• Instrumental
  

Instrumental statements take the form ‘A needs X to do Y’, for instance, a person needs a local connection in order to have right to accommodation. The local connection is instrumental in this case because it is not a need it in and of itself, but as a means to an end. If there were a different way of grounding a right to accommodation, then the local connection would no longer be required.

• Circumstance
  

• Complex needs may fall into this category?
  o As a subset of single people, defined separately from the vulnerable
  o Content of the definition: physical, mental, social, financial support requirements in addition to housing/homelessness – quite wide. Need therefore defined quite broadly.
  

• Meeting basic intrinsic need
  

  •Historical response to need
  o Parish outdoor relief
  o Workhouses
  • Normative bias in favour of protecting children because they have greater need in some way
  • Social security benefits: assistance level payments operate as a basic safety net for those in need
  
  

• Prioritisation of marriage and children in social housing
  

• this one seems harder to justify through desert - but maybe the children (lack of negative desert) thing again.
  

Families with children
The tendency to prioritise children, giving them the most comprehensive support in homelessness and related systems, is hard to understand in the context of desert. If desert is conceived as a ‘reactive attitude ‘ to individual performance, children are essentially ineligible for desert judgments, because they haven’t been given a meaningful opportunity for performance yet. We dont attribute full agency to them. Then the most obvious way in which desert can be relevant to children here, is that they are desert-neutral i.e. they have not yet had an opportunity to accrue negative desert.

Natural disaster provisions

• suggestion that people have not ‘failed’ to make provisions for themselves (i.e. no accrual of negative desert), and can therefore qualify as in need. Further indication that need responses are mediated/moderated by considerations of desert

Does the introduction of rights/end of priority need in Scotland represent a move away from a desert-based system?

Widening provision
Extensions of priority need under New Labour: acknowledgment that additional groups had more significant needs that outweighed their negative desert AND/OR had less negative desert due to background/context/structural circumstances

BUT eligibility criteria under the 2002 Act did make desert-based exclusions, such as to those with a history of rent arrears and anti-social behaviour. AND behavioural grounds (negative desert) could also be used as a reason to remove peoples’ reasonable preference (need-based priority) on the single housing register.

Removal of ex-offenders from priority need in Wales.
Despite evidence (common knowledge?) of the additional needs of people exiting institutions. POlitical/financial/resource-allocation decision motivated by ideas about desert?

Why distribute housing?

Fitzpatrick & Stephens 1999: 420
"to borrow Bernard Williams’ framework, "the relevant reason for distributing housing is the need for shelter" (Gutmann, 1980, p. 99). Everyone seems to accept that a large number of people lack shelter of a minimum acceptable standard.This standard is, in concept, absolute and applies to everyone equally. Because one household falls below that minimum by more than another does not alter the contention that each household has an equal need of shelter of a minimum acceptable standard (MAS). However, the resources required to achieve this standard will vary according to household circumstances, such as the number of people, their age and whether they have a disability."

McNaughton Nicholls’ ‘Housing, Homelessness and Capabilities’ paper takes Martha Nussbaum’s concept of capabilities and applies it to housing and homelessness, as a means of exploring the relationship between the two, and specifying what functions housing ought to support (2010, p. 23).
The capabilities approach originates in the ‘equality of what’ debate in the philosophical literature on social, or distributive, justice. This debate addresses what the ‘content’ or ‘metric’ of justice ought to be i.e. what it is that must be distributed in a just society, and therefore also what can be measured in order to assess a society’s justness. The capabilities approach argues that equality across a set of basic human ‘functions’ ought to be pursued so that, in so far as possible, people share the same potential (McNaughton Nicholls, 2010, p. 27). Drawing also upon Peter King’s (2003) work on the role that housing plays in supporting freedom and functions, McNaughton Nicholls argues that these are compromised by homelessness, as it limits ‘life’, ‘health’ and ‘bodily integrity’, amongst other basic capabilities specified by Nussbaum (2010, pp. 23, 30–32) .
The paper demonstrates the way in which philosophical concepts can be adopted within the field of housing and homelessness to bring a new perspective to that work. For example, the capabilities approach suggests a novel set of criteria by which to assess the suitability of accommodation; whether it supports people to fulfil their basic functions (McNaughton Nicholls, 2010, p. 38). It also provides a normative support to arguments which aim to end homelessness, and indicates particular policy strategies for doing so e.g. by indicating that provision of self-contained flats through a Housing First scheme might support basic capabilities more effectively than shared institutional accommodation (McNaughton Nicholls, 2010, p. 37).

