Needs, Rights, and Collective Obligations

Summary

Normative political discussion can be conducted in a variety of different vocabularies. One such is the vocabulary of rights; another is that of needs. Others, with which I shall be less immediately concerned, are the vocabularies of common good and perhaps—although one might regard it as such a general term as to be common to almost all the terms in which one might conduct normative discourse—that of moral obligation.

It is often pointed out that the use of particular normative vocabularies can have significant effects on political practice. So for example, it can be said that the vocabulary of needs carries with it implications of urgency which talk of preferences—which in this context almost always seem to attract the epithet ‘mere’—cannot. To those who think that the notion of need can play a valuable role in political discourse, this can be supposed to be one of its virtues. To those who are suspicious of it, it may, equally seem like further grounds for suspicion.

Similarly, use of the vocabulary of rights is often thought to encourage those designated as right-holders to take an active role in securing the new or continued performance of such obligations as they take to be owed to them. By contrast, use of the vocabulary of obligation may encourage them to take up a more passive or less strident attitude to the same matters.