Kirk's Needs of the Few

If we reject Spock's 'needs of the many', what about Kirk's 'needs of the one'...?

“Because the needs of the one... outweigh the needs of the many.”
- Kirk, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

We are not immediately attracted to the idea that the ‘needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many’... it seems, shall we say, illogical. What’s more, the means by which I undermined the legitimacy of Spock’s ‘needs of the many’ applies just as much to Kirk’s counter-proposal: moral judgements are not subjectable to inequalities, and the truths of mathematics are not at all like moral truths. Yet oddly, we do encounter people claiming that the needs of the few have some kind of special merit. As such, we might need to examine Kirk’s remark in order to understand why there might be some appeal in it.

It is worth admitting that Kirk speaks more-or-less in irony when he says to Spock that the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many. He says this precisely because it will appear illogical in the light of Spock’s prior remarks. But Kirk’s behaviour is no more illogical than Spock’s: Spock’s friendship is of such value to Kirk, and Kirk’s sense of duty towards his crew is so great, that the moment it is a possibility Spock can be rescued, the attempt becomes inevitable. Anyone who would not risk their lives to defend their values is a coward and quite possibly a fool.

If we set aside the problem that mathematical inequalities have no meaning in the context of living a good life, we can look at when and how the needs of the few might outweigh the needs of the many. To do so, we have to ask who the many are, who the few are, and what needs we are dealing with. It can only mean trouble if we try to transfer judgements from one domain to another, like my previous example of comparing an old couple’s freedom to die in their own house to shorter travel times, as if these ‘needs’ were in any way comparable.

Politics at the moment is suddenly filled with situations in which we are told that the few are disadvantaged, and the many must suffer to accommodate them. This is sometimes dressed up as social justice. But it is plainly injustice to inflict suffering or harm upon an arbitrary group of people in order to benefit another group, which makes it odd that anyone would come to think that this would be logical, moral, or desirable.

What makes this ever look plausible is a barely-concealed concept of reparations - for instance, because black citizens of the US were previously disadvantaged, we must extend them advantages now. There may well be a role for such reparations; we tend to believe that Native Americans deserved compensation for having had their land stolen from them by force, for instance. But reparations are attempts at redressing the balance. In so much as one situation ‘outweighs’ another, the reparations attempt to make good on that imbalance.

The danger in turning to such political interventions in the pursuit of justice is that in order to execute such redresses, someone has to make a judgement that compares like for unalike. Even before this, someone has to judge who is disadvantaged and who is advantaged. While motivated by a desire for justice, these kinds of political interventions will always be perceived by some people as a form of injustice as long as there is no prior agreement as to how and why we are trying to offer reparations in the first place.

Rather than mounting effectively random attempts to adjudicate justice, our safest and most trustworthy principle for political solidarity is to affirm our equality as humans. It is pointless to claim that because the scales were previously tipped in favour of white citizens, we must now tip them to the other side… this is as far from Martin Luther King Jr’s dream as could be imagined. Justice can never be attained through injustice. Rather, we need shared principles of equality where everyone is treated as equal, which until quite recently was our common ideal.

The needs of the few can no more outweigh the needs of the many than vice versa. The needs of all, however, can be served by good principles for life, and will be undermined by ill-conceived notions of justice. There may be no greater defence against ‘needs of the few’ arguments than a return to the one principle for a good life capable of travelling between all of the worlds we live in: equality. If anything outweighs anything else in ethics, equality outweighs every alternative for justice.