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This chapter examines three of the most influential defenses of marriage; each holds that marriage is the sole permissible context for sex and the unique context for achieving certain goods. Kant held that marriage morally transforms sexual objectification, thereby making procreation morally possible. Natural law accounts argue that basic human goods of procreation and marital friendship can only be attained through marriage. Roger Scruton argues that marriage enables virtuous erotic love, which is an essential contributor to human flourishing;. These three accounts, which attribute to marriage a unique transformative role, share a failing: entry into a legal institution does not effect, nor is it required for, the psychological transformation which virtues require. Basic goods and virtues can exist outside marriage, as in unmarried relationships. Furthermore, unqualified attributions of value to marriage fail to recognize the variability of real marriages and ignore their vices.

Chapter 10 takes leave of the project by reconsidering some especially troublesome thoughts about it—especially the way in which ordinary approximations to basic good health are apparently compatible with basic injustice of horrific sorts. This underlines the need for a full-fledged normative theory of justice, but does not undermine the argument for beginning with the habilitation framework.

The introduction summarizes the aims of the book and gives preliminary definitions of its central terms: habilitation, basic justice, basic good health, and robustly healthy agency. It explains the sense in which the book is offered as a framework for normative work on basic distributive justice generally, rather than as a competing normative theory of justice. The introduction concludes with an overview of the organizational plan of the book, and then appends an account of the motivation for pursuing this project.

This chapter begins with reminders about what has been done in the preceding ones, and what has deliberately been left undone. It then makes some additional arguments about the comprehensiveness of the habilitation framework and the adequacy of basic good health as the representative good for basic justice.

This chapter attempts to answer the following questions: Among the innumerable real motivations that cause humans to engage in actions, are there any that can rightly be said to be basic? Are some motivations more fundamental or original, in relation to which others are derivative or secondary? Can human motivations be arranged in a hierarchy according to how central or primary they are? And, if so, which specific motivations are most central or basic? After focusing on multiple theories that develop proposed needs, drives, desires, interests, capabilities, or goods that motivate action, and identifying common themes and concepts, the author advances his own argument, which is that human persons are most basically motivated to achieve their basic human interests, to enjoy what they think are their basic human goods. The chapter also establishes six distinct, basic, natural, universal human goods and interests that motivate human persons to action and that are grounded in the ontological natural of human personhood and the given human condition in this world.

This chapter describes the basic goods approach to global policy priorities. It reviews the treatment of human need in political philosophy, economics, and social policy and defines basic goods as those goods and services that meet objective human needs. The chapter identifies a set of basic goods that includes nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, housing, electricity, and human security services. It gives a sense of the magnitudes of deprivations for each of these basic goods. The chapter goes on to link the basic goods approach to minimalist ethics and subsistence rights, to assess the role of basic goods provision in growth processes, and to assess general approaches to basic goods provision.

This chapter is the author's fullest single treatment of marriage, as an act, a state and way of life, and as an institution. Its starting point is the way in which marriage is a basic human good, with a twofold point: procreation and friendship — the most far-reaching form of togetherness possible for human beings and the most radical and creative enabling of another person to flourish by bringing that person into existence. The marital act is a mating which actualizes, expresses, and enables the spouses to experience their marriage itself in each of its essentials dimensions. Modern myths about mediaeval attitudes to pleasure in marital intercourse are cleared away. ‘Same-sex marriage’ is no marriage, as invalid arguments are no argument and quack medicines not medicinal, but modern civil, dissoluble marriage is highly defective, as is the polygamy for which ‘same-sex marriage’ clears the way.

Chapter Four, “Access to Basic Goods,” turns to a third way in which discriminatory practices can wrong people: they can leave them without access to resources or social institutions that are “basic” in the sense that access to them is necessary for these people if they are to participate fully and equally in their society. The author explains that to identify a good as “basic” in this sense is not to claim that it is objectively good or that it is necessary for all groups in that society. The author argues that certain goods can be seen as basic only from the perspective of the person or group who lacks that good, and that it is therefore very important to look to the discriminatee’s particular situation, needs, and values. The chapter then explains the importance of this form of wrongful discrimination and gives examples of cases that are best understood in this way, including the fight for same sex marriage and for women’s freedom to breastfeed in public. The author also argues that there is a distinctive kind of wrongness involved when discrimination leaves someone without access to a basic good, different from the wrongs explored in other chapters of the book.

First principles, whether theoretical or practical, cannot be demonstrated, but can be defended successfully against objections by arguments of the broad kind known to Plato and Aristotle as ‘dialectical’. One such refutation of objections to a first practical principle is the ‘retorsive’ argument demonstrating the self-refutation of any serious assertion that knowledge is not an intrinsic good. There are hints of such an argument in Augustine and a few other writers, but no attempt to set the argument out with explicitness and some precision. This chapter, which first appeared in 1977, seeks to do that, building on some logical exploration of various kinds of self-refutation or performative inconsistency by J. L. Mackie, and emphasizing the importance of an exact understanding of assertion. Along the way, the chapter attends to some self-refutatory argumentation concerning legal sovereignty. The whole challenges Hart's exclusion of all goods save survival from legal theory.

Twentieth-century bioethics was a big disappointment. Despite articulation in declarations, oaths, textbooks, and courses, it proved no barrier to many unethical practices and experiments. The buffet bioethics of the liberals and the ledger bioethics of the utilitarians allowed practitioners to follow their own preferences, whatever they were. Some of the deficiencies of bioethics have been directly or indirectly addressed by John Finnis in his natural law theory and in articles on particular bioethical issues. This chapter is organized as follows. The first part examines his view of life and health as ‘basic goods’, priorities between goods, the nature of healthcare, and the virtues rightly associated with that practice. The second part turns to the application of the principles of morality to healthcare, personal responsibility and professional duties. The third part considers unethical healthcare decisions such as ones that are directly homicidal or harmful, the importance of intention, and some basic norms. Finnis' bioethics demonstrates the logical soundness and enduring practical significance of the conclusions of the natural law, Hippocratic and Judeo-Christian traditions of reflection upon bioethics.

