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An Idea we Cannot do Without: What difference will it make (eg. to moral, political and environmental philosophy) to recognize and put to use a substantial conception of need?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2017

David Wiggins
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1. Conferences on the subject of need are lamentably rare. All themore honour then for this one to the Royal Institute of Philosophy(an organisation long dedicated to saving philosophy's better selffrom its worse), to the Philosophy Department at Durham, and toSoran Reader, the organizer and editor.

2. Someone asked me recently what first made me think it wasimportant for philosophy to secure for itself a substantial andserious idea of needing and of thing vitally needed. What made itseem imperative to safeguard these categorizations from conceptualand rhetorical degradation? What suggested that there was aproblem here?

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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 57 , December 2005 , pp. 25 - 50
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

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References

1 I expressed doubts about starting a conference paper by drawing on personal memory in the way in which I shall. But the organizers reassured me that this was all right. So now we are stuck with this. In the paper given at Durham, as in this version, the text overlaps (especially at §§ 8–14) with my book Ethics: Twelve Lectures on Moral Philosophy, forthcoming in 2006 with Penguin UK and Harvard University Press. I am grateful to these publishers for permission to reuse this material. Dorothy Edgington helped me find words for my rough first thoughts concerning the indispensability of the concept of need to any convincing explication of the Precautionary Principle. See IV. All the mistakes that have developed in the time since we had our conversation are of course mine.

2 For more on these matters, see Plowden, Stephen, Towns Against Traffic (Deutsch 1972)Google Scholar, chapter 7. Plowden's book, given its date, could not say what was going to happen. For the record, let me say. In the run-up to the election of 1973, Labour, who won, were forced to make so many concessions to independent and oppositional groups that, when they gained office, they had to abandon the north and south sections of Ringway One. Ringways Two and Three now correspond to large roads, not quite on the scale projected. A qualified victory for the vital need-concept perhaps, which has gained ground or held its ground within the thinking of moderation and restraint. Even now it has impinged very little however on official or economic modes of thinking.

3 Also, if that were not bad enough, a consequential 40% increase of traffic on densely inhabited secondary roads, an increase deducible from the Transportation Study itself.

4 In a way, it has been recognised as such by some studies. But so far the habitual response has been to compensate for it in (hit or miss) fashion, e.g. to multiply by some arbitrary factor any benefits or costs that accrue to the lowest income groups. Anything to avoid confronting questions of theory or principle or issues of commensurability or the possibility that the whole conceptual basis of some study already in progress is simply a shambles.

5 Among the most important cases of the possibility which troubled Tocqueville and Mill is the case of a majority's outvoting a minority on an issue that mattered vitally only to the minority. For these issues, see Mill's Considerations on Representative Government, Chapter Seven.

6 Categorical in a sense that contrasts with hypothetical. For the analogy with Kant's conceptions of the categorical and hypothetical imperatives, see Thompson, G.Needs (Routledge, London 1989)Google ScholarPubMed.

7 I omit some details about time and the t variable deployed in the citation from the work referred to in note 8 below. See the reprint of my ‘Claims of Need’ (originally published in Morality and Objectivity ed. Honderich, T., Routledge, London, 1985Google Scholar) in Needs, Values, Truth (CUP 2002 third edition, amended) pages 7–8 with noteGoogle Scholar. At note 10 on page 7 of that chapter are recorded many anticipations of these thoughts and explorations, by writers such as J. Feinberg, D. Miller, D. Richards, Alan White and others.

8 David Wiggins ‘Public rationality, needs and what needs are relative to’ in Hall, Peter and Bannister, David (editors) Transport and Public Policy, London, Mansell, 1981Google Scholar. See also Wiggins, David and Dermen, Sira, ‘Needs, Need, Needing’ Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 13, 1987, pp. 61–68Google Scholar.

9 At this point, there is confusion to be guarded against. One point is that the analysis of all ‘needs’ sentences involves a conditional or hypothetical sentence ‘if then ….’ Another quite different point is that, among needs sentences, some have an overall force or meaning that is not absolute, thus being in that quasi-Kantian sense hypothetical; but others have a force or meaning that is in the quasi-Kantian sense categorical or non-hypothetical, a force that is owed to the unforsakeability of a certain end. See note 6.

10 I share in the blame for this. In Needs, Values, Truth op. cit. I should have said that ‘have’ was only a place-holder for the right verb. Nor did I point out that sometimes the ‘‘clause, unlike the ‘‘clause, contains no overt reference to the person(s) having the need, as in ‘the islanders badly needed the colonists to leave’.

11 See, for instance, Moral Thinking, Oxford 1982 and all the studies that led up to it.

12 You might suggest that it should be proportioned to the degree of importance of the interest, but this distinction does not figure in the construction.

13 To get an exact fit with Utilitarianism, it has to be all right to suppose that there is no mismatch between the strength of a (rationally corrected) desire and the efficiency with which it can turn into the effective satisfaction of desire any benefits the universalizer's choice of maxim may award to it. Unluckily, such an assumption is not generally true (see here my Needs, Values, Truth, page 86, ad finem).

14 See Leibniz's note, ‘Felicity’, as translated in Riley, P. ed. Leibniz: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

15 Rawls, J., ‘The Basic Structure as Subject’, reprinted in Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), see 281–3Google Scholar, from American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (04 1977)Google Scholar.

16 For ‘fair value’ see op. cit. Political Liberalism, 356–363.

17 It assists in the interpretation of this question of Rawls's to collate it with a sentence from the same paper (p. 271 in the same reprint): ‘what the theory of justice must regulate is the inequalities in life prospects between citizens that arise from social starting positions, natural advantages and historical contingencies’.

