Introduction

Abstract

This book argues that basic human needs can be shown to exist, that individuals have a right to the optimal satisfaction of these needs and that all human liberation should be measured by assessing the degree to which such satisfaction has occurred. Part I introduces the issue of individual and cultural relativity through examining and rejecting arguments that human needs are reducible to individual or collective preferences. In doing so, it explores the grammar of "need' in ordinary discourse, illustrating its relationship to more general arguments about relativism. Part II argues that "health' and "autonomy' constitute the most basic human needs which are the same for everyone. It is further argued that all humans have a right to optimum need-satisfaction. For this to occur, certain societal preconditions - political, economic and ecological - must be fulfilled. The theory of need that emerges is then operationalised in Part III. Human needs, it is argued, are neither subjective preferences best understood by each individual, nor static essences best understood by planners or party officials. They are universal and knowable, but our knowledge of them, and of the satisfiers necessary to meet them, is dynamic and open-ended. The book concludes by endorsing recent proposals for a mixed economy which also combines elements of both central planning and democratic decision-making - a "dual strategy' for the optimisation of need satisfaction. -from Authors