Abstract

Human needs play a crucial role in the moral evaluation of distributions of goods and services. This role is attested by the rhetorical effectiveness of appeals to needs. But what moral currency do these appeals to needs. But what moral currency do these appeals have? Which needs are morally most important? ;I argue that our morally most important needs are what we require or find indispensable in order to avoid harm as damage, or as the impairment of our fundamental capabilities. To illustrate their moral importance, I show that these needs are more important than are competing wants or desires. To this end, I offer a novel defense of the intuitively plausible view that universal moral claims to assistance in meeting needs have a presumptive precedence over competing claims to assistance in satisfying wants or desires. These needs have a presumptive precedence over competing wants largely because one person's reasons to meet these needs are presumptively stronger than another person's reasons to satisfy competing wants. ;Instead of considering the full moral importance of what we need in order to avoid harm as damage--an evaluation that requires studying the role played by these needs in other fundamental distributive principles, such as property rights--I turn to consider two challenges to this principle of precedence to needs in assistance. Is this principle not too demanding in requiring that one help others meet their needs before allowing one to help others satisfy competing wants and desires? Is this principle not too demanding in requiring one to help others meet their needs beyond what it would be fair for one to do? ;Although the first challenge is intuitively appealing, I reject it because the suggestions made about where to draw the limits to moral requirements of assistance on grounds of costs or burdensomeness are unsatisfactory. In order to evaluate the second challenge, I propose that we understand fair shares of a collective obligation of assistance as equally burdensome shares. I then argue we have little reason to think we are morally required to do only what it is fair for us to do in this sense