The Tyranny of “Need”

The inflation of need-based claims in “equity” and popular social justice talk inevitably leads to perpetual conflict, and the exertion of arbitrary power over various societal institutions

Photo by Nikko Macaspac on Unsplash

The recent introduction of “equity” terminology into political discourse—accompanied by the relentless advertisement of this supposedly new and refreshing concept through various commercial, bureaucratic, and pseudo-academic channels—puts much emphasis on addressing people’s “needs”. “Equity” advocates often emphasize that while equality means “assuming everyone are the same, and treating everyone the same”, “equity” involves addressing everyone’s unique needs. Here is a sample from a representative YouTube “equity” video (available here):

“Equity is not the same as equality. What if the shoe industry designed all shoes to fit only one size? What if it made all shoes equal? That sounds ridiculous, because we’re all different sizes. We don’t try to make everyone fit the same shoe. We design for variability. That’s equity. Each person is provided access to what is needed. To further illustrate this point, consider giving everyone the same box to stand on to look over a fence [Readers are probably familiar with the image usually presented here, of three people of different heights trying to look over a fence]. This is equality. But it doesn’t make any sense to give someone something to stand on if it’s not needed. Instead, we want to provide what is actually needed for each person to have access.”

I have written here about the misguided line of reasoning underpinning the identification of the value of equality and its implementation in real-life situations with “treating everyone the same”, or assuming everyone is the same. The discussion there also shows how, under the guise of a “soft” and nuanced replacement for the supposedly rigid equality, “equity” talk effectively pushes for radical agenda that seeks to change accepted and well-established views about the aims of various societal institutions—and that whether people are treated equally or “equitably” within this newly-minted ethical system is, to a large extent, not the main point of this transition. Particularly, “equity” talk seeks to change the broadly accepted view that various professional and business organizations, along with other societal institutions, can have particular aims—for instance, developing and selling particular products—other than providing for people’s “needs”, and that they are free to pursue them.

In addition to noticing the radical change promoted by “equity” discourse, it’s important to fully understand what the frequent appeals to “need” within it, and within populist social justice discourse more generally, actually involve. As we’ll see, contrary to the image that “equity” advocacy is trying to create, such appeals to need are not “soft” requests for general consideration and empathy at all: they are (implicit) justice claims, which imply that something—a situation, policy, decision, an institution, etc.—is seriously objectionable, and that swift action to correct it is required. Moreover, need is a particularly strong and demanding basis for making justice claims, as it inherently signals that a situation must be urgently changed or corrected to meet someone’s need—and that this should take priority over other considerations, including the rights and interests of people who do not voice any need-based demands. Particularly in the highly-specified and fractured form in which they appear in “equity” talk, such demands cannot realistically be satisfied—definitely not when multiple claims are mounted simultaneously—and, as a result, embracing “equity” discourse in evaluating the functioning of various institutions will likely lead to constant conflict and strife.

At the same time, because “equity” discourse places no principled limits on the grounds for making need-based claims, endorsing it will inevitably lead to the (potentially, infinite) proliferation of such claims, and then to their selective and biased application—often on the basis of reference to broad group identities and misguided, generalized notions of “victimhood hierarchy”. This is especially worrying where such need-based claims are inserted into the legal discourse, which allows various legal and political actors to exert relentless, arbitrary pressure and influence over the functioning of societal institutions, potentially leading not only to continuous erosion of the law’s impartiality but to seriously undermining the rights and interests of people who find themselves (sometimes repeatedly and systematically) on the receiving side of need-based “equity” and justice claims.

To effectively confront these types of arguments, especially given the high emotional traction they have for genuinely empathetic and concerned people—it’s necessary to have a better understanding of their flaws, and why they are likely to lead to the dynamic just described. Let’s examine these step-by-step.

