Physical Health and Autonomy: the Basic Needs of Persons

Abstract

Attempts to deny the objectivity of need have proved popular and superficially plausible. People do have strong feelings about what they need and these feelings can vary enormously between cultures and over time. In Britain, for example, Townsend found that as many as 44 per cent of those he defined as severely deprived felt no deprivation themselves (1979a, p. 423). Yet there also appears to be a consensus about the range of necessities which form a poverty line below which no one should be allowed to fall (Mack and Lansley, 1985, ch. 3). Conflicting evidence of this kind suggests that subjective feeling is not a reliable determination of human need, a point reinforced by the fact that we can strongly desire things which are seriously harmful and, in our ignorance, not desire things which we require to avoid such harm. But the intelligibility of this fact seems to depend on the belief that there is something objective and universal about human need: ‘objective’ in that its theoretical and empirical specification is independent of individual preference, and ‘universal’ in that its conception of serious harm is the same for everyone.