From the editor’s desk

Towards justice and dignity

Unlike his recent Regensburg speech with its controversial quotations about Islam, Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, published earlier this year, met with universal acclaim. Its far-reaching analysis examined not only the more spiritual aspects of our lives, but also our responsibilities in the public sphere, emphasising that social justice should be a central concern of politics.

Social justice has a long Catholic pedigree, with the term first coined by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, and later being expressed more fully in Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which he emphasised that society should be based on cooperation rather than class conflict.

In political circles, however, it has remained a more controversial concept, often considered a theory of the Left. Yet this week at a Labour Party Conference fringe event hosted by the Christian Socialist Movement and sponsored by The Tablet, the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith argued that social justice should also be a guiding principle for those leaning more to the Right. Mr Duncan Smith's ideas - he has been asked to indulge in some "blue sky" thinking by the current party leader, David Cameron - have been in part shaped by the places he has visited in the past year, where he has seen the damage inflicted by poverty to people's lives. Poverty, he said at the fringe event in Manchester, is relative, rather than an absolute - probably the first time that a Conservative has admitted as much. He understood that poverty is not just concerned with lack of food or shelter or clothing, however vital they may be, but is also an experience of being an outsider in one's own society.

Mr Duncan Smith is clearly as committed to slaying Beveridge's five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness as his Labour counterparts, but social justice, as is clear from the experience of people in our most deprived areas, is about more than the satisfaction of economic needs. Instead, as the Catholic Church's teaching on social justice makes clear, we need to go beyond the basic necessities of human survival and instead enable people to fulfil their potential, to flourish and to live a truly human life.

This is, in essence, the notion of society as a moral community. As John Rawls, the foremost modern thinker on social justice, insisted, justice is the first virtue of social institutions. But justice requires us to acknowledge people's need for, and right to, respect and consideration. The damage done by neglect or removal of dignity is revealed in Paul Nicolson's account of bailiffs' activities on page 4, an account that exposes the exclusion and alienation of the most vulnerable in our society.

Dignity, however, should not be just the privileged experience of those in the West - a view that is increasingly influencing the aid agencies' critique of the work of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As Paul Melly's analysis on page 6 highlights, there is a growing sense that countries receiving aid must match it with a commitment to improved human rights and to democracy. In other words, whether it is in Glasgow or Mali, social justice requires the recognition of the dignity of the human person. And the Church must keep reminding politicians of that requirement.