# Meditations on Need in David Schmidtz’s Elements of Justice **URL:** **By** Bill Glod **Published:** November 9, 2026 --- David Schmidtz argues that justice meets human needs best by fostering self-reliance, productive excellence, stable rights, and social trust rather than distributing goods according to immediate need alone. > **Editor’s Note** > > This essay is the fourth in a series on David Schmidtz’s _Elements of Justice_. Read the third essay [here](https://www.libertarianism.org/article/equality-david-schmidtzs-elements-justice). Need is the fourth and final element in [David Schmidtz](https://business.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/directory/profile?pid=3546)’s [_Elements of Justice_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001APYVU4?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback), as contrasted with prior discussions of desert, reciprocity, and equality. Famously, [Maslow’s hierarchy of needs](https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/psychology/maslows-hierarchy-needs) suggests how the components of a good life must be met in succession, each as conditions of the next. From the pyramid’s base to its apex, the order of needs is physiological, safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization. Schmidtz notes that “a society is better when its citizens can meet their rudimentary survival needs. It is also better when its citizens can afford to look beyond the moment to ask what really matters. The bottom of Maslow’s pyramid matters because the top matters.”[1](#note-1) Do we need survival items like food more than we need love and self-esteem? Food may be the most _urgent_ need in many contexts. We can only go a few days without food, while we might last longer without the other needs being met. However, a placekicker attempting a game winning field goal needs self-esteem and confidence more in that moment than he needs bananas. People in desperate survival situations, such as Holocaust survivor [Viktor Frankl](https://viktorfranklamerica.com/viktor-frankl-bio/), may need to give love or have it bestowed on them to overcome extreme physical deprivation. Love and esteem are no less _important_ needs even if they’re typically less urgent. They’re important both for constituting a good life and motivating the drive to flourish. Our need for survival is consistent with our need to flourish—they really aren’t two separate matters. Indeed, surviving at a base level doesn’t ensure long-term survival as much as a life well-lived. The point of distributing according to need is not to prove our hearts are in the right place, but to help those in need.[2](#note-2) “In many contexts, distributing according to need does not result in people getting what they need. It induces people to do what _manifests_ need rather than what _meets_ need.”[3](#note-3) As the proverb goes, giving a man a fish feeds him for a day, but teaching him to fish feeds him for a lifetime. In other words, always giving a man a fish may teach him to be helpless when he could instead learn self-reliance. People who aren’t self-reliant to some degree will never meet the needs toward the top of Maslow’s pyramid even if their physiological needs are always met. If we really care about need, “then we want social structures to allow and encourage people to do what works.” Societies that effectively meet needs have always been those that “empower and reward exercises of productive capacities by virtue of which people meet needs.”[4](#note-4) In the long run, what our children need is to live in a culture that fosters excellence, “a culture where high achievers continually invent better ways to meet whatever needs—vitamins, vaccinations, whatever—their fellow citizens may have.”[5](#note-5) Schmidtz asks whether a student who needs an A to get into medical school should get what she needs or what she deserves. Suppose for argument’s sake that nothing matters except need. Would this entail that our aspiring brain surgeon should get the grade she needs rather than the grade she deserves?[6](#note-6) No. _Need itself_ requires that she get the grade she deserves because we’re not merely focusing on the individual agent’s need but also those of other people. Patients need competent (and sometimes excellent) brain surgeons who earned their pre-med As. If people always got what they needed rather than what they deserved, the outcome would be a world where far more needs went unmet than in a world where a culture of excellence was allowed and encouraged. Such a culture won’t be fostered if people aren’t allowed to fail at their goals. People need to know what to expect from each other.[7](#note-7) Consider the famous ethical thought experiment, the trolley problem. Five people tied to the tracks are about to be killed by a runaway trolley. You, a bystander, can flip a lever that switches the trolley to a track where it will only kill one person. Most people’s intuitions are that we should kill one person to save the five. However, consider the hospital thought experiment. A UPS delivery driver can be killed and his organs harvested to save the lives of five patients. In this case, almost nobody thinks he should be killed. Why, though? True, killing him would be illegal under our current laws, whereas there are doubtfully any laws covering the trolley problem. But the numbers are the same in both cases, so what differs _morally_? Schmidtz suggests that the hospital case reveals that what matters is being able to trust our community to respect us as separate persons. “Hospitals cannot exist, and more generally we cannot live well together, unless we can trust each other to acknowledge that we all have lives of our own.”