Need, Care and Obligation

Summary

All humans experience needs. At times needs cut deep, inhibiting persons' abilities to act as agents in the world, to live in distinctly human ways, or to achieve life goals of significance to them. In considering such potentialities, several questions arise: Are any needs morally important, meaning that they operate as morally relevant details of a situation? What is the correct moral stance to take with regard to situations of need? Are moral agents ever required to tend to others' well-being by meeting their needs? What justification or foundation, if any, can be given for requiring moral agents to respond to others' needs?

In answering these questions, my argument will take place in several parts. I begin explanatorily, describing care ethics for those unfamiliar with this particular ethical approach. This discussion reveals that care ethicists assert the moral importance of needs. Their position, however, does not offer comment on whether or not we are required to respond to the needs of others. I propose that our human interdependence and finitude give rise to an obligation to care for a certain subset of needs, namely, the constitutive needs of others. Through analysis of both the Groundwork and the Metaphysics of Morals, I present an interpretation of Kant's duty of beneficence that lays the foundation for the duty to care. After acknowledging the strengths of the Kantian approach, I cite one of its most significant shortcomings: although helpful in clarifying the foundation and scope of the duty to care, Kantian ethics requires supplementation with regard to content.