Aquinas on Human Well-Being and the Necessities of Life

The Thomist 66 (2002): 61-99 AQUINAS ON HUMAN WELL-BEING AND THE NECESSITIES OF LIFE JOHN D. }ONES Marquette University Milwaukee, Wisconsin RE YOU SURE you really need that?" We are all familiar with this sort of question. In allocating resources in our personal nd social lives, we often assign a key role to distinguishing what people need from what they do not need or perhaps merely desire. David Macarov, for example, claims that a basic function of social welfare programs is to distinguish needs from desires.1 Discourse about needs ("needs discourse") also plays a key role in various psycho-social theories of development and well-being.2 But needs discourse is not merely practical in nature; it raises a host of complex theoretical problems related to defining needs, distinguishing basic needs from other needs, determining the relation between culture and needs, and so forth. 3 1 David Macarov, Social Welfare: Structure and Practice (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995), 17-18. 2 Abraham Maslow's need-based theory of psychological development is perhaps the best example in this genre. 3 Needless to say, there is an immense contemporary literature on all aspects of needs discourse. For a small sample of some recent work, one can consult Fernando I. Soriano, Conducting Needs Assessments: A Multidisciplinary Approach (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995); Janie Percy-Smith, ed., Needs Assessments in Public Policy (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1996); Philippe van Parijs, Arguing for Basic Income: Ethical Foundations for a Radical Reform (London: Verso, 1992); D. P. Ghai, et. al., The Basic-Needs Approach to Development: Some Issues Regarding Concepts and Methodology (Geneva: International Labour Office, 1977); Paul Streeten, First Things First: Meeting Basic Human Needs in the Developing Countries (New York: Published for the World Bank [by] Oxford University Press, 1981); Edmond Preteceille and Jean-Pierre Terrail, Capitalism, Consumption, and Needs, trans. Sarah Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985); Conrad Lodziak, Manipulating Needs: Capitalism and Culture (Boulder, Co: Pluto Press,1995); Katrin Lederer 61 62 JOHN D. JONES Yet, however pervasive is the role of needs discourse in contemporary life, that role pales in face of the foundational role Aquinas assigns to it in his conception of human life, both individual and social. One of the fundamental properties of happiness is self-sufficiency, namely, that it is in itself (per se) sufficient as a final end of human life. Commenting on Aristotle's claim that happiness is a self-sufficient good because it needs nothing exterior (nullo exterior indigentem),4 Aquinas observes that the happiness of this life "has self-sufficiency, since, namely, it contains in itself everything that is necessary for a human."5 At the same time, the self-sufficiency of happiness entails that humans are naturally social, since "one person does not suffice for things necessary for life if he lives alone."6 Further, the major communities in everyday human life are defined and distinguished from one another in terms of the sorts of needs they satisfy and the corresponding degree of self-sufficiency they attain. The household (domus) provides those things which are necessary for daily life. The household is the locus of the most elemental human associations between man and woman, master and slave, and father and son, each of which Aquinas, following Aristotle, claims to be necessary for the generation and the preservation of life.7 The vicus, which Aquinas defines in terms of the street of a medieval town in which a particular art or craft was practiced, provides the necessities required for the practice of the craft and, thus, for the satisfaction of those needs which the single family cannot provide.8 The city, to which both the household and Johan Galtung, eds., Human Needs: A Contribution to the Current Debate (Cambridge, Mass.: Oelgeschlager, Gunn & Hain, 1980); William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction (Kingston, Ontario, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988); and John D. Jones, Poverty and the Human Condition (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990): 159-78. 4 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1.5.1097b15. 5 "habet per se sufficientiam, quia scilicet in se continet omne illud quod est homini necessarium" (I Ethic., lect. 9). Latin texts are drawn from the editions contained in...