Understanding Human Need 2e. Dean, Hartley

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

Outline of the book

      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.

Conclusion/Summary

      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.

Challenging questions

      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?

       Part One

       Understandings and concepts

       2

       The needs of humanity

      This chapter will:

      •consider a broad-brush anthropological account of the history of the human species;

      •discuss the variety of ‘humanisms’: that is to say, the plethora of conceptual approaches and belief systems that in contrasting ways prioritise humanity;

      •present a radical humanist analysis of the constitutive or ‘essential’ characteristics of the human species as a means by which to define its needs.

      This chapter sets out to consider what is distinctively ‘human’ about human need. Its conclusion informs the critical stance that informs the rest of the book: for appraising the distinction between that which is necessary to a human being’s existence, and that which is – in a literal sense – essential to her humanity (to which we shall turn in Chapter 3): and for understanding the dynamic relationship between human needs whose meanings are framed through prescribed beliefs and/or reasoning, and those which are framed through direct human experience, feelings and struggles (to which we shall turn in Chapters 4 and 5, respectively).

Human history

      Recorded history began only with the development of systematic forms of written communication some 5,000 years ago. But biological, archaeological and anthropological scholarship tell us that what we now refer to as the human species, homo sapiens, had by that СКАЧАТЬ