Len Doyal
Biographic Data
| ID | 3583604 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Len Doyal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Len |
| FAMILY NAME | Doyal |
| SIGNATURE | DOYAL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen Mary University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 416 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account - Gillian Brock
It all began so well. In many parts of the eighteenth‐century world, fights against tyranny and declarations of universal rights echoed Rousseau's optimism about the capacity of all humans to flourish intellectually and emotionally. If only the contamination of social injustice could be abolished, then the will of the people could be realized. New democracies were founded, and market economies emerged, based on laws which ensured non‐interference…
Is patient involvement possible when decisions involve scarce resources? A qualitative study of decision-making in primary care
Greater patient involvement has become a key goal of health care provision. This study explored the way in which general practitioners (GPs) in the UK manage the dual responsibilities of treating individual patients and making the most equitable use of National Health Service (NHS) resources in the context of the policy of greater patient involvement in decision-making. We undertook a qualitative study incorporating a series of interviews and foc…
O direito à satisfação das necessidades
Este artigo desenvolve uma estratégia argumentativa para justificar uma moralidade de satisfação das necessidades humanas. Se esperamos seriamente que outros assumam os deveres e responsabilidades morais que lhes atribuímos, então temos que provê-los dos recursos e das oportunidades necessários para tanto. Os autores avaliam a validade e o alcance desse argumento, tanto em um contexto intracultural quanto em um contexto intercultural
The role of the public in health care rationing
(1993). The role of the public in health care rationing. Critical Public Health: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 49-54
Thinking about Human Need
The discourse of objective and universal human need has been abused to reinforce a wide variety of relationships of dominance. The word ‘need’ is one of the first to which self-proclaimed ‘authorities’ have traditionally turned to justify their power and the morality of inflicting it on others. If
A Theory of Human Need
The Inevitability of Human Needs
The coherence of the concept of social progress depends upon the belief that some modes of social organisation are better suited to satisfying human need than others. Unless increases in need-satisfaction can be shown to follow from policies which purport to promote such progress their moral purpose will be blurred. This can be seen as regards the varied attempts to defend and improve the welfare state. In light of national differences between we…
Who Needs Human Needs?
Abuses of the concept of objective and universal human need have led to disillusionment and scepticism. This has contributed to the collapse of confidence in the prospect of successful socialist politics, the threat to welfare citizenship rights, the fragmentation of political struggle against varied forms of oppression, and, gaining strength from all of this, the intellectual influence of the New Right. Many argue that it is morally safer and in…
A Dual Political Strategy
Just as the economic organisation of a society which accords a high priority to optimising need-satisfaction must consist of a duality, so too must its political organisation. If human needs have strict priority over other political goals, then all people have the right to optimal need-satisfaction based on the best available knowledge. Such a view might seem to support the authority of experts. However, we have seen that appropriate and effectiv…
Physical Health and Autonomy: The Basic Needs of Persons
Attempts to deny the objectivity of need have proved popular and superficially plausible. People do have strong feelings about what they need and these feelings can vary enormously between cultures and over time. In Britain, for example, Townsend found that as many as 44 per cent of those he defined as severely deprived felt no deprivation themselves (1979a, p. 423). Yet there also appears to be a consensus about the range of necessities which fo…
Human Liberation and the Right to Need-Satisfaction
So far we have argued that health and autonomy are basic needs common to all humans irrespective of culture. We have further shown that there are specific societal conditions for the satisfaction of both needs. But we have not been concerned with the moral issue of whether people’s needs should be met. Not everyone accepts that they have an obligation to aid those in serious need. Without such a moral theory we can only preach to the converted. T…
Measuring Need-Satisfaction
In Part II we have argued that basic needs exist which are objective and universal but our understanding of which changes, and typically expands, through time. We also recognised that these needs are met by innumerable specific satisfiers, which do vary across cultures. Here, we must again address the many problems which flow from this duality of universality and particularity. Can we articulate what physical health and autonomy mean in terms whi…
Optimising Need-Satisfaction in Theory
Even if we assume that there is general agreement within a society that priority should be given to the optimisation of need satisfaction, we are not yet out of the relativist wood. There may be little consensus over which strategies best achieve this goal and/or, whether or not it can be reconciled with other aims and beliefs. Human history has created so many different patterns of production, reproduction, communication and government that view…
