The Relational Dimensions of Need

What is the significance of relationality for moral life? This chapter offers several answers to this question by considering what human needs can teach us about relational morality. In doing so, it draws on feminist care ethics and relational theory to explore four issues. First, it demonstrates how the problem of human needs reveals the relational nature not only of moral agency but also of interests, harm, and moral judgment. Next, it exposes the tensions that exist between conceptualizations of needs as a fundamental feature of what it means to be human and needs as politically determined, as well as the resulting implications for relations of moral responsibility. Along this vein, it examines what human need, understood constitutively, occludes about relational power and demonstrates how the creation and maintenance of need for certain subjugated populations challenge established notions of moral obligation. It also asks how relational power makes some forms of need more socially legible—heightening their perceived moral salience for dominant groups while occluding other forms of need in and beyond the human world. Finally, and by way of conclusion, this chapter illustrates how the forgoing needs analysis underscores the necessity of holding in view the complex interaction between interpersonal relations, social relations, and structural relations when determining the nature of relational morality.