Again, I do appreciate your willingness to leave the Tower to engage in dialogues with non-academics (to the extent that demands on your time permit).
As I commented after reading that article about Honneth, the ethic he espouses seems to come down to a requirement of mutual respect of the basic kind that all human beings should share with one another merely by virtue of being fellow humans: taking one another into account as we live our separate lives together in this world.
The problem is that, as any postmodernist would put it, he ends up merely privileging one belief/value over others. "Privileging" means arbitrarily favoring some abstract construct at the meta level--in this case, the formulation of an ethic. To this point that has been the case with every idea of justice ever rendered.
In "real justice" (as I have come to call my attempt) the ethic is the same (as the definitive, sufficient, prescriptive condition of justice). With both the determiner and the referents of the ethic of justice located in material existence, however, the problem of arbitrariness in the formulation of the ethic is resolved. The absence of arbitrariness is not due to 'objectivity' (which, as postmodernists--especially Derrida--have well established, is an impossible state of mind for any human being to achieve), but to a (sufficiently) knowable commonality of the experience from which the ethic follows (unlike beliefs, etc.).
Going 'outside' material existence (to beliefs, etc.) to deny the applicability of the ethic to any human being (including oneself) or to justify violating the ethic is legitimately de-legitimated, as that must involve arbitrary, non-material assertions of some kind. The absence of arbitrariness is reflected in the absolute prohibitions that follow from the minimum, necessary, proscriptive condition of justice (a ban on co-opting or otherwise preempting the capacity of other people to choose in effecting any choice).
If perchance interested, I recently published "Beliefs, Rationalistic Propositions, Justice" here in Medium.