Does Moral Force Reside in a Systematic Schema? Not in Any Simple Way

My point of departure in the book Meeting Needs was the conviction that the concept of needs has moral force, but the force has been dissipated and anyway made hard to see by multiple complications including but not confined to multiple abuses. I now think that is only half the problem.

To help restore the moral force to view for systematic application, I worked out a philosophical construction – a schema – designed to give a stable foundation for the concept of needs in the uses in which it carries moral force. It is this schema on which I shall focus in the present paper. If vanity in addition to familiarity plays any part in my decision to do so, the vanity is offset, I hope, by the fact that I shall be carrying out an exercise in self-correction; and by the reasonable expectation that what I say in correcting the view to be taken of my own schema will apply to other attempts to systematize the concept.

The schema specified a list of matters of need and minimum standards of provision for each need and each person. The matters of need were course-of-life needs, that is to say, needs (like the need for food and for being spared terrorization) that people have throughout their lives, or at least (like the need for sexual activity) in certain stages of their lives.