Towards a Political Economy of Need-Satisfaction
Chapter 12 provides a description of need-satisfaction in the contemporary world: it does not explain what we observe. Such findings raise questions for each of the Three Worlds’. What, if any, is the contribution of economic growth, as conventionally defined and measured, to the level and distribution of need-satisfaction? What other political and social institutions and processes are at work? Why have the more developed state socialist societie…
Physical Health and Autonomy
How can the satisfaction of basic needs be empirically evaluated? The reader will recall the distinction drawn in Chapter 4 between the ultimate goal presumed by our theory — the avoidance of serious harm regarded as the fundamental and sustained impairment of social participation — and the basic needs for physical health and autonomy. These needs were seen to be the universal conditions for achieving this goal. Our intention here is to operation…
Charting Human Welfare: Need-Satisfaction in the Three Worlds
Beliefs about the benign or malign effects of modernisation on human welfare seem to go in swings. The nineteenth-century trust in social progress was severely undermined by First World War, the interwar crisis of capitalism, the emergence of fascism and Stalinism and the horror of Auschwitz. Yet for a period after the Second World War the belief in a rational path of progress revived, as both welfare capitalism and state socialism held out the p…
The Grammar of ‘Need’
It is at least plausible to assume that objective human needs exist in some sense. Yet there can be no doubt that our common-sense understanding of what sorts of things needs are is varied and often confused and ambiguous. This is due in part to the fact that the word ‘need’ is employed in everyday language in such diverse ways. One of the most common usages refers to needs as drives with which we have little choice but to conform. Another concep…
Societal Preconditions for Optimising Need-Satisfaction
In Chapters 6 and 7, we argued that everyone has a moral right to optimal need-satisfaction. We now need to consider how this moral right translates into specific positive rights — how rights to need-satisfaction can be specified and delivered, and how our procedural preconditions for rational deliberation can be approximated in real-world political processes and institutions. Only then can we evaluate how closely different societies approximate …
Societal Preconditions for the Satisfaction of Basic Needs
Has our emphasis on personal autonomy smuggled in a strong form of individualism which denies the role of the social and its place in meeting needs? The answer we give in this chapter is no — we can only acquire the ability to act from the positive actions of others and they from others and so on. Any conception of agency or autonomy which ignores this fact will be an impoverished abstraction, irrelevant to understanding why humans act and choose…
Intermediate Needs
In Chapter 8 we introduced the notion of ‘universal satisfier characteristics’: those ‘inputs’ which, according to the best available knowledge, contribute positively to the ‘output’ of individual health and autonomy in all cultures. We identified eleven such characteristics, which we called ‘intermediate needs’. In this chapter, we shall elaborate on each of these, trying to do two things. First, its inclusion will be justified by referring to t…
A Theory of Human Need
Rejecting fashionable subjectivist and cultural relativist approaches, this important book argues that human beings have universal and objective needs for health and autonomy and a right to their optimal satisfaction. The authors develop a system of social indicators to show what such optimization would mean in practice and assess the records of a wide range of developed and underdeveloped economies in meeting their citizens' needs
Medical Ethics and Moral Indeterminacy
Table of Contents I. No Justice, No Peace II. Spirit III. Class IV. Political Economy Understanding emergency takeover of Detroit depends on overstanding complex relationships and dynamics: socioeconomic class; class conflict; government powers theoretically constrained by rule of law but actually exercised at will without checks, balance or accountability; and nuances of multi-level relationships between race, regional power, political economy a…
Human Evolution (Book)
A theory of human needs
The Practical Foundations of Human Understanding
This essay concerns the significance of ‘human sensuous activity’—what has become known variously as ‘praxis’ to many Marxists and ‘action’ to analytic and phenomenological philosophers. Put grandly, our thesis is that it is from labour, and not from language or thought, that the category of meaning arises. That
A Theory of Human Need
Rejecting fashionable subjectivist and cultural relativist approaches, this important book argues that human beings have universal and objective needs for health and autonomy and a right to their optimal satisfaction. The authors develop a system of social indicators to show what such optimization would mean in practice and assess the records of a wide range of developed and underdeveloped economies in meeting their citizens' needs
A theory of human needs
Is patient involvement possible when decisions involve scarce resources? A qualitative study of decision-making in primary care
Greater patient involvement has become a key goal of health care provision. This study explored the way in which general practitioners (GPs) in the UK manage the dual responsibilities of treating individual patients and making the most equitable use of National Health Service (NHS) resources in the context of the policy of greater patient involvement in decision-making. We undertook a qualitative study incorporating a series of interviews and foc…