The starting point: need as a plausible and important basis for making justice claims—in a limited set of circumstances

It is not a coincidence that need-based claims have historically taken the central stage in many philosophical discussions of distributive justice, equality, and discrimination: certain situations intuitively call for such claims and lend them considerable support. In my previous essay here, for instance, I cite Thomas Nagel, one of the Twentieth Century’s most notable analytic philosophers, who starts his discussion of equality by examining how a family’s choice between two places of residence might affect two of the family’s children: one who is normal and quite happy, and would be better served by living in a suburban environment where he can grow up peacefully, and another who suffers a painful handicap that can be better treated in an urban environment, where the family’s general standard of living is going to be lower. Nagel then discusses where the parents should decide to live, and which decision—to move to the suburban or urban environment—would be the more egalitarian one, that is, the one that treats the children more equally, given their different needs and the different decisions’ influence on their wellbeing.¹

Regardless of what one may think is the answer to the question here—how exactly should the children’s different needs and interests be evaluated, and how they should be balanced against each other in making a decision on where to live—the question seems compelling, in that many people would agree that the situation does give rise to a moral dilemma that should be decided based on considerations pertaining, by and large, to how each option would satisfy or provide for each child’s needs. This is so intuitive that it hardly needs explication: parents naturally consider these kinds of questions on a daily basis in making decisions about how to raise their children, and those decisions often have a tremendous effect on children’s well-being. These types of family scenarios, along with scenarios involving medical treatment and emergency situations (where a decision needs to be made about whom to save and why), have indeed provided a fertile ground for discussions on how certain decisions should be made given that we want to treat people justly, fairly, and equally, and how certain resources should be distributed in certain situations where different people have valid need-based claims for them.

But there is also a serious problem with extrapolating from these types of scenarios, or with generalizing the conclusions reached based on such discussions to other contexts involving questions relating to equality, fairness, and justice. The problem is, well, that most life situations do not involve decisions made about young children by parents who are responsible for their well-being, nor do they typically involve—outside of contexts such as medical treatment and emergencies—helpless individuals who are dependent on the relevant decision-maker for their well-being, and have no influence on how they are being treated.² While this may seem initially confusing, it does appear that the strength of need-based justice or equality claims that are raised within the context of family situations is tied with their highly particular and limited scope of application: that is, with the fact that they are raised against the background of family relationships, especially those involving young children. There are, however, crucial dissimilarities between those family situations and the situations where “equity” arguments are typically invoked—for instance, in calls for “equity” in the workplace—which render need-based justice claims made in the latter context largely out of place, and sometimes completely inappropriate. 

Nevertheless, this is exactly the analogy or implicit equivalency that is often invoked in appeals to need in “equity” and social justice talk. “Equity” advocates often seem to presuppose that employers, for instance, are responsible for satisfying their employee’s needs, in a manner similar to that in which parents are responsible for providing for their children’s needs, and generally take care of their children’s welfare. It’s hard to ignore the infantilizing and patronizing undertones that often accompany descriptions of what “equity” means, and what its implementation would require. Here is, for instance, one representative example from a standard “equity” advocacy video, which appears to pertain generally to all life situations involving adults:

“If we value everyone, we need to equip each one to be successful in all areas of society […] the idea that everyone needs the same thing doesn’t work. Instead, everyone needs different things to provide that access to opportunity. […]. When everyone has access, everyone has a chance to reach their potential and contribute to society.”

And here is another example from a discussion of equity in the workplace:

“Equity is about each of us getting what we need to succeed based on where we are and where we want to go. Equality without equity doesn’t set everyone up for success. If a company treats everyone equally without realizing that certain individuals or teams need specific support or resources, there will be inequality. Equity is the pathway to true equality.”

At a later point, the “equity” advocate being interviewed makes the analogy between parents and employers explicit:

“We do that intuitively […] as a parent you don’t treat each of your children the same, because they have different personalities. So we do embrace equity very intuitively to have an equal outcome so all our kids are equally happy. I think that it’s just sometimes [referring to workplace decisions] we have to overcome this mental block of ‘oh, it’s special treatment’, I can’t do everything to make everybody happy.”

The host then sums it up:

“My mom always said, fair is not always equal!”

