I shall try to persuade you that fairness in procedures for resolving conflicts is the fundamental kind of fairness, and that it is acknowledged as a value in most cultures, places, and times: fairness in procedure is an invariable value, a constant in human nature. Justice and fairness in substantial matters, as in the distribution of goods or in the payment of penalties for a crime, will always vary with varying moral outlooks and with varying conceptions of the good. Because there will always be conflicts between conceptions of the good, moral conflicts, both in the soul and in the city, there is everywhere a well-recognized need for procedures of conflict resolution, which can replace brute force and domination and tyranny. This is the place of a common rationality of method that holds together both the divided and disruptive self and the divided and disruptive state. Rationality and substantial justice do not consist in a consensus and a harmony of belief in the soul and state from which all conflict has been eliminated, which is Plato's picture of the soul and of the state. On the opposing and Heracleitean picture, every soul is always the scene of conflicting tendencies and of divided aims and ambivalences, and correspondingly, our political enmities in the city or state will never come to an end while we have diverse life stories and diverse imaginations.
-- Stuart Hampshire, Justice is Conflict