425 NEEDS-CENTERED ETHICAL THEORY The Journal of Value Inquiry 36: 425–434, 2002. © 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Needs-Centered Ethical Theory GILLIAN BROCK Department of Philosophy, University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand SORAN READER Department of Philosophy, University of Durham, Durham, United Kingdom In ordinary moral life we encounter needs frequently. We respond to the needs of others and expect other people to respond to our own needs all the time in a way that is common and unremarkable. We do this in so unthinking a manner, that the central place of needs in our moral lives has tended to go unnoticed. More attention should be paid by moral philosophers to the role that the concept of need can and should play in moral theory. The map metaphor for theories may be useful here. 1 If the task of moral philosophy is to map a moral life, then, when we look closely at the land- scape of a life, we must notice that a central feature on the landscape is the phenomenon of need: living beings in need, and in the case of moral agents, their recognitions of and responses to needs. If this is right, any general purpose map we make will have to delineate the patterns of moral significance created by the phenomenon of need, if it is to be useful. A general purpose map, however, which does not show the position and significance of needs, is as inadequate as a real general-purpose map of an area which omits representations of such things as the position and scale of water features, or boundaries which affect rights of access. Of course, we sometimes use maps with a limited purpose, and so we can imagine a context in which a waterless map might be useful. But where the purpose of a map is to help us find our way about, such a map would fail us at critical points. We would have nothing to guide what we said or did. 1. Ways in which Needs are Part of the Moral Landscape Perhaps no true exceptionless general claim about the nature of moral demands can be made. Nevertheless, there are clear and central cases of moral demands, and there are more doubtful and marginal ones. The context in which a human agent meets a needy being is an especially clear and central case of a moral demand. This is easy to see in dramatic