Justice is a fundamental value of political science, forming the main preoccupation of both Plato’sRepublic and Aristotle’sPolitics. It can most conveniently 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 as due 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 international arena, where the disparity in wealth between, for example, the Third World and the First World, is treated as a failure of justice.
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