Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-r5fsc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-23T21:05:16.837Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Fundamental Needs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 April 2017

Garrett Thomson
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The concept of need is promising and alluring because of three factors:

1. Needs are objective because it is a discoverable matter of fact what needs a person has and yet this fact has a bearing on what one ought to do. The concept is both factual and evaluative.

2. Needs are matters of priority; what we need usually overrides other reasons for action.

3. Needs are unimpeachable values. We cannot say truly that a person ought to have different needs and, in this sense, they are fundamental.

In this paper, I shall be concerned primarily with explaining the third of these features. I am interested in fundamental needs, but not necessarily basic or minimal needs, such as those pertaining to survival. Furthermore, I shall not be concerned directly in the strength of claims to need on other people, but rather on oneself. I shall use ‘need’ in such a way that the term indicates a disposition and does not imply a lack. I need food even when I am eating.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 57 , December 2005 , pp. 175 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Wiggins, D., Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987)Google Scholar, and Thomson, G., Needs, (London: Routledge, 1987)Google Scholar, Chapter 1.

2 Griffin, J., Well-Being, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986)Google ScholarPubMed

3 See Platts, M., Ways of Meaning, (London: Routledge, 1979)Google Scholar and ‘Morality and the End of Desire,’ Reference, Truth and Reality, (ed.) M., Platts, (London: Routledge, 1980)Google Scholar.

4 Freud, S., ‘Instincts and their Vicissitudes,’ Standard Edition of the Psychological Works of S.Freud, Vol. 14, 111, (International University Press, 1964).Google Scholar

5 Thomson, op cit., Chapter IV.