  For those who believe that claims of need can also be claims of justice, the idea that what justice requires is that resources should be distributed according to need has an obvious appeal: the needier someone is, the more resources they should be assigned.  Marx famously wrote that in the higher state of communist society, resource distribution would be governed by the principle ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ (Marx 1977, 569). But he prefaced this by pointing out that this could only happen once ‘the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly’—that is to say, scarcity had been overcome. Because of this assumption, it is arguable whether the principle as proposed by Marx should be seen as a principle of justice, or as a principle for a world that has moved beyond the circumstances for justice (see Buchanan 1982; Lukes 1985, ch.4; Wood 1980).