O direito à satisfação das necessidades
Este artigo desenvolve uma estratégia argumentativa para justificar uma moralidade de satisfação das necessidades humanas. Se esperamos seriamente que outros assumam os deveres e responsabilidades morais que lhes atribuímos, então temos que provê-los dos recursos e das oportunidades necessários para tanto. Os autores avaliam a validade e o alcance desse argumento, tanto em um contexto intracultural quanto em um contexto intercultural
A Theory of Human Need
Medical Ethics and Moral Indeterminacy
Table of Contents I. No Justice, No Peace II. Spirit III. Class IV. Political Economy Understanding emergency takeover of Detroit depends on overstanding complex relationships and dynamics: socioeconomic class; class conflict; government powers theoretically constrained by rule of law but actually exercised at will without checks, balance or accountability; and nuances of multi-level relationships between race, regional power, political economy a…
The Practical Foundations of Human Understanding
This essay concerns the significance of ‘human sensuous activity’—what has become known variously as ‘praxis’ to many Marxists and ‘action’ to analytic and phenomenological philosophers. Put grandly, our thesis is that it is from labour, and not from language or thought, that the category of meaning arises. That
A theory of human needs
Human Evolution (Book)
Medical Ethics and Moral Indeterminacy
Table of Contents I. No Justice, No Peace II. Spirit III. Class IV. Political Economy Understanding emergency takeover of Detroit depends on overstanding complex relationships and dynamics: socioeconomic class; class conflict; government powers theoretically constrained by rule of law but actually exercised at will without checks, balance or accountability; and nuances of multi-level relationships between race, regional power, political economy a…
The Inevitability of Human Needs
The coherence of the concept of social progress depends upon the belief that some modes of social organisation are better suited to satisfying human need than others. Unless increases in need-satisfaction can be shown to follow from policies which purport to promote such progress their moral purpose will be blurred. This can be seen as regards the varied attempts to defend and improve the welfare state. In light of national differences between we…
Who Needs Human Needs?
Abuses of the concept of objective and universal human need have led to disillusionment and scepticism. This has contributed to the collapse of confidence in the prospect of successful socialist politics, the threat to welfare citizenship rights, the fragmentation of political struggle against varied forms of oppression, and, gaining strength from all of this, the intellectual influence of the New Right. Many argue that it is morally safer and in…
A Dual Political Strategy
Just as the economic organisation of a society which accords a high priority to optimising need-satisfaction must consist of a duality, so too must its political organisation. If human needs have strict priority over other political goals, then all people have the right to optimal need-satisfaction based on the best available knowledge. Such a view might seem to support the authority of experts. However, we have seen that appropriate and effectiv…
Physical Health and Autonomy: The Basic Needs of Persons
Attempts to deny the objectivity of need have proved popular and superficially plausible. People do have strong feelings about what they need and these feelings can vary enormously between cultures and over time. In Britain, for example, Townsend found that as many as 44 per cent of those he defined as severely deprived felt no deprivation themselves (1979a, p. 423). Yet there also appears to be a consensus about the range of necessities which fo…
Human Liberation and the Right to Need-Satisfaction
So far we have argued that health and autonomy are basic needs common to all humans irrespective of culture. We have further shown that there are specific societal conditions for the satisfaction of both needs. But we have not been concerned with the moral issue of whether people’s needs should be met. Not everyone accepts that they have an obligation to aid those in serious need. Without such a moral theory we can only preach to the converted. T…
Measuring Need-Satisfaction
In Part II we have argued that basic needs exist which are objective and universal but our understanding of which changes, and typically expands, through time. We also recognised that these needs are met by innumerable specific satisfiers, which do vary across cultures. Here, we must again address the many problems which flow from this duality of universality and particularity. Can we articulate what physical health and autonomy mean in terms whi…
Optimising Need-Satisfaction in Theory
Even if we assume that there is general agreement within a society that priority should be given to the optimisation of need satisfaction, we are not yet out of the relativist wood. There may be little consensus over which strategies best achieve this goal and/or, whether or not it can be reconciled with other aims and beliefs. Human history has created so many different patterns of production, reproduction, communication and government that view…
Towards a Political Economy of Need-Satisfaction
Chapter 12 provides a description of need-satisfaction in the contemporary world: it does not explain what we observe. Such findings raise questions for each of the Three Worlds’. What, if any, is the contribution of economic growth, as conventionally defined and measured, to the level and distribution of need-satisfaction? What other political and social institutions and processes are at work? Why have the more developed state socialist societie…
