Abstract

The main objective of the paper is to study the concept of human needs and develop a framework for thinking about human needs that will prove useful for the development of social and political theory. The inquiry consists of three different approaches to this problem and concludes with a discussion on real human needs and some suggestions for future projects that are grounded on the results of this study. ;In the first part of the inquiry, the concept of need is developed as a hybrid concept with both empirical and normative dimensions. A careful distinction is made between needs and wants and needs and moral entitlements. This results in a concept of needs that has relatively independent criteria of ascription and is couchable in terms of a purely extensional language. ;In the second part of this inquiry, special attention is given to epistemological aspects of "need" and "want" ascription. A privileged access thesis is developed for first-person knowledge claims about wants; while a more complicated analysis of various theoretical categories of need is developed. ;In the third part of this inquiry, an analysis of the normative aspects of need ascription is developed. The results suggest that categories of core human needs are at least partially influenced by culturally-specific norms and that the objective of metabolic norms of human health is likewise influenced by these norms. Included in this part is some discussion on the relationship between core needs and various socially-constructed needs, and the relationship of such needs to culturally-specific norms of human excellence and well-being. This analysis of needs as social conditions for human survival brings full circle to the ordinary language analysis with which the paper begins, in so far as the ambiguity of "needs" talk is best construed as a reflection of the dialectical status of human needs within the context of human history