Focusing on the human necessity of habilitation leads to a more inclusive and adequate account of the circumstances of justice. Such an account involves paying persistent attention to similarities and differences in the physical and psychological abilities of actual human agents. That in turn leads to equally persistent attention to the basic good health (or lack of it) in such agents, and to their inabilities (disabilities) and abilities. Such attention to basic good health then yields a disability-friendly starting point for the construction of normative theories of basic justice generally. It does this by providing a constant undercurrent of attention to the crucial problems of human habilitation and rehabilitation that any plausible normative theory of justice must address. Those problems of justice, moreover, are framed as part of the inescapable project of working around human disabilities, or through them, toward situations in which their salience for basic justice is minimized.

On the occasion of translating into English the Latin of the 1968 encyclical on contraception and responsible parenthood, this chapter locates the encyclical in the context of the Second Vatican Council. It identifies its central argument, and focuses on the significance of the basic human good of marriage and the significance of the marital act for the expressing, actualizing, and experiencing of that good. Contracepting is excluded on essentially the same grounds as all other non-marital sex acts, that its being non-marital (because it eliminates from the act one of the aspects of the good of marriage) is against the good of marriage. Marriage's point is not procreation, nor friendship between the spouses, but marriage itself, as a good uniting both procreation and friendship in a form of life apt for the good of children. The essential difference between contraception and periodic abstinence can be explained more clearly than the encyclical does, as can (with hindsight) the bad effects of treating contraception as morally acceptable.

This concluding chapter reviews the basic goods approach, its intellectual sources, and its practical importance. It emphasizes the role of basic goods as basic rights and connects these basic subsistence rights to the tradition of moral minimalism in political philosophy. It questions the claims of technological optimists and calls for a “rational pessimism” in the setting of global policy priorities. It also proposes a set of ten basic development goals to replace the current and often criticized sustainable development goals. It considers the feasibility of basic goods provision using back-of-the-envelope calculations, concluding that the goal of universal basic goods provision is indeed feasible.

This introductory chapter introduces the basic goods approach and its relationship to the standard growth perspective and the capabilities/human development perspective. It defines basic goods and services as those that meet central and objective human needs and argues in favor of sustained attempts that achieve their universal provision. It identifies a set of basic goods that includes nutritious food, clean water, sanitation, health services, education services, housing, electricity, and human security services. The chapter argues that what really matters about growth is the possibility that it will lead to an increase in the broad-based provision of basic goods and services. The hoped-for expansion of human capabilities and development is predicated on this expanded provision of basic goods, and the expanded provision of basic goods and services also can promote growth. In these ways, basic goods and services are a critical link between growth and human development.

This chapter seeks to identify the basic human goods that are the foundational principles of the natural law; a derived set of moral norms that emerge from consideration of the integral directiveness or prescriptivity of those foundational principles; and the implications of these norms for medical practice and medical law as regards four questions. First, how should medical practice and medical law be structured with respect to the intentional taking of human life by members of the medical profession? Second, who, in the clinical setting, has authority for medical decision making, and what standards should guide their decisions? Third, what standards should govern the distribution of health-care resources in society, and do those standards give reasons for thinking, from the natural law standpoint, that there is a ‘right to health care’? Fourth, what concern should be shown in medical practice and medical law for the rights of ‘physician conscience’?

This chapter critically reviews the standard growth perspective to development policy and contrasts it with the capabilities approach and human development paradigms. It reviews the research on the causes of growth and assesses the role of growth in development. It argues that, although important, growth is not always as necessary as alleged for some advances in human development, including health. It also argues that growth can be dependent on minimal levels of basic goods provision. The chapter characterizes the capabilities approach as overly aspirational and suggests that it downplays the actual determinants of capabilities expansion. Without a focus on determinants, desired outcomes cannot be achieved.

This chapter examines John Finnis' neo-Aristotelian and objective conception of what makes a life good for a person, or well-being. It is argued that, pace Finnis himself, Finnis is in fact a philosophical intuitionist, but that he should welcome such foundationalism. Each of Finnis' ‘basic goods’ is discussed: knowledge, life, play, aesthetic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion. The chapter ends with defences of hedonism against Finnis' objections, and of a form of Pyrrhonist scepticism.

Liberty is a comparative ideal (although not in the same way that equality is comparative). In order to live a good life, we need secured access to at least four basic goods: (i) which will adequately satisfy one’s biological needs; (ii) secure one’s negative freedom, ie freedom from unjustified interference by others in one’s person, projects, possessions, relationships, and affairs; (iii) provide an adequate range of valuable opportunities to choose from; and (iv) are conducive to having an appropriate level of self-respect. Sufficient and secured access to these goods make a person free and enable her to seek a good life. While these goods promote liberty, how much of each we are entitled to is a relative and contextual judgment rather than an absolute and insular one. This relative understanding of freedom is key to appreciate the freedom-enhancing role of discrimination law.

This chapter introduces the concept of human security and relates the concept to the basic goods approach. It considers the widespread nature of human security deprivation and the consequent negative impacts for well-being and safety. The chapter examines the right to human security and the central role of this right within the United Nations system of human rights. It considers the related concepts of the right to protect and humanitarian space, the many causes of human insecurity, the contribution of the drug and arms trade to human insecurity, and the various kinds of costs and impacts of human insecurity. It concludes with a brief consideration of various means to better provide human security services.