Inherent vs interpreted

A conception of needs as interpreted would look to observation and the claims people make to identify needs. Kenna (2011) similarly discusses ‘relativist’ conceptions of need, according to which norms or minimum standards are established or ‘socially constructed’, against which needs can be measured. Bradshaw’s distinction between normative need (defined by experts, professionals and policy-makers); felt need (wants, desire or subjective views of need); expressed need (demand or felt need turned into action); and relative need (unfair and unequal distribution) (1972, 1994, see also Clayton, 1983) is identified by Dean (2010) as an interpreted view of need. More recently, Bradshaw, et al. have established a ‘minimum income standard’ (Bradshaw et al., 2008) by “involving members of the public in reaching agreement (consensus) about what people need as a minimum and drawing up budgets to meet those needs” (p2). In the field of housing, Fitzpatrick and Stephens (2007) propose that “when it is claimed that housing should be allocated to those in most need, what is really meant is that it should be allocated to those who are in greatest housing deprivation” (p420) where housing deprivation is understood as the difference between a minimum acceptable standards of housing and that person or household’s actual housing conditions. Such approaches highlight the social interpretation, negotiation and ‘embeddedness’ of need.
23

Inherent conceptions of need on the other hand draw on some theory or doctrine of what
it is to be human to identify needs (Dean, 2010, p121). Needs are therefore objective and held universally. Doyal and Gough’s theory of human need (1984, 1991) is an example of such an approach. People have needs for the things they require to avoid harm and suffering: the things that are required to achieve any goal and are preconditions for human action and interaction. Kenna (2011) refers to this as a ‘universalist’ approach to need. These basic needs are identified as physical health and autonomy. Further intermediate needs are also identified, including adequate protective housing, physical security, significant primary relationships and a non-hazardous physical environment, although these may be met in various ways in different social and cultural contexts. In the field of homelessness, McNaughton Nicholls draws on Nussbaum’s work, placing housing as an ‘inherent need’ (McNaughton Nicholls, 2010). Adding a further layer to understandings of need, she illuminates the trade-offs rough sleepers face between finding shelter and meeting their other needs and priorities (for relationships and social networks for example). Her analysis suggests a conceptualisation of housing as: “more than a material unit, but as a part of a broader complex system of interconnected factors that operate to constrain and enable the capability that individuals have to lead a well lived life” (2010, p38).

Whose needs are prioritised

Third and building on this last point, in the context of a study exploring the impact of legal rights-based approaches to homelessness, the question of who’s needs are prioritised comes to the fore. By casting entitlement across a specifically defined group, legal rights necessarily create ‘insiders’, who qualify for the legal entitlements in question, and ‘outsiders’, who do not (Habermas, 1988, p210; Bengtsson, 2001; Thompson and Hoggett, 1996, p37). By directing resources (in this case, social housing) towards ‘insiders’, ‘outsiders’ lose out in the allocation of resources: not all housing needs are met simultaneously. This is particular pertinent in the case of housing: unlike other welfare goods and services (such as income) where supply is more ‘elastic’ (provision can respond more quickly to demand) and the good is ‘continuous’, the supply of housing is inelastic and housing is a ‘discrete’ good (only consumable in units). As such, in the short to medium term, ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ compete for a set quantity of social housing in a ‘zero-sum’ situation (Fitzpatrick and Stephens, 1999; Fitzpatrick and Pawson, 2007). Whilst Bradshaw (1994) proposes that ‘inequality’ offers a superior organising principle than ‘need’ in the context of health services, the nature of housing necessitates the prioritisation of certain groups over others as opposed to an attempt to smooth consumption across groups. Considering the impact of legal rights on housing needs therefore

Frailty?