Talk of “being given what one needs in order to succeed and reach one’s full potential”, and “equipping people with what they need to be able to contribute to society” unmistakably draws on a general description of what parents should do for their young children, particularly in the process of raising them—that is, attending to their needs and personal traits in a considerate and empathetic manner, so they develop necessary life skills and grow up to be happy adults. But, of course, employers can’t “give” the same thing to their employees, nor is it employers’ responsibility, properly understood, to just “give” employees various “stuff”: contrary to the situation between parents and children, employers engage in an exchange with their employees, where they give them very specific things—salaries, financial benefits, and maybe various professional development and socializing opportunities—in exchange for employees’ contribution to, say, furthering the business aims of a company. Employees’ needs, then, cannot, and should not, have a role in justice, fairness, or equality demands directed at their employers that is analogous to the role that children’s needs have with respect to their parents’ ethical duties (or, for that matter, the role that patients’ needs have in providing a basis for claims that they can appropriately mount at the medical institutions treating them).  

“Equity” claims that rely on such false equivalencies are, then, off to a wholly misguided start.³ It’s also important to notice some of the other features that the implicit analogy to the parent-child relationship unnoticeably imports into such discussions. Young children are uniformly helpless, and depend on their parents for providing them with their basic needs and supporting their healthy development—including, of course, by providing them with love, support, or acceptance. But, again, adults are not similarly positioned, and are not similarly dependent on others with regard to their basic needs, nor with regard to something like their need for social acceptance and inclusion—the latter, as we’ll see below, plays an important part in some need-based demands.

Accordingly, then, we should keep in mind that there’s always someone on the receiving end of demands for need-based justice and equality. Often these are other adults, but sometimes these may be children, or other needy individuals, including helpless adults—especially when the indirect, sometimes not immediately observable, consequences of accepting various justice and equality demands are taken into consideration. As elaborated below, this is a result of the inherently comparative nature of many justice, fairness, and equality claims: accepting someone’s claim that a certain thing is unjust or unequal almost always comes at the expense of someone else. Nevertheless, the misleading one-sidedness of invocations of such demands is a common thread in “equity” and other popular social justice discourses. The focus is always on one side of the equation—the needs of the person or group of people who are mounting the claim—and not on the other side. Here too, then, the analogy to the parents-children relationship is highly misleading: in many situations to which “equity” arguments are meant to apply, there’s no reason to uniformly presuppose that one party is the needier or weaker one, and that the other party should be held responsible for satisfying its needs, any more than the other way around. Nevertheless, this is precisely the implicit assumption that “equity” advocates seem to make with respect, for instance, to employees, and many other parties who are frequently positioned as those whose need-based claims should be heard and accepted by others.

The emotionally manipulative, sometimes even extortive, undertones that often accompany such talk shouldn’t be ignored either (in their more extreme forms, these turn into claims that not giving people certain goods is equivalent to failing to provide them with life-saving medical care, or failing to provide for children’s basic needs).⁴ Not only do “equity” advocates often implicitly invoke intuitions and instincts that are associated with family situations in an attempt to support the claim that certain adults are responsible for satisfying the needs of other adults, but those needs are often conflated with children’s needs for emotional support, acceptance, and approval. This conflation is, again, not accidental, and often masks a manipulative appeal to some of the most basic (positive) human instincts. Situations where real or perceived infractions of fairness within the family are identified in children’s minds with lack of love, support, or acceptance, are familiar to almost anyone—and attentive parents often try very hard to avoid them. Social justice talk often exploits this natural tendency by, again, implicitly equating fair treatment and general social acceptance by the wider society with such parental duties to ensure that children are equally loved and accepted—and then equating lack of fair treatment and broad societal acceptance with a failure to provide for people’s more basic needs. In other words, as we’ll see below, popular social justice talk often capitalizes on the adequate ethical intuitions and protective instincts of empathetic and concerned people, by leading them to misapply those to wholly inappropriate contexts.

