  Where a caring relationship already exists, it is easy to identify the person who has the moral obligation to meet another’s needs, but this raises the question whether needs as such can impose obligations on those who have the means to satisfy them, or whether there must already be a pre-existing relationship that explains why Alfred has an obligation to meet Betty’s needs. Reader (2007, 72) defends the view that ‘need only constitutes an actual moral demand in the context of a moral relationship’. But she is obliged to stretch the idea of a moral relationship to deal with emergency situations in which we intuitively think that rescuers are obliged to come to the aid of complete strangers when they can do so at little cost. She does so by arguing that ‘encounters’, even very brief ones, should count as a form of moral relationship (Reader 2007,  74–5). This, however, is implausible if it is intended to include cases such as those in which the person in need is unaware of the presence of her saviour (for example because she is lying unconscious). The relationship between rescuer and victim here consists simply in the former’s physical capacity to carry out the rescue at small cost: there is no person-to-person encounter between them prior to the rescue itself. So if we think that the rescuer in such cases does have an obligation to meet the needs of the victim, then we must concede that human need alone can impose obligations in the absence of any further relationship between the two parties.