Fitzpatrick, Bengtsson Watts 2013
Turner (1993) has argued that, in the absence of a metaphysical natural law, the philosophical foundations of human rights can most effectively be defended via an appeal to the universal nature of human “frailty”, particularly the frailty of the body. Such a position may quite readily be seen as encompassing a right to at least a basic level of shelter consistent with human physiological requirements. In a rather more ambitious vein, Norman (1998) argues that a derivative concept of rights can be based on the satisfaction of basic and universal human “needs”, as there are rational and objective ways of determining what these needs are (see also Doyal and Gough 1991). Housing of a minimally “acceptable” standard may be viewed as intrinsic to a conceptualization of human rights derived from this perspective.

Tony Fitzpatrick, 2008, Virtue
The human species may be more diverse but Foot believes that we have enough in common for similar inferences to be drawn, since without basic mental and physical health we are deprived of the capacity to flourish (cf. Doyal and Gough, 1991).

Dean 2000: 55
Our social rights by definition reflect our needs.
Doyal and Gough (1991) have argued that, logically, human beings have a right to have their basic needs for health and autonomy met if they themselves are to have the capacity to fulfill such moral obligations as society demands of them. However, it is when our ‘needs’ are formulated as ‘claims’ that they become tangible (see Spicker, 1993) and the point about social rights is that they incorporate not some a priori universal definition of human need, but a substantive policy objective (for example, Hirst, 1980)

Dean 2014
Discussions of human need are widely framed in terms of whether it is absolute or culturally relative (e.g. Doyal & Gough, 1991).

Emmel 2017: 461
Difficulties in accessing basic needs and material deprivation can significantly curtail the range of possible ways of being (Doyal and Gough, 1991), where the notion of being does not capture mere existence of basic needs but the relations needed to acquire those needs.

Emmel 2017: 464
Now labelled meeting basic needs (Doyal and Gough, 1991), this dimension extends explanation to recognise a broader consideration of services, goods and wants. These include intermediate basic needs such as childhood security and safety. The relatively affluent grandparent, Mark, who attempts to secure the safety of his grandchildren is an example of this. Minimal needs continue to be recognised in this dimension, Geoff and Margaret’s struggle with deprivation emphasise this. These basic needs are universal and knowable. They are also, as this article has emphasised, dynamic and evaluated by people (Rawls, 1973;Sayer, 2011). As Doyal and Gough (1991) emphasise a basic needs approach requires explanation of the capacity for action through agency

Dean

Dean 2013: S33
Discussions of need tend to be framed in terms of whether human needs are absolute or culturally rela- tive (Doyal & Gough, 1991). Disagreement about the relativity of human need has at times obscured a deeper understanding of the underlying issues. I would contend that the issue of relativity may be distilled into the two dimensions to which I alluded previ- ously: sociality and negotiation.
The point about human needs is that they are at one and the same time both ‘social’and ‘individual’. As Titmuss (1955, p. 62) observed, ‘no complete distinction between the two is conceptually possible’.

human beings are defined by their sociality, that is, they are ineluctably social, not merely individual beings, albeit the context in which they conduct themselves may be more or less defined by individual or personal, as opposed to social or collective, imperatives.We can understand this as a dis- tinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ concep- tions of needs (Soper, 1993).

S34
Thin needs may be thought of in a minimal
sense as survival needs. But insofar as human beings seek more than bare survival, the classic hedonic concept of human wellbeing regards the human condition as a struggle for the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. This is still a thin understanding of human need in that its focus is narrowly on the pleasures and pains of the individual subject.

Thick needs may be thought of in an
optimal sense as that which we require not merely to survive or even to be happy, but in order to flourish as fully fledged human beings. Insofar as there is or was a founda- tional notion of human flourishing, it may be found in the classic eudaimonic concept of humanwellbeing associated with Aristotle (c. 350BC) who contended that leading a good life entails more than pleasure seeking; it requires ‘virtue’ (Macintyre,

This is a thick understanding of human need in that it embraces the social context that defines and sustains our human being.