Expansive claims for “need”-based justice and fairness cannot work in everyday situations

Apart from all of these problems, attempts to follow the “equity” need-based line of reasoning in guiding the policies and decisions made by various institutions are inevitably going to fail, and lead to many conflicts on the way. This is because of two important features of such claims.

First, they are very strong and demanding claims—they are appeals to justice, which most people understand as claims that certain states of affairs must obtain, or that situations, actions, or policies that are unjust must be corrected or changed—even against countervailing considerations (for instance, even if that would lead to reducing an organization’s productivity and not hiring additional, deserving employees). Need-based demands for justice are particularly strong and demanding, as there is an inherent sense of urgency attached to them (compared, say, to claims that make reference to people’s preferences or interests), and they implicitly convey the message that priority should be given to satisfying them over other types of claims. Justice claims are also, in many contexts, comparative in nature, which means that the satisfaction of one person’s claims entails that another person is going to lose something; for instance, if one employee receives better resources as a result of mounting the claim that the current distribution of resources within a company is “inequitable”, this is likely going to be at the expense of other employees, or the employer.

On the other hand, when permissively understood, or when not constrained to a certain set of basic needs, there is no principled limit to the number and degree of specificity of need-based claims that individuals can mount. As a result, “equity” discourse principally supports, and encourages, the proliferation of such claims. Imagine the many things that can be characterized as employees’ “needs” under the expansive definition suggested by the quotes mentioned above: one employee might need quiet time, but another might need a more stimulating work environment; one person prefers orderly and structured meetings, while another “needs” to creatively brainstorm and bounce ideas; one employee “needs” tight deadlines to be productive, while his teammates “need” a flexible schedule. “Equity” and popular social justice discourse encourage the reframing of all of these innocuous preferences as need-based justice demands, maintaining that things must be done in a certain way, or that certain unjust situations should be urgently corrected. But often there’s no way of even completely satisfying each of these separate claims, let alone all of them simultaneously (regardless of whether they are justified or not).  

Moreover, when so expansively defined, people’s needs often have a subjective aspect to them, and some of them are entirely constituted by subjective attitudes and emotional states. What a person “needs” from a workplace relationship under such definition may depend, for instance, on their own expectations and how they tend to interpret and respond to certain work situations—along with their aspirations, moods, and a series of other personal traits and attitudes. And some people may have a misguided and narcissistic view of their own needs, and of whether and when others are responsible for satisfying them. By contrast, justice claims, especially those that appeal to one’s needs, imply that they are justified according to objective standards: they call for certain situations or things to be changed because they are purportedly objectively unjust or “inequitable”, and certain decisions or policies are similarly accused of being objectively inequitable or unfair. The specific appeal to “needs” further implies that these claims are based on things that people objectively need across the board—such as food and water.

Hence, contrary to the happy picture that “equity” advocates are trying to convey, where everyone gets what they “need” and organizations are rendered overall happier and better as a result, the broad and subjective basis for need-based claims that “equity” discourse encourages is likely to lead to the opposite outcome. People who are more likely to mount demanding need-based claims are those who tend to see their own needs, rightly or wrongly, as ones that others have to accommodate. Alongside this familiar social dynamic, repeated emphasis on “needs” is likely to encourage people to become, well, needier, and to genuinely feel that they must have certain things to be productive, or that certain workplace or other day-to-day normal situations must be changed so their needs can be met. 

All in all, then, it is highly misleading to paint “equity” as a soft, considerate, and nuanced substitute for more traditional justice and equality claims. Rather, “equity” talk preserves the demandingness and stringency associated with traditional appeals to justice and fairness, along with the sense of urgency and priority that inherently attaches to need-based claims. In contrast with such traditional appeals, however, equity discourse does not limit the scope of justice claims to a defined and relatively narrow set of circumstances; instead, it sees such claims as applicable to just any life situation, and maintains that they might consist in whatever one may subjectively view as their “need”, hence encouraging an ever-growing set of demands based on people’s idiosyncratic and highly specific preferences. This necessarily narrows the scope of everyday disputes that can be resolved through negotiation and compromise, and encourages constant conflict in normal day-to-day situations.       

