Why Prioritize Needs?

The presumption underlying the scientific engagement with need-based justice is that neither the principle of equity nor the principle of equality safeguards a distribution that ensures the preservation of human dignity through the satisfaction of needs as a fundamental proviso of human sociality. In this introductory chapter, we first show that in the context of other principles of distributive justice, the satisfaction of needs takes a prominent position both empirically and in political philosophy. We then proceed to discussing fundamental contributions to the theory of need-based justice and outline the perspective that the present volume adds to the literature. At the core is a process model of need-based justice that conceptually differentiates the identification of needs, the social and political recognition of needs, and the consequences of need-based distributions. We suggest that these empirical questions are associated with normative claims about the consistency, the legitimacy, and the sustainability of need-based justice. The chapter concludes with a brief outline of the following chapters.