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Humanity before Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

T. D. Campbell
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Extract

Advocates of the welfare state often appeal to social justice as the moral basis of their claim that distribution of scarce resources ought to be made in proportion to the needs of potential recipients, at least to a certain minimum level of satisfaction. More generally, it is commonly assumed that need is certainly one and perhaps the main factor which ought to determine any just distribution of benefits and burdens. Thus, when the Labour Government abolished medical prescription charges under the National Health Service in 1964 the then Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, defended this step in the House of Commons by saying that it was ‘unjust’ to put such ‘burdens on the old and sick’ and he went on to cite the principle ‘from each according to his means, to each according to his needs’.

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Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , January 1974 , pp. 1 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 House of Commons Debates, 3 November 1964, Cols. 701–77. See also Gaitskell's, Hugh equation of social equality and social justice, Socialism and Nationalisation (London: Fabian Society, 1956), pp. 3–4.Google Scholar

2 ‘Limits of the Welfare State’, New Left Review, XXVII (1964), 28–37, p. 34.Google Scholar See also Essays on ‘the Welfare State’, 2nd edn. (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963), p. 221Google Scholar, and Slack, Kathleen, Social Administration and the Citizen (London: Michael Joseph, 1966), p. 68.Google Scholar

3 The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1956) p. 214Google Scholar; cf. The Conservative Enemy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 40.Google Scholar

4 Cf. Utilitarianism, (London: Fontana, 1962), p. 299Google Scholar: ‘It is universally considered that each person should obtain that (whether good or evil) which he deserves; and unjust that he should obtain a good, or be made to undergo an evil, which he does not deserve. This is, perhaps, the clearest and most emphatic form in which the idea of justice is conceived by the general mind.’

5 Cf. Methods of Ethics, 7th edn. (London: Macmillan, 1963), p.283Google Scholar: ‘it is the Requital of Desert that constitutes the chief element of Ideal Justice, in so far as this imports something more than mere Equality and Impartiality’.

6 Ginsberg, M., ‘The Concept of Justice’, Philosophy, XXXVIII (1963), 99–116, p. 109.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For a contrary view see Hancock, Roger, ‘Meritorian and Equalitarian Justice’, Ethics, LXXX (1969–70), 165–9.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Raphael, D. D., Problems of Political Philosophy (London: Pall Mall Press, 1970), pp. 48 and 190Google Scholar, and Vlastos, G., ‘Justice and Equality’ in Brandt, R. B., ed., Social Justice (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 53.Google Scholar

8 For a fuller discussion of the relationship between rights and justice see T. D. Campbell, ‘Rights without justice’, Mind, (forthcoming).

9 Cf. Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 3.Google Scholar

10 Cf. Benn, S. I. and Peters, R. S., Social Principles and the Democratic State (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959), p. 111:Google Scholar ‘To act justly then is to treat all men alike except where there are relevant differences between them.’ The same could be said of Rawls, A Theory of Justice.

11 Cf. Acton, H. B., ‘Negative Utilitarianism’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume XXXVII (1963), 83–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Urban Policy Making (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 22.Google Scholar Allardt and Hannu Uusitalo include the ‘need for love’ and the ‘need for self-actualization’ as representing welfare values in relation to which the performance of governments can be measured: ‘Dimensions of Welfare in a Comparative Study of the Scandinavian Countries’, Scandinavian Political Studies, VII (1972), 9–27, p. 12.Google Scholar

13 Taylor, Paul W., ‘ “Need” Statements’, Analysis, XIX (1959),106–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Barry, Brian, Political Argument (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 47–9.Google Scholar

15 Culyer, A. J., Lavers, R. J. and Williams, Alan, ‘Health Indicators’ in Shonfield, Andrew and Shaw, Stella, Social Indicators and Social Policy (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1972), p. 114.Google ScholarAllardt, and Uusitalo, , on the other hand, are happy to proceed on the basis that ‘the concepts of value and need will be treated as synonyms’ ('Dimensions of Welfare’, p. 11).Google Scholar They side-step the evaluative problems involved in deciding what is to count as a need by assuming that, because needs are ‘socially defined’, they can be empirically determined by recording the ‘modicum of agreement over what the most important needs are’ in any society.

16 Cf. Boaden, , Urban Policy Making, p. 22Google Scholar: ‘the absence of such facilities such as swimming pools, concert halls, town halls and theatres should be seen as a need or a deficiency, and. such a view greatly assists understanding of local decisions about them, and about other services. Need then becomes an objective condition of a community which can be ameliorated by council action but in relation to which the provision of relevant service is either inadequate or, as in the cases just cited, non-existent’. See also p. 136. Boaden masks the evaluative arbitrariness of his selection of needs by taking it for granted that the general nature of the goals of local government activity are determined by central government. See also Allardt, Erik, ‘A Frame of Reference for Selecting Social Indicators’, Commentationes Scientarium Socialium, I (1972), 5–16, p. 6Google Scholar: ‘Indicators contain or produce incitements to action. Under such circumstances a systematic consideration of individual needs becomes all the more important.’

17 Cf. Boaden, , Urban Policy Making, p. 76.Google Scholar

18 Braybrooke, David, ‘Let Needs Diminish that Preferences may Prosper’ in Rescher, N., ed., Studies in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968), p. 90.Google Scholar

19 Brooke, Bray, ‘Let Needs Diminish that Preferences may Prosper’, pp. 91–2.Google Scholar

20 Cf. Runciman, W. G., Relative Deprivation and Social Justice (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 251Google Scholar, and Rescher, Nicholas, Welfare (Pittsburg: The University Press, 1972), Chap. 6.Google Scholar One classification of needs which is sometimes used to suggest that there is an objective hierarchy of needs is that which was formulated by Maslow, Abraham (cf. ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, Psychological Review, L (1943), 370–96)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This hierarchy depends on the idea that certain needs are, in the main, causally prior to others in that they require to be satisfied before these other needs manifest themselves. In Maslow’s terminology, ‘physiological needs’, for example, are more ?‘prepotent’ than ‘safety needs’ in that the need for safety tends not to affect human behaviour when physiological needs are unsatisfied. However even if such a causal hierarchy of needs could be scientifically proved, while this would have obvious practical implications for policy making, ‘prepotency’ cannot be equated with evaluative importance. If ‘basic’ is taken to mean that which is most important for living a minimally human existence according to some norm of a worthwhile human life, then there is no reason why needs which are less fundamental in Maslow’s causal serial ordering should not be more fundamental terms in of human values. Thus, while Maslow’s ‘self-esteem’ needs may normally be more prepotent than his ‘self-development’ needs, this may conflict with the ordering of these needs in our scale of values. Without, therefore, invoking the spectre of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’ in order to forbid the deduction of moral goals from factual statements about human nature, it is nevertheless clear that the relationship between needs and values is too complex for us to go along with Christian Bay who, in developing a theory of political legitimacy on the basis of Maslow’s, hierarchy of needs, assumes that ‘a psychologically prior need must legitimate a politically prior right’: ‘Needs, Wants and Political Legitimacy’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, I (1968), 241–60, p. 248.Google Scholar

21 Cf. Feinberg, Joel, Doing and Deserving (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p.93.Google Scholar

22 Baldwin, R. W. calls ‘justice’ in the distribution of beneficence ‘quasi-justice’: Social Justice (London: Pergamon Press, 1966), p. 115.Google Scholar

23 Cf. Vlastos, G., ‘Justice and Equality’ in Brandt, R. B., Social Justice, pp. 45–53.Google Scholar

24 Cf. Downie, R. S. and Telfer, Elizabeth, Respect for Persons (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969),Google Scholar Chap. 2.