Читать книгу Understanding Human Need 2e - Dean Hartley - Страница 13
ОглавлениеThis chapter will introduce the reader to the contested nature of human needs, but then:
•explain the importance of human need by:
◊illustrating how concepts of need figure in central, albeit diverse, ways in our everyday lives and everyday discourse;
◊critically reinterpreting the vital yet contested distinction between absolute need and relative need that continues to dominate and constrain social scientific analysis and debate.
•outline the contents of the rest of this book.
This chapter sets out to explain that ‘need’, though it is a central term in social policy, has proved to be an elusive concept. It will demonstrate how understandings of human need may be reflected not only through social policies but also in wider interpretations – whether commonplace or philosophical – of the ‘human condition’ (Arendt, 1958).
Competing concepts of human need, whether express or implied, are present within all the social sciences. Academic social policy, as an inter- and multidisciplinary subject, draws from across the social sciences including sociology, economics, politics and elements of psychology, philosophy and much else besides. Need, it has been said, is a concept that is ‘central to social policy making’ (Erskine, 2002: 158). Unfortunately, need is also a concept that is interpreted in a mind-boggling variety of ways. Des Gasper has described the proceedings of an academic workshop convened in the 1990s as part of a research project on human needs and wants as follows:
… it became evident that the participants – psychologists, economists, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists – held to no consistent usage of ‘need’, as individuals, not only across disciplines. Yet most of us had read and thought about needs since the 1960s or 1970s. We jumped between different usages almost from one sentence to the next: between … more basic needs versus satisfiers; and verbs versus nouns – and also between needs as explanatory forces and factors, needs as (pre)requisites, and needs as particular sorts of moral priority claims. (Gasper, 2007: 54)
There is a virtually inexhaustible supply of binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of human need, many of which we shall encounter in the course of this book (see Table 1.1 and also the select glossary at the beginning of the book). Many of these distinctions overlap or coincide with each other. Some may be more helpful than others. To pursue them all in any depth would be as exhausting for the reader as for the author. The literature on human need is also replete with a similarly inexhaustible supply of thought experiments and anecdotal vignettes with which to illustrate a variety of philosophical conundrums. They will be used sparingly, if at all, because they can lead readers (and this author) to a sense of despair and inadequacy since nobody has been clever enough to solve every conundrum.
Table 1.1: Binary distinctions between different kinds or levels of need
| absolute | … | relative |
| objective | … | subjective |
| basic | … | higher |
| material | … | non-material |
| positive | … | negative |
| non-instrumental | … | instrumental |
| non-derivative | … | derivative |
| physical/somatic | … | mental/spiritual |
| physiological | … | cultural |
| viscerogenic | … | sociogenic |
| intrinsic | … | procedural |
| natural | … | artificial |
| true | … | false |
| constitutional | … | circumstantial |
| inherent | … | interpreted |
| thin | … | thick |
In this book we shall attempt to weave the disputed threads into a categorisation of needs concepts and to develop a theoretical proposition concerning the relationship between human interdependency, needs and rights. The aim is to pick out and develop an encompassing conceptual overview of human need. It will be argued that need represents a pivotally important idea and, arguably, the single most important organising principle not only for social policy but in human history and for our understanding of humanity. It is pivotal in the sense that it connects an understanding of our interdependency as human beings with arguments about the claims that we can assert against each other. While it remains conceptually elusive, human need is the idea from which other eminently practical and strategic approaches can flow. Or, to put it more precisely, it is through contests over human need that social policy is made. The concluding argument will be essentially normative: the book will map out how we might prefer to think about human need. But along the way we shall be addressing a great many essential empirical questions: questions about what is going on in the world around us and how others accordingly frame their understandings of human need. It has long been acknowledged that ‘the concept of a need involves both “is” and “ought”’ (Thomson, 1987: 109).
