamites.’

²⁰ A point emphasized in just these terms by Sen in Development as Freedom, 84.

²¹ An earlier version of this paper was read and discussed — much to its advantage — in a colloquium of the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie University in June 2003. I have also benefitted not only from Brandon Butler's bringing his father and grandfather into the discussion, but also from Brandon's comments on a version of the paper even earlier than the one discussed at Dalhousie. Mats Furberg's reactions helped me understand the paper better as well as to make some corrections.