                         

“Need”-based equity talk eventually collapses into talk about group identity, where basic needs are conflated with “social” needs

We can see, then, why in many real-life situations there’s no possibility of satisfying, and sometimes even specifying and enumerating, the many claims that might be invoked where “needs” are so expansively defined. There’s no wonder, then, that appeals to people’s needs in populist social justice talk quickly collapse, after some attempts at such elaboration, into broad and unspecified claims about the “needs” of certain identity groups (defined by the usual suspects among identity markers, such as race and gender). This happens, in part, because there is no way of logically organizing such claims so they could give rise to actual practical recommendations—for instance, by pointing to concrete steps that employers can take to respond to their employees’ “needs”. As is the recurring theme in many situations where populist social justice (or “critical-theoretical”) modes of thinking enter the picture, this is simply a result of the fact that the picture is, in terms of the many different claims and arguments that need consideration, very complex; and populist social justice advocates want a quick solution. Hence, common “equity” talk often ignores this complexity entirely, and dissolves it into a pre-prepared “framework” that is uniformly based on crudely defined group identities. This works particularly well with need-based justice claims, as this pre-prepared “framework” often comes with settled preconceptions about which identity group is the weak or oppressed one and which group is the privileged one, and the implicit assumption that one party is responsible for providing for the other party’s needs almost automatically mutates at this point into a group-based format.

This is beautifully illustrated by the following “equity” conversation, which took place in a Canadian women’s talk show. First, the guest speaker, an equity advocate, starts by enumerating the multiple grounds that might give rise to different “need”-based claims in the workplace in her particular case:

“I wasn’t born in this country [implying that this is a disadvantage] […] I did not go to a Canadian school, so my social circles and access are totally different from yours [referring to the host] […] English is my first language but we also speak French-Creole […] so I tend to use different words. […]  I moved here alone, I do have a family in Ottawa and I do have a sister here, but I moved here all by myself […] I have a Caribbean-French-Creole accent and this tends to remind people that I don’t belong here […]” etc.

As readers can see, that is an entirely arbitrary list of parameters, and there’s no reason to suspect that it is anywhere near exhaustive. Why, then, choose whether one is a native speaker and lives near their family over, say, whether they suffer from enhanced noise sensitivity, or find common conventions of conversational distance uncomfortable, as justified grounds for making need-based claims in the workplace? In any event, many of the mentioned things—having dual citizenship, being bilingual, or having lived in multiple cultures—can be evaluated either way, that is, as making the person less or more disadvantaged or needy in various workplace situations. Selecting these particular parameters over others, evaluating whether they are good or bad in terms of generating people’s workplace needs, along with the meaning they have for particular individuals does not seem to rest on any discernable, generally applicable standards here. Yet at this point of the conversation, these parameters are still appropriately examined in light of how they are likely to generate the specific needs of identifiable, individual employees. But when the “equity” advocate is asked to specify what can employers do to implement these ideas, this quickly and almost unnoticeably devolves into generalized demands based on blanket group identities: 

“There are clear patterns of women’s inferior access to resources and opportunities. Women are systematically underrepresented in decision-making roles and processes that actually shape our societies and our realities […] and again, it’s like recruiting both a male and a female employee, but do we give the female employee access to opportunities? And resources? And rewards to expand her career and help her grow, so she can get a seat at the board of directors’ table? […] maybe they both got the same opportunities in terms of getting hired, but when we look at it through an equity mindset we’re looking at women’s unique needs […] this is about women working in companies examining recruitment practices and policies […] are you screening for candidates across the spectrum of gender diversity, and also go beyond this, looking at race, looking at abilities, looking at ageism […] what needs would be different for those individuals based on these multiple definitions of identity.”

