  How should we respond to this contest? It is tempting to sidestep the controversy over needs by substituting other concepts that cover some of the same terrain but are viewed as less contestable—such as resources, welfare, or capabilities—and as we shall see later, needs have played a smaller part than one might expect in recent political philosophy. Yet there remains something compelling about the idea of need. To say that a human being is in need—is ill, or starving, or threatened by danger—seems on the face of it to identify a state of affairs that calls for immediate remedy. In everyday life, the language of need is pervasive. We talk constantly of the needs of children, the elderly, the poor, the sick, the lonely, and so on. We should not be too quick, therefore, to assume that needs-talk can easily be replaced by some other idiom. Instead we should try to understand how the controversy has arisen, and whether it can be resolved by more careful specification of the needs claims that have non-derivative practical force.