It has been suggested already that the way we think about human need is relevant to the ways in which social policies are organised. Functionalist accounts suggest that the analysis of human need ‘provides a clear basis for the analysis of society. And though we should expect the forms of these social institutions to vary among different types of society, some institutions centring about these human need there must always be’ (Fletcher, 1965: 21). It may be supposed that a distinction could be drawn between individual need and social need. The classic riposte to this suggestion was provided by Richard Titmuss:
All collectively provided services are deliberately designed to meet certain socially recognised ‘needs’; they are manifestations, first, of society’s will to survive as an organic whole and, secondly of the expressed wish of all the people to assist the survival of some people. ‘Needs’ may therefore be thought of as ‘social’ and ‘individual’ … [but] … no complete division between the two is conceptually possible; the shading of one into the other changes with time over the life of all societies; it changes with time over the cycle of needs of the individual and the family; it depends on prevailing notions of what constitutes a ‘need’ and in what circumstances; and to what extent, if at all, such needs, when recognised, should be met in the interests of the individual and/or of society. (1955: 62)
It has been said that need is only one of several perspectives from which we might define what we mean by human welfare (Fitzpatrick, 2001: 5). However, the goals of social policy, if they are not directly informed as Titmuss asserts by concerns about human need, will indirectly reflect assumptions about human need. Governmental social policy and academic social policy are each preoccupied – more or less explicitly – with processes of resource distribution on the one hand and the development of human services on the other. Social policy interventions may entail the distribution or redistribution of resources through the administration of taxes and the provision of cash transfers; the provision of education and training and the regulation of employment; the regulation of land use and the environment and the control or provision of housing; the organisation of health and social care and social protection for people who are vulnerable.
The significance of needs
This kind of provision must be informed at some level by assumptions or principles relating to what human beings (as citizens, customers, subjects or clients) might need. However, there are other candidates for the job of prime organising principle, such as wants or preferences; desert and merits; security and social protection. The contention of this book is that, at root, these all amount to different interpretations of, or approaches to, need. Though philosophers may seek it (for example, Thomson, 1987) there cannot be one true meaning of a word like ‘need’. It is a word with a myriad of vernacular meanings.
Consider some of the things that you might say you will need in the course of your own life, or the needs that you consider yourself fortunate to have already met. The important things that might immediately spring to mind are the need for a job; for a place to live; for time to relax; for somebody to love. Our needs as human beings relate to such fundamentals as work, space, time and relationships. Everyday meanings of need might be thought of as falling – more or less – into four broad categories:
Economistic meanings. These are essentially market-oriented. Needs are associated with economic opportunities and consumer preferences. Our needs are reflected in the priorities we should be enabled freely to express in terms of the jobs, the homes, the leisure pursuits and personal relationships we might choose.
Moralistic meanings. These are essentially self-centred, yet authoritarian in nature. Needs are associated not so much with what we might want to have, but dictated by the things we have to do; with a necessitous struggle for jobs and homes and such allowable pleasures and relationships that fate and fortune permit.
Paternalistic meanings. These are essentially socially protectionist in orientation. Needs are associated with common vulnerabilities and what is required so as to preserve a shared social order. We need safe and suitable jobs, homes, recreation and supportive relations in order to take our proper place within society.
Socially reformist meanings. These may be socially liberal or social-democratic in orientation. Needs are associated with the requirements of a ‘progressive’ liberal society.1 We need decent jobs and homes and fulfilling pastimes and social relations in order effectively to participate in and contribute to society.
These suggested meanings are not necessarily systematic. They amount to no more than caricatures of broad, sometimes principled and often complex arguments as to the nature of the human condition. You are unlikely ever to meet anybody who subscribes consistently to just one of these meanings in the terms just portrayed. Our purpose for the moment is to provide not necessarily an accurate description of what particular individuals, commentators or policy makers think or say, so much as a clearer understanding of the complexity of the issues. In practice these meanings are seldom, if ever, applied in complete isolation from one another. They tend to be muddled together. Approaches are combined – often unthinkingly but sometimes with subtlety – in contradictory or complicated ways. This will be illustrated in the chapters that follow.
These meanings will be enlarged upon and explored, while introducing different radically humanist meanings of need. People in fact need more than just jobs. Certainly they need the means to obtain a livelihood, but this should not necessarily depend on wages. It is possible, in some parts of the world, to obtain livelihoods without recourse to a cash economy through subsistence farming; or, in others, to sustain oneself as a lone parent or informal carer through social security benefits. Nonetheless, people most certainly need to be meaningfully active in ‘work’ – regardless of whether it is paid – because this is part of what defines our humanity. ‘Work’ might entail labour, but it might also entail caring, studying, artistic endeavour or all kinds of purposeful and creative activity. And human creativity demands not just skills but also the development and expression of personality (in its literal sense).