The reference to a generalized “equity mindset” here—and similar appeals to “equity lens”, “framework”, etc.—is not accidental: it’s a direct result of the lack of discernable, valid standards for generating, evaluating, and deciding between various “equity” and justice claims in this and similar discussions. When the expansion of the definition of “need” leads to enormous inflation in justice and fairness-related claims for decision-makers to consider, all one can do to try and arbitrate between them and reach some practical resolutions is defer to an arbitrary standard, and vague appeals to group identity through a generalized “equity mindset” are an immediately available—and politically expedient—arbitrary standard, that can then generate a false sense of orderly progress in such muddled discussions.     

Expansive interpretations of “need”-based justice claims lead to a biased application of the law

Unfortunately, this biased approach to generating need-based justice claims is not restricted to aspirational, non-committal talk by various “equity” advocates and activists. It’s been advocated by academics with real influence on how the legal system, for example, operates. One notable example here is Sophia Moreau, a noted Canadian law professor, who in a recent book argues that discrimination claims—whose content she ties with the content of anti-discrimination law—can be based, among other things, on showing that certain entities or people have failed in providing “basic goods” to others. She defines “basic goods” as “something [that people] are owed, by virtue of certain fundamental human needs” (122; emphasis mine).

Whatever one may think of this claim about the nature of wrongful discrimination and the appropriate role of need-based claims in legal anti-discrimination protections, the more interesting part is Moreau’s characterization of “basic goods”—and by extension, basic, or fundamental human needs. While she starts her discussion from a clear case of a basic good (or a basic need)—drinking water—this quickly transmutes into something very different:

“Lack of access to clean drinking water prevents Indigenous people from participating fully in many of the institutions that comprise Canadian society. And, particularly because of the stereotypes surrounding indigenous peoples—that they are unclean, lazy in their habits, and primitive in their practices—lack of access to clean drinking water also prevents them from being seen as full and equal participants in Canadian society. […] if [a] group of people is left without [a basic] good for a long time, this may send the social message that they are not worthy of it. And this in turn may contribute to their actually being seen by others, and also being seen in their own eyes, as less than fully or equal participants in their society.” (126)

Initially, then, Moreau appears to make an innocuous argument about how some clear-cut, extreme cases of deprivation may lead to repugnant forms of severe social exclusion. The problem here is that she quickly moves to argue for a conceptual tie between the provision of basic goods, or the satisfaction of people’s basic needs, and something like a broad, generalized form of group-based social acceptance (where, as we’ll see below, what constitutes a group for the purposes of the arguments is entirely arbitrary). She then continues to argue, in the opposite direction, that only “underprivileged” groups, or those that suffer from pre-existing lack of general social acceptance, may legitimately raise discrimination claims that are based on failure to provide them with basic goods, or satisfy their basic needs. In effect, then, Moreau conditions such need-based discrimination claims on independent background facts about one’s group-based social positioning (while at the same time preserving the sense of strength, urgency, and priority intuitively associated with need-based claims). As illustrated below, she also proceeds to significantly relax her view of what should be included in the definition of basic goods or needs, and selectively mentions under this banner various things that are hardly uncontroversial examples.

Setting aside the problems with the content of this argument—many would deem the suggested conceptual tie wholly implausible, as whether one needs water or food is hardly tied with one’s supposed social positioning—the boundaries of such argument are entirely murky. While there are some clear-cut situations where (extreme) deprivation leads to obvious social exclusion across a broad range of societal activities, this is hardly the case in many real-life situations that fall within Moreau’s vague and expansive definitions. Under this broadly applicable argument, then, there is no plausible grounds for maintaining that some groups should have their need-based discrimination claims acknowledged, while others shouldn’t; and here too, this problem is swiftly set aside by a uniform appeal to blanket group identities, and to biased, broad presuppositions about their social positioning:  

“How people are seen by others, and how they see themselves, depends on […] facts about the particular stereotypes associated with them. As I have mentioned, indigenous people in Canada have for many years been stereotyped as unclean, lazy in their habits, and primitive in their practices. So the absence of clean drinking water on their reserves will certainly, in light of these stereotypes, prevent them from being seen as full and equal participants in Canadian society.”