[8](#note-8) To a crude utilitarian thinking about the trolley problem, all that matters is numbers. But in a more realistic institutional context like hospital, “we intuitively grasp a more fundamental point. Namely, if we don’t take seriously rights and separate personhood, we won’t get justice; in fact, _we won’t even get good numbers._”[9](#note-9) We won’t get good numbers because hospitals would not exist, patients would not trust doctors, and as a result many more people would get sick or die. We need constraints to maximize intelligently. Again, even if needs were _all_ that mattered, simply acting to maximize the meeting of needs in each context would leave a community with no capacity to meet needs. The above presumes the hospital would be found out, but what if the organ harvesting could be done in secret? Perhaps trust would not be violated then. It’s easy to stipulate impossible features in a thought experiment, but that brings the cost of making the scenario so far removed from the real world that it has little relevance to the questions that matter _to us_. Anyway, it would be a terrible failure of leadership at UPS if they didn’t investigate why hospitals had become black holes into which their drivers were disappearing. Thought experiments are of little use if they’re based on the premise that large and prolonged [conspiracies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_theory) can be executed and covered up without anyone else noticing enough to investigate. A broadly consequentialist theory must treat some topics as beyond the reach of utilitarian calculation. “Rights can trump (not merely outweigh) utilitarian calculation even from a broadly consequentialist perspective . . . As an empirical matter, there is enormous utility in being able to treat certain parameters as settled, as not even permitting case by case utilitarian reasoning.” To get good results in the real world, “we need to be surrounded not by unconstrained maximizers but by people who respect rights.” This enables us to have a system of expectations and trust, “which allows us together to transform our world into a world with greater _potential_ (a world where delivery companies are willing to serve the hospital.)”[10](#note-10) [John Stuart Mill](https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/mill-john-stuart-1806-1873), wanting his society to promote utilitarian solutions to most moral problems, “considered it more important to live in a world with a higher ceiling than to make sure every action hits the ceiling.” If other people can count on us not to murder them, “new possibilities open up—opportunities people would not otherwise have.” By contrast, if people cannot rely on us not to murder them, then “our murderous act may be as good as possible under the circumstances—it may hit the utility ceiling, but the ceiling itself will be lower than it would have been had murder been ruled out.”[11](#note-11) “Our being forbidden to consider case-specific consequences has better consequences. For one thing, it gives other people the option of rationally trusting us.”[12](#note-12) How could we trust each other if at each moment murder may be an option and we know that each of us is considering whether murder is an option? Social contract theories for centuries have defended political rights as ways to avoid these nightmarish low-trust [Hobbesian](https://www.libertarianism.org/topics/hobbes-thomas-1588-1676) situations. Moral institutions normally don’t get the best result by pursuing the best result but “by imposing constraints on individual pursuits so as to bring individual pursuits into better harmony with each other.”[13](#note-13) People have to be able to trust their society to treat them as rights-bearers, and society must in turn trust people to use the opportunities they have as rights-bearers within society.[14](#note-14) In other words, people “need to be able to get on with their lives in peace. _They need to know what to expect from each other._”[15](#note-15) A thoughtful consequentialism should be troubled if it regularly calls upon some individuals to be sacrificed. Perhaps this is the least bad we can do in emergency situations, but everyday life isn’t about emergencies like the trolley problem. One point of progress is to make emergencies as infrequent as possible, such that “if we find ourselves seemingly called upon to sacrifice the few for the sake of the many, justice is about finding another way.”[16](#note-16) Instead of guessing how to minimize foreseeable casualties in a war, perhaps we should avoid war altogether. “A thoughtful consequentialist morality is not about one versus five. It is not even about costs versus benefits. It is about how we need to live in order to be glad we are neighbors.”[17](#note-17) To be good neighbors, we need a developed economy, a peaceful culture, a culture of personal responsibility, and rudimentary benevolence. A developed economy offers a positive sum society, the opposite of a dog-eat-dog hellscape. A peaceful culture ensures stability of expectations and thus stability of property. A culture of personal responsibility helps avoid the temptation of thinking that needs imply helplessness, or that the default way to meet needs is by receiving rather than doing. Rudimentary benevolence means that we view our neighbors in a positive light unless given reason to believe otherwise. It doesn’t mean treating your utility as one unit among many equally weighted units. What we _don’t_ need is perfection. We don’t need ideal and complete theories of resource distribution that cannot anticipate the norms that our communities grow to help us know what to expect from each other and thereby guide us toward living well together in a messy and complex world. This concludes my overview of the four elements of justice. The next and final essay in this series explores Schmidtz’s discussion of the right to distribute. ## Endnotes [1.](#ref-1) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 164 [2.](#ref-2) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 166 [3.](#ref-3) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 167 [4.](#ref-4) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 167 [5.](#ref-5) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 169 [6.](#ref-6) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 169 [7.](#ref-7) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 170 [8.](#ref-8) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 171 [9.](#ref-9) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 171 [10.](#ref-10) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 171 [11.](#ref-11) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 172 [12.](#ref-12) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 173 [13.](#ref-13) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 174 [14.](#ref-14) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 174 [15.](#ref-15) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 175 [16.](#ref-16) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 176 [17.](#ref-17) David Schmidtz, _The Elements of Justice_ (Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 174