Justice
Justice is a fundamental value of political science, forming the main preoccu-
pation of bothPlato’sRepublicandAristotle’sPolitics. It can most conve-
niently be divided into two aspects, procedural justice, and substantive, or
‘social’, justice. Procedural justice is considerably the easier to deal with,
involving as it does, relatively technical questions such asdue process, fair
trial and equality before the law. Substantive justice refers to the overall fairness
of a society in its division of rewards and burdens. Such divisions can be made
on the basis of social efficiency (for example, incentive payments), merit,
desert, need or several other criteria. The principal meaning of ‘social’ justice is
probably a matter of giving to people what they are ‘entitled to’ or ‘need’ (the
concepts are not identical) in terms of basic social rights, food, clothing,
housing, etc., and thereafter distributing any surplus in a fair and equitable way.
Although it is clearly a matter of great importance, ‘justice’ as a political value
can really be analysed no further than to say that it requires a ‘fair’ distribution
of goods. It is, in fact, often described as ‘distributive’ justice, and the criteria
which count as ‘fair’ depend on previous ideological judgments. In this sense
Plato and Aristotle were using the word translated as ‘justice’ to connote a
much broader summation of the good in political life. An increasingly
important application of the political sense of justice has been in the interna-
tional arena, where the disparity in wealth between, for example, theThird
Worldand theFirst World, is treated as a failure of justice.
Justice