People need more than just a place to live. Certainly they need to be appropriately sheltered from the elements, but space and place are important. People need comfortable homes and a healthy, sustainable environment. People need more than just time to relax. Certainly they need enough time to rest, but more particularly they need time to realise their own creativity; to play as well as rest. People most definitely need somebody to love, and somebody to love and care for them in return. Our humanity, it will be argued, depends on the manner of our interconnectedness and interdependency with others.
The absolute/relative distinction
A key debate that has driven a great deal of this complexity concerns a distinction between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ conceptions of need. Is it possible to define what human beings need in absolute terms, or is human need always socially or culturally relative? And if human need is always relative, is there any point in seeking to define it? This has been a critical question for social policy (Doyal & Gough, 1991: Part I). The period of welfare state retrenchment that began in the global North from the 1970s onwards (M. Powell & Hewitt, 2002) has been associated by some writers with a ‘politicisation of need’ (Langan, 1998: 13–21). Towards the end of the last century arguments about the relativity of human need had developed to the point that the very concept of need had among many policy makers become increasingly discredited.
The absolute/relative distinction is intimately caught up with issues of poverty, deprivation and inequality. A person may be said to be absolutely poor if she is deprived of the necessities of life itself. She may be said to be relatively poor if she is deprived of whatever she might need in order to participate in the life of the society to which she belongs. Villagers in a drought-stricken region of sub-Saharan Africa need food and water. But do relatively deprived families living in inner-city public-sector housing developments in the global North really need state-of-the-art-televisions and high-end smartphones, simply because some, or perhaps many, of their neighbours seem to have them? As living standards rise around the world, will human needs continue indefinitely to expand? These are questions to which we shall be returning later in the book. For now, however, it is suggested that the absolute/relative distinction – whether applied to poverty or to need – contains two underlying distinctions. One distinction relates to the extent of human need or needing – thinking of ‘to need’ as a verb and as a distinctive component of all human feeling and experience. The other distinction relates to the essential or identifiable characteristics of human needs – thinking of ‘need’ as a noun and as a thing to be named or defined.
Insofar as the distinction between absolute and relative needs is concerned with the extent of human needing – both in a quantitative and a qualitative sense, this raises questions of measurability on the one hand and philosophy on the other. How much do we need and how far do our needs extend? Should human need be minimally or optimally satisfied? Is it enough that we should be able minimally to survive or is it important that we should be allowed, or even encouraged, so far as possible to flourish (Ignatieff, 1984: Introduction)? Another way of thinking about this – and one we shall be adopting – is to distinguish between thin needing and thick needing (Drover & Kerans, 1993: 11–13; I. Fraser, 1998; and see Walzer, 1994). The terms are, of course, metaphorical, and one of the analogies that has been used to explain them relates to the difference between a thin insipid soup that, though it may be nutritious and wholesome, is not as thoroughly satisfying as a thick rich soup – skilfully or lovingly made – which appeals to our sense of taste and enjoyment. It is a distinction between what might respectively be called minimalist and expansive interpretations of need and of needing.
When it comes to the characteristics of need, human beings are simultaneously both biological and social creatures. We have biological or physiological needs on the one hand, but we have socially derived needs on the other. In practice, because we are embodied social beings (K. Ellis & Dean, 2000), it can be difficult to draw a line that distinguishes between these two kinds of need. But one element of the absolute/relative distinction is a distinction between physical sufficiency and social acceptability. We have bodily needs, but our needs have social meaning and significance. Psychological ‘drives’, for example, may be subject to cultural ‘taboos’. We can’t escape from our bodies, but some of the things that define us as human derive from our social context; from our inter-relationships and interdependency with other human beings; from the dynamics of human history and development. Therefore, the second distinction we shall draw is between, on the one hand, needs that are conceptually or theoretically defined – from the ‘top-down’ – as inherent to the human person and, on the other, needs that may be experienced or practically observed or interpreted – from the ‘bottom-up’ – in the course of everyday lives and processes.
The naming and claiming of human need
Social policies are concerned with the ways in which human needs are met. And academic social policy is concerned with the critical analysis of that continuing process. What we call social policy emerged during the 20th century with the development of capitalist welfare states in the global North (T. H. Marshall, 1950), albeit that there have been different kinds of welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990) that have reflected different and sometimes conflicting approaches and priorities in terms of their underlying understandings of human need.
