Gillian Brock

What sort of moral importance do people's needs have? Can people's needs defensibly make claims on anyone ? Recent arguments concerning the moral importance of needs adopt a distinctive approach: the importance of needs is evaluated in terms of how needs fare in contests with preferences or desires in distributive contexts. I suggest some explanations for this move, but argue that the moral importance of needs is not best evaluated using this strategy. Rather, whether needs can trump, or in other ways significantly affect property rights, is a more adequate test of their importance--indeed, is the crucial issue if needs are to have the kind of moral importance recent arguers want to claim for needs in the kinds of distributive contexts identified. ;So, can people's needs defensibly affect others' property rights? I argue that this question, once thoroughly examined, conceals some important misconceptions about property rights and the kinds of arguments by which they can be justified. I argue that claims of need can have a significant impact on property rights: people's needs can define the limits of defensible property rights in certain sorts of cases. Indeed, failure to recognize the constraints imposed by people's needs leaves one with an indefensible account of property rights. So, if according property rights and rewarding labor are to be defensible practices, there are some needs which legitimately make claims on others

In 'Meeting Needs', Braybrooke argues that a new and improved version of utilitarianism can be constructed around making a priority of satisfying needs. In this paper I concentrate on Braybrooke's suggestion about the method for determining needs, and more generally, the method of settling issues concerning matters of need. (This emphasis is chosen since these problems are most devastating to his project as currently formulated.) I argue that Braybrooke's method is seriously flawed. Braybrooke believes that the process for settling issues concerning needs guarantees consensus and fairness. I refute this claim by showing that a number of assumptions crucial to Braybrooke's method are unwarranted. In addition, I show that these and other structural defects in the method are such that Braybrooke's account is guilty of paternalism and "fraud", despite his attempts to avoid these charges. I also indicate why similar methods are unlikely to meet with success.

Disturbing international inequalities in health abound. Life expectancy in Swaziland is half that in Japan. A child unfortunate enough to be born in Angola has 73 times as great a chance of dying before age 5 as a child born in Norway. A mother giving birth in southern sub-Saharan Africa has 100 times as great a chance of dying from her labor as one birthing in an industrialized country. For every mile one travels outward toward the Maryland suburbs from downtown Washington, DC on its underground rail system, life expectancy rises by a year – reflecting the race and class inequities in American health. Are the glaring, even larger, international health inequalities also unjust? All of us no doubt think they are grossly unfortunate. Many of us think they are unfair or unjust. Why should some people be at such a health disadvantage through no fault of their own, losers in a natural and social lottery assigning them birth in an unhealthy place? Others of us are troubled by the absence of the kinds of human relationships that ordinarily give rise to the claims of egalitarian justice that we make on each other – for example, being fellow citizens or even interacting in a cooperative scheme. Who has obligations of justice to reduce these international inequalities? And do those obligations hold regardless of how the inequalities came about? What institutions are accountable for addressing them?

In Globalization and Global Justice , Nicole Hassoun offers advice on practical ways to fulfill obligations to the poor. Our recommendations must be well informed by empirical evidence, and so important research on poverty that suggests we sometimes focus inadvertently on the wrong objects in our attempted assistance efforts, deserves consideration here. We also need guidelines on how to choose from among plausible policy options on how to help the poor. I offer one and explain why some of Hassoun s policy recommendations do not meet these criteria

Frankfurt argues that there are two categories of needs that are at least prima facie morally important (relative to other claims). In this paper I examine Frankfurt's suggestion that two categories of needs, namely, nonvolitional and constrained volitional needs, are eligible for (at least prima facie) moral importance. I show both these categories to be defective because they do not necessarily meet Frankfurt's own criteria for what makes a need morally important. I suggest a further category of needs as being a more promising 'moral importance indicator'.

In this article we argue that the concept of need is as vital for moral theory as it is for moral life. In II we analyse need and its normativity in public and private moral practice. In III we describe simple cases which exemplify the moral demandingness of needs, and argue that the significance of simple cases for moral theory is obscured by the emphasis in moral philosophy on unusual cases. In IV we argue that moral theories are inadequate if they cannot describe simple needs-meeting cases. We argue that the elimination or reduction of need to other concepts such as value, duty, virtue or care is unsatisfactory, in which case moral theories that make those concepts fundamental will have to be revised. In conclusion, we suggest that if moral theories cannot be revised to accommodate needs, they may have to be replaced with a fully needs-based theory. Correspondence:c1 [email protected] g. brock @auckland.ac.nz

In this article I present four central challenges for Hennie Lötter’s book Poverty, Ethics and Justice. The first criticism takes issue with Lötter’s focus on social rather than global justice. Though he seems to be concerned with poverty everywhere, he takes social rather than global justice as the primary unit of analysis and this leads to a certain blindness to the ways in which discharging duties to the poor is a global not just society or state level project. My alternative perspective also gives us more insights into the nature of our duties to one another and can accommodate a wider range of duties. A second set of concerns revolves around what we must do to discharge our duties to the poor and what we need to know to help effectively. We come to appreciate that helping effectively is no easy matter and supplying more guidance would be helpful. Third, after discussing some relevant empirical research, I also discuss the kinds of initiatives that deserve support, that can act as rough guidelines for would-be assisters. These more simplified guidelines do not place such heavy epistemic demands on those aiming to help. Fourth, I explore whether we can offer some more guidelines for determining which of many plausible policy initiatives we should support, given that there are many good ideas and limited resources. I offer one guideline for choosing among what appear to be plausible policies to support.