“Contrast this case, however, with the case of other remote communities that lack clean drinking water, but that are not indigenous and have no history of being thought of as unclean and incompetent.⁵ In most cases, these other communities have simply had the misfortune of being located near the sites of chemical spills or polluting mines. […] they have been denied a good that is necessary if they are to participate in society as equals, and their lives will, at least for a time, be much more difficult, and their other opportunities, fewer. But, because they have not historically been stereotyped as unclean and primitive, this lack of water will likely not lead to their being seen by others or by themselves, as less than full or equal participants.”

(126-127; emphasis mine).

You get the picture, then. Need-based discrimination claims made by Indigenous people are legitimate and should be accepted—because, apparently, they are currently perceived in some circles as a weak and victimized group. But identical claims made by people who just happen to suffer from serious deprivation of clean drinking water should not be offered the same consideration, even though these people are similarly deprived of basic goods and their basic needs are not being met—and despite possibly suffering similar problems of social exclusion. The argument then continues to take an overtly politicized tone:

“Consider a remote community comprised of a group of scientists, who have chosen to work in the Arctic but discover that the water near their site is contaminated. […] Even if their water crisis persisted for years and made their scientific work much more laborious and their lives, more difficult, they would likely not be seen as less than full and equal participants in society. However, again the background social facts matter: if they were a group of scientists investigating climate change and the government’s refusal to provide proper water treatment facilities were part of a concerted program to deny credibility to proponents of climate change, then this too might, over time, affect how others see them or how they saw themselves.” (127; emphasis mine).

Readers can see, then, how abstract arguments appealing to generalized notions of social acceptance and inclusion are likely to operate in reality—and, to the extent that such academic legal works influence decisions made by legal practitioners, how they are likely to be implemented in making concrete legal judgments. Relevantly similar vague arguments, pointing to the partly-theoretical possibility of some generalized, partial form of social exclusion resulting from the lack of certain goods, and similar speculations about how the lack of certain goods could lead to self-esteem deficits, could be applied to almost any other group of people (when such groups are realistically characterized). Hence, making concrete judgments about specific cases based on such arguments is necessarily going to be selective and biased—and would often correspond to one’s biased preconceptions and political affiliations. Later in the discussion, for instance, Moreau continues to argue that non-aboriginal Canadian fishermen were not treated as second-class citizens when they were denied a special fishing license issued to aboriginal fishermen—despite the claim touching, presumably, on their basic need for making a living; but that gays’ claims for instituting gay marriage are comfortably grounded in appeals to their basic needs, because marriage is, for some reason, something that falls neatly within the definition of basic goods that society must provide (pp. 127-129).

Conclusion: The dangers of expansive “need”-based justice claims in political and legal discourse

Moreau’s discussion is not an isolated example: the argumentative moves described here are a recurring theme in many similar academic and non-academic writings and discussions. First, hugely expansive and vague claims about people’s “needs” are being put forward. This leads to a huge, potentially infinite, inflation in available need-based claims. But then one has to select which ones are plausible, and which ones should be prioritized and attended to first. The fact that there’s no practical way to do that (and arguably not a theoretically plausible way of doing so either) gives various advocates and activists the faux argumentative support they need to pre-select certain claims based on their own preferences and biases, and re-organize all of them in a way that is easily digestible to the wider public by introducing broad appeals to group identity and other expedient political concepts. At the same time, the allure of such claims, which are deemed to reflect the genuine urgent needs of people requiring society’s help, is retained.

The expansion of “need”-based justice and discrimination claims and their selective application are, then, powerful tools in cultural and political discourse, as many decent and empathetic people intuitively and strongly react to the sense of urgency and priority embedded in them. The fact that such claims are often sneaked into public discourse under the banner of “equity”, in the guise of “soft” substitutes for traditional, more transparent claims pertaining to injustice and inequality, contributes to their potency as well. In many cases, the generalized and vague form that such claims take leads to a situation where people don’t actually understand their specific content, but still respond to the impression that it’s acutely important to correct the perceived injustice. As a result, members of the public then defer to the judgment of “experts” in attempting to come up with concrete determinations about what those claims entail in practical terms, and those “experts” often gravitate towards representing the claims of various well-organized groups, or those groups defined by salient identity markers that appeal to people’s tribal instincts.