It is clear, however, that throughout the world – even within the welfare states of the global North – needs have been going unmet, and theorists and practitioners alike have sought better to understand and address the processes that fuel the enduring systemic disadvantages that remain evident, most especially in parts of the global South. However, the concept of human need has remained relatively under-theorised. Attention has been paid to the role of rights-based approaches to the alleviation of poverty and the prevention of disadvantage, albeit that connections between understandings of human need and the framing of social rights have by and large been ambiguous (but see H. Dean, 2015). Throughout history, human beings have in a multitude of ways and with varying degrees of success been finding how to care for one another and to meet their own and each other’s needs. Long before the invention of the welfare state, it was through the processes of naming and claiming needs, the social negotiation of claims and the mutual recognition of needs that human beings have survived.
What we now call social policy and the framing of social rights may, in retrospect, be seen as integral to human life and the naming and claiming of human need. The understanding of needs is critical to an understanding of what it means to be human.
The argument sketched out earlier informs the structure of this book and key distinctions that underlie the ideas that are developed throughout it. The book falls into two parts: the first is concerned with concepts and understandings; the second with implications and debates.
Part I begins in Chapter 2 with an explanation of the concept of humanity and of the human species’ constitutive characteristics that will inform the approach this book takes to human need. Chapter 3 will draw out the key distinction – between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ needs and needing. Particular meaning is attributed to the distinction by articulating it with different understandings of human well-being. The discussion draws on classic philosophical arguments and current debates about the nature of ‘happiness’ and what might be meant by human ‘dignity’. Chapters 4 and 5 draw out the key distinction mentioned earlier between theoretical ‘top-down’ and practical ‘bottom-up’ approaches to need. The former relates to needs that are held by philosophers, ideologues and scholars to vest in, or inherently belong to, the human subject; the latter to needs that are understood, inferred or expressed by or on behalf of people themselves. Clearly, the two approaches interact and are related, but it is the ongoing nature of that relationship that matters. Chapter 6 brings the threads of this discussion together by articulating the crudely sketched needs-based approaches outlined earlier in this chapter with the key conceptual distinctions explored in the intervening chapters; it illustrates how each approach is manifested in different kinds of social policy intervention; and it reflects upon how in the current era recent events and debates regarding welfare and well-being may unfold.
In Part II, Chapter 7 firstly revisits debates around the disadvantages that occur when human needs go unmet and the processes by which, throughout human history, advantage has accrued to some segments of humanity at the expense of others. It will consider how this is manifested through the poverty, exclusion, inequalities and injustices that affect human societies and in terms of systemic mal-distribution of resources and, more fundamentally, the ways in which at every level human needs are differentially recognised and fulfilled. Chapter 8 explores how needs-based approaches can be translated into or articulated through rights-based approaches, and advances a new way of theorising the nature of social rights and global justice. Chapter 9 re-examines the politics of human need and argues in favour of a radical humanist ‘needs-first’ ethic.
Each chapter concludes with a summary of its main points. This may assist not only student readers but those who wish first to browse the book to determine its principal contribution. Readers interested in a framework within which to situate competing interpretations of need may wish to focus on Chapters 3 to 6. Readers interested in policy implications may wish to focus on Chapters 7 and 8. Readers from across the social sciences and beyond, it is hoped, will wish critically to engage with the radical humanist approach to needs developed principally in Chapters 2 and 9. And posed at the end of each chapter are two ‘challenging questions’: invitations to the reader to engage with the contested and contestable dimensions of the discussions this book presents.
This chapter has:
•Provided some insight into the complexity of human need as a term that is used in a variety of different and contradictory ways among policy makers and social scientists alike.
•Suggested that the idea remains, nonetheless, of central importance.
•Broadly identified four of the ways in which human need may be thought about. These have been characterised (for now) as the economistic, moralistic, paternalistic, and socially reformist approaches.
•Argued that the essential distinction between absolute and relative needs can be understood in two ways:
◊first, in terms of a distinction between thin needs and thick needs; a distinction concerned with the quantitative extent and qualitative nature of human need;
◊second, in terms of a distinction between theoretical (top-down) and practical (bottom-up) understandings of need; between the needs that individuals may be conceptualised as having by virtue of being human and needs that are experienced in the course of everyday human existence.
•Explained that this book, in developing these arguments, will contend that human need is best understood in the context of human interdependency and as the basis upon which social rights may be constructed and claimed. It will argue for a radical humanist understanding of needs.
1.Why should it be difficult to define what human beings need?
2.Can any of the binary distinctions in Table 1.1 be regarded by themselves as meaningful or helpful?