489: It is argued that sociology can ground the analysis of human rights in a concept of human frailty, especially the vulnerability of the body, in the idea of precariousness of social institutions, and in a theory of moral sympathy.

• 'ontological frailty'
  
  

Embodied frailty is a human universal condition, which is compounded by the risky and precarious nature of social institutions. Human vulnerability can be contained or ameliorated by the institution of rights which protect human beings from this ontological uncertainty.
From a sociological perspective, rights are social claims for institutionalised protection.

500: The specific aim of this conclusion is to claim that universality of the concept of rights can be defended through a sociology of the body. If it is possible to identify such a foundation, then this sociology of the body could function discursively as a substitute for the ancient notion of natural law...
To be precise, the argument is that, from sociological presuppositions about the frailty of the body and the precarious or risky character of social institutions, it is possible to offer a sociologically plausible account of human rights as a supplement to citizenship or as an institution which goes beyond citizenship because human rights are not necessarily tied to the nation-state.

501: I want to argue that the central aspect of the legacy of Gehlen resides in two related ideas. First, human beings are ontologically frail, and secondly that social arrangements, or social institutions, are precarious. These two notions can be given a specific operational content as follows. Human beings are frail, because their lives are finite, because they typically exist under conditions of scarcity, disease and danger, and because they are constrained by physical processes of ageing and decay...
...In any case, human life is still finite, and the mass of the world's population lives under conditions of scarcity. The institutions which are meant to protect human beings from their own frailty now appear as part of the problem, not the solution.
There is therefore a dynamic and dialectical relationship between our ontological frailty and our precariousness. The institutions which are (502) designed to protect human beings - the states, the law, and the church in particular - are often precisely the institutions which threaten human life by the fact that they enjoy a monopoly of power.

502: We can perhaps at this point begin to define social preacriousness. The basic idea here is that social institutions are in the long run often inadequate to human purposes.

503: ...In short, social systems are subject to the contradictory problems of resolving the requirements of normative integration and allocation of resources under conditions of scarcity. Because thee is no stable optimal solution to these contradictory requirements, social life is precarious. Human beings as social agents are always exposed to contingencies, uncertainties and risks, and the measures which are taken to regulate these risks create further dilemmas of power.

504: Social life is characterised by its risk, by the instability of social relations, and hence by the precarious nature of trust.

Parfit 1997

213: On what I shall call The Priority View: Benefiting people matters more the worse off these people are. For Utilitarians, the moral importance of each benefit depends only on how great this benefit would be. For Prioritarians, it also depends on how well off the person is to whom this benefit comes. We should not give equal weight to equal benefits, whoever receives them. Benefits to the worse off should be given more weight.17 This priority is not, however, absolute. On this view, benefits to the worse off could be morally outweighed by sufficiently great benefits to the better off. If we ask what would be sufficient, there may not always be a precise answer. But there would be many cases in which the answer would be clear.18 On the Priority View, I have said, it is more important to bene- fit those who are worse off. But this claim does not, by itself, amount to a different view, since it would be made by all Egalitarians. If we believe that we should aim for equality, we shall think it more important to benefit those who are worse off, since such benefits reduce inequality. If this is why we give such bene- fits priority, we do not hold the Priority View. On this view, as I (214) define it here, we do not believe in equality. We do not think it in itself bad, or unjust, that some people are worse off than others. That is what makes this a distinctive view.
The Priority View can be easily misunderstood. On this view, if I am worse off than you, benefits to me matter more. Is this because I am worse off than you? In one sense, yes. But this has nothing to do with my relation to you.
...on the Priority View, benefits to the worse off matter more, but that is only because these people are at a lower absolute level. It is irrelevant that these people are worse off than others. Benefits to them would matter just as much even if there were no others who were better off.

216: Distribution according to need is better regarded as a form of the Priority View

Hooker 2016

11: What we had thought of as pressure in favor of equality of welfare was instead pressure in favor of levelling up. We might say that additions to welfare matter more the worse off the person is whose welfare is affected. This view has come to be called prioritarianism (Parfit 1997; Arneson 1999b). It has tremendous intuitive appeal.