Physical Health and Autonomy
How can the satisfaction of basic needs be empirically evaluated? The reader will recall the distinction drawn in Chapter 4 between the ultimate goal presumed by our theory — the avoidance of serious harm regarded as the fundamental and sustained impairment of social participation — and the basic needs for physical health and autonomy. These needs were seen to be the universal conditions for achieving this goal. Our intention here is to operation…
Charting Human Welfare: Need-Satisfaction in the Three Worlds
Beliefs about the benign or malign effects of modernisation on human welfare seem to go in swings. The nineteenth-century trust in social progress was severely undermined by First World War, the interwar crisis of capitalism, the emergence of fascism and Stalinism and the horror of Auschwitz. Yet for a period after the Second World War the belief in a rational path of progress revived, as both welfare capitalism and state socialism held out the p…
The Grammar of ‘Need’
It is at least plausible to assume that objective human needs exist in some sense. Yet there can be no doubt that our common-sense understanding of what sorts of things needs are is varied and often confused and ambiguous. This is due in part to the fact that the word ‘need’ is employed in everyday language in such diverse ways. One of the most common usages refers to needs as drives with which we have little choice but to conform. Another concep…
Societal Preconditions for Optimising Need-Satisfaction
In Chapters 6 and 7, we argued that everyone has a moral right to optimal need-satisfaction. We now need to consider how this moral right translates into specific positive rights — how rights to need-satisfaction can be specified and delivered, and how our procedural preconditions for rational deliberation can be approximated in real-world political processes and institutions. Only then can we evaluate how closely different societies approximate …
Societal Preconditions for the Satisfaction of Basic Needs
Has our emphasis on personal autonomy smuggled in a strong form of individualism which denies the role of the social and its place in meeting needs? The answer we give in this chapter is no — we can only acquire the ability to act from the positive actions of others and they from others and so on. Any conception of agency or autonomy which ignores this fact will be an impoverished abstraction, irrelevant to understanding why humans act and choose…
Intermediate Needs
In Chapter 8 we introduced the notion of ‘universal satisfier characteristics’: those ‘inputs’ which, according to the best available knowledge, contribute positively to the ‘output’ of individual health and autonomy in all cultures. We identified eleven such characteristics, which we called ‘intermediate needs’. In this chapter, we shall elaborate on each of these, trying to do two things. First, its inclusion will be justified by referring to t…
A Theory of Human Need
Rejecting fashionable subjectivist and cultural relativist approaches, this important book argues that human beings have universal and objective needs for health and autonomy and a right to their optimal satisfaction. The authors develop a system of social indicators to show what such optimization would mean in practice and assess the records of a wide range of developed and underdeveloped economies in meeting their citizens' needs
The role of the public in health care rationing
(1993). The role of the public in health care rationing. Critical Public Health: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 49-54
Thinking about Human Need
The discourse of objective and universal human need has been abused to reinforce a wide variety of relationships of dominance. The word ‘need’ is one of the first to which self-proclaimed ‘authorities’ have traditionally turned to justify their power and the morality of inflicting it on others. If
A Theory of Human Need
O direito à satisfação das necessidades
Este artigo desenvolve uma estratégia argumentativa para justificar uma moralidade de satisfação das necessidades humanas. Se esperamos seriamente que outros assumam os deveres e responsabilidades morais que lhes atribuímos, então temos que provê-los dos recursos e das oportunidades necessários para tanto. Os autores avaliam a validade e o alcance desse argumento, tanto em um contexto intracultural quanto em um contexto intercultural
Is patient involvement possible when decisions involve scarce resources? A qualitative study of decision-making in primary care
Greater patient involvement has become a key goal of health care provision. This study explored the way in which general practitioners (GPs) in the UK manage the dual responsibilities of treating individual patients and making the most equitable use of National Health Service (NHS) resources in the context of the policy of greater patient involvement in decision-making. We undertook a qualitative study incorporating a series of interviews and foc…
Global Justice: A Cosmopolitan Account - Gillian Brock
It all began so well. In many parts of the eighteenth‐century world, fights against tyranny and declarations of universal rights echoed Rousseau's optimism about the capacity of all humans to flourish intellectually and emotionally. If only the contamination of social injustice could be abolished, then the will of the people could be realized. New democracies were founded, and market economies emerged, based on laws which ensured non‐interference…
Political science (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Economics (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Ethics in medical practice (5 works)