But, as mentioned above, it’s crucial to keep in mind that because of their inherently comparative nature, there’s always someone on the other side of justice claims: when the need-based claims of one party are accepted, this is normally going to be at the expense of other people. In many cases, the push for more need-based justice claims has concrete consequences in terms of the policy choices it encourages, which may, in the long run, have serious adverse effects for people who systematically find themselves on the receiving end of (justified and unjustified) claims generated by such inflated discourse. Contrary to the explicit need-based claims that are put forth in the name of easily identified social groups, the slow, continuous erosion of people’s legitimate interests and needs generated by such discourse is likely to remain under-recognized—at least until the point where the situation spins out of control—particularly because such adverse effects are typically dispersed across unorganized and unidentified groups of people. More generally, justice claims often lead to a discursive tunnel vision: pushed by the inherent sense of urgency and priority attached to them, people hurry to correct the real or perceived injustices explicitly pointed to by various activists and advocates—but ignore the injustices that might ensue following the implementation of those corrective measures.

Even worse, expansive need-based claims often find their way into the legal system: as we’ve seen above, one major way for this to take place is through anti-discrimination jurisprudence. Here, such claims have much more concrete and immediate implications for protecting people’s core rights. Legal practitioners influenced by lines of arguments such as those described above may apply them in a similarly selective and biased manner—but this time, the biased legal interpretation that would inevitably accompany judgments about broad notions of social positioning might have concrete implications for people’s legal rights to sue others for discrimination, and for their protection against false and unjustified legal claims of discrimination. More generally, the inflation of legal anti-discrimination claims, along with the introduction of vague notions of need and social acceptance into anti-discrimination jurisprudence, are dangerous tools to render at the hands of various actors responsible for interpreting and enforcing the law. These allow such players to relentlessly exert power and influence over others, including their political opponents—by constantly waving implicit threats of legal action based on an arbitrary, politically biased application of the law.

References

Moreau, Sophia, Faces of Inequality: A Theory of Wrongful Discrimination (New York, 2020; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 May 2020), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190927301.001.0001, accessed 13 Apr. 2023.

Nagel, Thomas. “Equality.” In Mortal Questions, 106–27 (Cambridge University Press, 2012). doi:10.1017/CBO9781107341050.010.

Wolff, Jonathan. "Equality: The recent history of an idea." Journal of Moral Philosophy 4, no. 1 (2007): 125-136.

1. Nagel, “Equality”, pp. 123-124.

2. As we’ll (probably) see in a separate essay, the appeal to how we should treat those with disabilities in various discussions of justice and equality is not coincidental either, as it too brings out the questions of interest in very strong and intuitive, but at the same time highly misleading, ways.

3. Needless to say, the picture of the parents-children relationship drawn here is inadequate to begin with: for instance, there’s no way to reach an “equal outcome” even where children in the same family are concerned (whatever “equal outcome” even means in that context).

4. Readers can now better understand where the push for framing a growing number of political issues as involving “care” (implicitly referring to medical care) and “emergency” comes from. That gives the immediate, implicit sense that the claim pertains to people’s basic and urgent needs, and that other parties should be held responsible for providing for these needs.

5. The appeal to history here is not going to save the argument. First, it isn’t clear whether and when historical facts are relevant to determining whether a particular group of people is presently marginalized, and such facts seem clearly irrelevant to determining whether group members’ existing basic needs are being met. Second, again except for extreme, clear-cut examples, what basis is there for claiming that someone has or hasn’t been stereotyped throughout the entire course of history? How would you establish that in a legal proceeding, for instance? All we might know, even in the best-case scenario, is that there isn’t historical record establishing that some group has been stereotyped. But presumably, almost everyone and every group of people has been stereotyped in some way, at some point in history.