As it happens, I have developed an account of justice (encompassing personal and societal) that has as the ethic of justice “mutual respect.” I routinely refer to it as “mutual respect (of a basic kind — taking one another into account).” I argue that a requirement of mutual respect follows from a belief in equality.

I have also made the case that a requirement of mutual respect follows from observation within material existence (i.e., we humans are social beings who have no choice but to effect choices). In “real justice,” as I have come to call it, as I routinely put it, to respect others is “to recognize them as fellow human beings” (emphasis added here). Here, “respect” means respecting their capacity to choose for themselves, beginning with choosing whether or not to be involved in the process in any way whenever any choice is being effected.

This ethic of justice must govern the political process because it is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole. It must govern the economy because that societal process is nothing but effecting choices. It can even be applied to the conduct of nation-states.

I thought of mutual respect as the ethic of justice while reading Kant. I got “effecting choices” from Warren J. Samuels., who all but defined “social power” as the ability to effect choices. [“Welfare Economics, Property, and Power” in Perspectives of Property, Gene Wunderlich and W.L. Gibson, eds.] (Dr. Fred Boadu loaned me his copy of that text in graduate school — M.A., economics; my Thesis was in political economy, with a Review of the Literature that covered the academic debate concerning ‘distributive justice’ that was initiated by the publication of Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.)

I hope I have aroused your curiosity enough and garnered enough intellectual respect for you to look further: “Equality Is All We Need;” “Real Justice” here in Medium or my Web site, ajustsolution.com (Page: real justice).