  What kinds of reason for action do basic needs create? Needs are sometimes described as ‘morally demanding’, and therefore as directly generating moral obligations on the part of those who can fulfil them (Reader 2007, chs. 4–6). But what kind of obligation? Some philosophers writing in defence of care ethics take responding to need as the paradigm case of, or even definitive of, a caring relationship. For Bubeck, for example, ‘caring for is the meeting of the needs of one person by another person where face-to-face interaction between carer and cared for is a crucial element of the overall activity and where the need is of such a nature that it cannot possibly be met by the person in need herself’ (Bubeck 1995, 129). This is echoed by Held (2006, 10): ‘the central focus of the ethics of care is on the compelling moral salience of attending to and meeting the needs of the particular others for whom we take responsibility’. However it would be a mistake to think that needs only have moral relevance in the context of caring relationships, even if it is within those relationships that they can be responded to most fully. For meeting needs is also sometimes demanded as a matter of justice: we explore the relationship between needs and justice more fully in section 4 below. We can see this most clearly in circumstances where resources are not plentiful enough to meet everyone’s needs in full. Then we face the problem of how to distribute them, and the principle we use to solve it will be a principle of justice.  ‘To each according to their needs’ has over the last two centuries often been held up as the highest principle of distributive justice, although as we shall see in section 5 there are a number of different ways in which the requirement to distribute scarce resources according to need can be interpreted. Those who want to defend the supremacy of care as a moral value acknowledge that justice of this kind must have a place within caring relationships (Held 2006, ch. 4). The caring parent, for instance, must pay equal attention to the various different needs of each of his or her children.