...there is a scale from the worst off, to the not quite so badly off, and so on up to the best off. Prioritarianism is committed to variable levels of importance of the welfare of people at different places on this scale: the worse off a person is, the greater the importance attached to that person’s level of welfare.

Arneson 2000

95:I endorse amending Mill's utilitarianism by incorporating a preference for equality directly into the funda- mental principle. This yields what nowadays is called prioritarianism: this is the claim that institutions and policies should be set and actions chosen so as to maximize moral value, with the moral value of a gain in well- being for a person being greater, the greater its size and the lower the person's prior lifetime expectation of well-being.13 Prioritarianism is some- times referred to under the heading "weighted well-being." The priori- tarian aims to maximize not well-being in the aggregate, but well-being weighted by giving priority to the worse off.
Contrasting prioritarianism with utilitarianism clarifies the former idea. For the utilitarian, the right policy is the one that maximizes the sum of utility (human well-being). For the prioritarian, the right policy is the one that maximizes the sum of moral value. Moral value accrues from utility (human well-being) gains obtained for persons, but the moral value of each gain is adjusted depending on its size (other things being equal, more utility is better than less) and also depending on the prior utility level of the recipient (other things being equal, utility to a badly off person is better than a similar gain obtained for an already well off (96) person). The extent to which prioritarianism in practice would yield rec- ommendations for policy that are different from those that utilitarianism would recommend depends on the specific degree of priority to the worse off that is assigned. Prioritarianism encompasses a family of principles that give more or less priority to the worse off.

Crisp 2003

752: the priority view is essentially a nonlexical weighting principle
The Weighted Priority View: benefiting people matters more the worse off those people are, the more of those people there are, and the greater the benefits in question

BUT 745: the weighted priority view, though it may avoid
requiring us to give the smallest benefits to the smallest number of the worst off at the largest costs to the largest number of those only slightly better off, does require us to give tiny benefits to those who are very well off at huge costs to the worst off.

754: one possible solution here would be to decrease the weight attached to numbers of individuals...
The Number-Weighted Priority View: benefiting people matters more the worse off those people are, the more of those people there are, and the larger the benefits in question. But the number of beneficiaries matters less the better off they are.

Wolff 2015

42: Such critics have suggested that our real concern as egalitarians is either that each person has enough – the ‘sufficiency’ view (Frankfurt, 1987), of which the ‘unconditional basic income’ view is an important variant (Van Parijs, 1992, 1995), or that we give priority to the worst off – the ‘priority’ view (Parfit, 1998)

On the face of it, the sufficiency view would appear to support a concern with absolute poverty. The idea, defended in the recent literature by Harry Frankfurt, but also with affinities to Martha Nussbaum’s view explained previously, is that justice requires that everyone has enough, rather than that everyone has the same amount. Hence there is a sufficiency line, just as there is a poverty line, and there is no difficulty in principle in the idea that all can cross that line, even in a society of great inequality, if there is general affluence. However, there are two caveats. First, defenders of the sufficiency view make clear that they believe the sufficiency threshold is far above any poverty line. Second, a sufficiency threshold could require a relative element, just as we have seen in the accounts of poverty discussed in earlier sections, which is one reason why the Joseph Rowntree Foundation regularly updates its Minimum Income Standard (Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 2014).

If the sufficiency view appears to support a concern with absolute poverty, the priority view seems closer to some accounts of relative poverty: what matters is not how people do in absolute terms, but rather how they do in comparison to others. On some versions of prioritarianism, it appears we still have a moral imperative to improve the position of the worst off even in highly affluent societies. This appears to be a consequence, for example, of Rawls’s ‘difference principle’ according to which we have a duty to make the worst off as well as possible, apparently without qualification (Rawls, 1971). Deviations from equality are permitted as long as everyone benefits, especially the least advantaged, as they might do, for example, from a growing economy. In other versions of the priority view, the imperative weakens and then disappears the richer the society becomes (Parfit, 1998). However, according to this view too a caveat is necessary. No theorist seems to make the claim that the worst off are necessarily in poverty, and hence in this case our duties go beyond confronting poverty.
The