Department of Philosophy, University of Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany.
Faculty of Technology, University of Applied Sciences Emden/Leer, Emden, Germany.
PLoS One. 2023 Nov 27;18(11):e0294572. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294572. eCollection 2023.
Needs play a key role in many fields of social sciences and humanities, ranging from normative theories of distributive justice to conceptions of the welfare state. Over time, different conceptions of what counts as a need (i. e., what is considered a normatively relevant need) have been proposed. Many of them include (in one way or the other) needs for survival, decency, belonging, and autonomy. Little work has been done on how these kinds of needs are evaluated in terms of their significance for distributive justice. To begin closing this gap, we investigate the role of the four aforementioned kinds of needs for impartial observers. We do so in two empirical studies. The first study asks participants to evaluate the importance of each of the four kinds of needs separately. We find that different levels of importance are attributed to the kinds of needs, which places them in a hierarchy. The second study asks participants to make distributive decisions. Results further support the hierarchy found in the first study and, additionally, reveal that participants tend to make coherent allocation decisions.
需要在社会科学和人文学科的许多领域中发挥关键作用，从分配正义的规范理论到福利国家的概念。随着时间的推移，人们提出了不同的需要概念（即，哪些被认为是规范上相关的需要）。其中许多概念都包含（以某种方式）生存、体面、归属感和自主权的需要。在这些需要对分配正义的重要性方面，几乎没有什么工作。为了开始缩小这一差距，我们研究了上述四种需要对公正观察者的作用。我们在两项实证研究中进行了研究。第一项研究要求参与者分别评估这四种需要的重要性。我们发现，不同程度的重要性归因于各种需要，这使它们形成了一个层次结构。第二项研究要求参与者做出分配决策。结果进一步支持了第一项研究中发现的层次结构，此外，还表明参与者倾向于做出一致的分配决策。
