According to John Rawls, “. . . social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that ... they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged”.  .“. . John Rawls’s premise is that society is a ‘cooperative venture for mutual advantage.’  Justice is defined in terms of two principles grounded in the structure of society: First, each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive liberty compatible with similar liberty for others. Second, social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (a) they are to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and (b) are attached to offices and positions open to all  Most important, for Rawls, what is in everyone’s advantage means that the worst off person is better off than that person would be under any other arrangement.”[i] 

Barnett asserts that “needs” apply only to individuals not groups.  He says, “. . . there are certain objections to the indiscriminate use of the term ‘need’ as an explanatory concept. . . . it is a much abused word in popular usage.  It becomes quite meaningless when it is applied to a group of people, as it usually is.  It loses whatever validity it may have when it is said that necessity is the mother of invention, or that airplanes were not invented until they were needed, or that people in backward areas of the world need the advantages of an industrial economy.  Such judgments are ex post facto, evaluative, and ethnocentric. . . . American family life needs greater binding forces only because a condition can be conceived by someone in which it might profit by them; the Hottentots need sewing machines only because we have them, and we need them only because we have become accustomed to them.”  On the other hand, he places no such cautions on the use of the word “want”; a want can be held in common by many persons.[ii]

“In large societies (including nations or parts of nations), when food becomes scarce there is thus a breakdown of social ties, or property rights, the devaluation of treasured objects and of virtue (including sexual) in the omnipotent physical desire for food. . . .”[iii]

“The need for self-actualization is more tenuously involved in political perceptions.  It is, however, a reasonable hypothesis that only a person whose physical, social, and equality needs are relatively well met will become concerned with public affairs that have to do with individual liberty. . . .”[iv]