Contesting the Minimally Good Life

Abstract

This article offers a supportive but critical engagement with Nicole Hassoun’s method for determining the content of the minimally good life. Against the dangers of both homogenising, paternalistic objectivism and capricious, uncritical subjectivism, Hassoun develops an account grounded in the second-person perspective of a free, reasonable, caring agent. While this framework marks a considerable advance, we argue that it systematically and problematically sidelines the politics of need: the contested, power-structured, and institutionally embedded processes through which needs are generated, interpreted, contested, claimed, legitimised, and met. Analysing each of Hassoun’s triad of freedom, reasonableness, and care, we show how her attempt to locate normative authority in well-placed individual agents generates both conceptual difficulties and a troubling detachment from the real-world challenges her theory is designed to address. Emphasising the risk of adaptation in affluent societies, the persistence of reasonable disagreement and pluralism, and the relational and political dimensions of caring practices, we argue that assessments of the minimally good life cannot plausibly be treated as matters of individual judgement. Instead, they require collective processes capable of coordinating and legitimating our choices, judgements, and actions under conditions of persistent disagreement and asymmetrical power. We conclude by proposing a shift from individual standpoints to political relationships as the proper locus for determining the content and demands of a minimally good life.