18 One might wonder here whether there is something within Rawls's construction that makes Rawls's prefer to begin with his question. If there is not, and it is not clear that there is, then what else makes it the first? To judge from the wording of the question and the presence there of the words ‘free and equal’, an assumption is at work here about the connection between citizenly equality and equality of income and wealth, or equality of life chances. The assumption is momentous. It evidently determines the direction we see Rawls move in. Before taking the truth of the assumption to be obvious, compare Rawls's procedure with the rival idea that the needs theorist is seen proposing in the text.

19 Let me refer here to the illuminating treatment of this question given by Barry, Brian in The Liberal Theory of Justice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), at pp. 54–55 and 115–5Google Scholar.

20 Here is a disobliging suggestion. Perhaps this obviousness ought to be compared with that of Laplace's notorious Principle of Indifference, to the effect that, in the case of complete ignorance, the a priori probability of a given proposition is V2. For the fate of this principle, cp. the discussion in Keynes, J.M.A Treatise on Probability (1921)Google Scholar, Chapter IV et passim.

21 More cautiously, the White paper The Common Inheritance (Cmnd Paper 1200, September 1990): ‘Government will be prepared to take precautionary action to limit the use of potentially dangerous materials or the spread of potential dangerous pollutants, even where scientific knowledge is not conclusive, if the balance of likely costs and benefits justifies it …’.

22 You calculate the expected utility of a policy in a given situation by assigning a probability and a utility to each possible outcome there, multiplying the probability together with the utility for each outcome and then taking the sum of these products. Expected utility theory, together with any constraints that it places upon rational choice under conditions of risk or of uncertainty, has its origins in philosophical utilitarianism, a theory which puts needs on a par with desires and, in many versions, discounts the future in ways that appear to offend against reason. Meanwhile, among its most sympathetic interpreters, the defects of the theory are now seen as lying with the monolithic generality of its aspirations. See for instance the temperate conclusions of John Gray's editorial Introduction in the Oxford World Classic edition (1991) of John Stuart Mill On Liberty and Other Essays (see especially page xxvi following). A conclusion one might draw from all this is that the way forward is not to replace expected utility by another theory with the same scope.

23 Jonas, H., Philosophical essays: from ancient creed to technological man (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971)Google Scholar. (See Part One, Essay 4, ‘Socio-Economic Knowledge and Ignorance of Goals’.)

24 Unless he is eager to confuse the attitude's not being required by the theory of rationality that he himself accepts with the attitude's being condemned by that theory as irrational. This type of confusion is of course far from unknown.

25 Thus echoing, in effect, the advice that J.R. Lucas has repeatedly offered for a decade or two to public inquiries and public consultations: assess the cost of error.

26 A similar response needs to be made where a utility theorist reminds us of the law of diminishing marginal utility. That only directs us towards the earlier units of no matter what benefit. It does not discriminate between things desired and things needed.

27 Cp. Robert M. Solow, ‘Sustainability: an economist's perspective’ 1993, Washington D.C. Resources for the Future.

28 These words I quote from the Brundtland Report (Our Common Inheritance, Oxford, 1987Google Scholar).

29 See Helm, Dieter ‘The Assessment: Environmental Policy—Objectives, Instruments, and Institutions’ Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 14, No. 4 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. ‘Almost any policy … can be claimed to be consistent with sustainability, since the definition has been stretched by governments to be sufficiently wide to be practically almost meaningless’ (p. 17).

30 O'Riordan, T. and Voisey, H. (eds.) The Transition to Sustainability (London: Earthscan Publications, 1998)Google Scholar.

31 Careful legislators, if only they will revert to the style of the English common law, might then try to formulate some general duty lying upon this or that body or legal person to take such care as is in the circumstances possible to prefer the more sustainable over the less sustainable way of pursuing their legitimate objectives. The sense of such laws is of course to be determined gradually by reference to an emerging body of case law. As Aristotle says in his discussion of equity in Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, chapter 10, the subject matter of the practical is indefinite, unlimited, but susceptible in context of sufficient in context determination.

32 If the reader really is at a loss for an example of the reckless, let me provide one. Human beings have only been releasing such things as pesticides, artificial fertilizers, herbicides, plasticizers and pharmaceuticals into the environment for about seventy or eighty years. In really serious quantities, we have only been doing this for half as long as that. In the life span of the human race this is a bare moment, the blink of an eye. Even if pregnant mothers on the Faroe Islands are now being warned not to eat too much of their traditional allowance of whale-meat, no doubt it is questionable how large or serious a present threat this constitutes to human beings in the present day. It is far more significant that already, a moment after the bare moment it has taken for us to start upon our dispersion of these substances into the oceans, there is scarcely a sea, however remote from human settlement, where fish do not already carry traces of these substances. If we can bring about so much in seventy years, what shall we have done in a hundred and seventy? Whatever reasonable safety threshold is set for bioaccumulation, it will take no more than two or three further moments in the history of mankind for present levels to be substantially exceeded. It will be hard for one who reflects on this to react with anything but relief to the information that, at the third conference on the North Sea, The Hague, March 1990, “the participants adopted the following premises as a basis for their future work. They will continue to apply the precautionary principle, that is to take action to avoid potentially damaging impacts of substances that are persistent, toxic and liable to bioaccumulate even when there is no scientific evidence to prove a causal link between emissions and effects.” Did the participants keep to their resolve?