needswhether

needswhether is a theoretical concept used in philosophy of action, decision theory, and artificial intelligence to describe the process of evaluating whether a specific need should trigger an action under conditions of uncertainty. The term combines the notion of a need—something that may compel action—with the interrogative whether, signaling that the proper response depends on how the need manifests across possible states of the world. It helps distinguish between needs that are uniformly present across scenarios and needs that appear only in some scenarios.

In formal terms, given a set of possible worlds or states W and a need N, needswhether assesses whether to act by considering how N holds across these worlds. If N is true in all plausible worlds in W, the needswhether recommendation is to act; if N is false in all, the recommendation is not to act; if N holds in some but not others, a probabilistic, priority-based, or risk-adjusted decision rule is typically invoked. This contrasts with a simple necessity claim, which ignores variation across possible conditions.

Applications of needswhether appear in autonomous planning, where systems must decide when to allocate limited resources, and in normative ethics, where agents must justify action under uncertainty about other agents’ states. It also informs everyday reasoning about whether a need warrants action given incomplete information. Related discussion touches on needs, obligations, and conditional decision theories.