First of all, thank you such a thoroughgoing exposition on a topic of which I was totally ignorant. I do think I have something to contribute.

I think that Mr. Bertolo would agree that “justice” is legitimate constraints on power. I have developed what I think is a universally legitimate ethic of justice for human beings.

Warren J. Samuels all but defined “social power” as the ability to “effect choices” (i.e. choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). [“Welfare Economics, Property, and Power,” Perspectives of Property, Gene Wunderlich and W. L. Gibson, eds. (1972)] (From me, not Samuels) for any community of human beings the political process is the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole; any economy is nothing but a conglomeration of choices being effected. [Samuels wrote of “opportunity sets,” ad hoc combinations of resources we have at our disposal for effecting a particular choice, which has interesting implications for just interactions in effecting choices but is beyond the immediate point.]

Immanuel Kant made the case that the only legitimate constraint on any person’s exercise of power can be one that person accepts for oneself. [He then sought to derive a moral imperative that every rational (i.e. human) being must accept as valid for oneself; in doing so he wandered into the realm of beliefs (assertions not amenable to being validated or invalidated within material existence) when he posited the existence of a “noumenal” realm of being of which we cannot ‘know’ anything except that it exists — yet which somehow still determines his “categorical imperative.”]

Heretofore all ideas of justice have been based on beliefs — either religious (theological) or secular (ideological). Beliefs divide people. They engender “contests of power” (from Michel Foucault) of the most vicious kind.

Justice requires commonality — at the same time that it still requires for any individual who would be governed by the ethic of justice to validate it for oneself. To accept a belief is to validate it for oneself, but at the same time to reject a belief is to invalidate it for oneself. So, no belief can be necessarily universal for human beings, so no ethic involving any belief can be. Only conditions within the material existence experienced with commonality by human beings, which all human beings validate for themselves, can yield an ethic of justice that legitimately applies to all human beings.

I have developed such an ethic. It applies to anyone who perceives that one is a ‘human being’ experiencing a material existence that includes other human beings and that all such beings have no choice but to effect choices. To respect others’ given, necessary capacity to choose for themselves (beginning with whether/how/to what extent to be involved in the process in any way — as means or ends, directly or indirectly, purposefully or not — whenever any choice is being effected) is to recognize them as fellow human beings within that material existence. To act otherwise is to assert some status regarding ‘thee and thou’ that cannot be substantiated within that material existence.

So the ethic of justice for ‘human beings’ (as we call ourselves) must be (most succinctly) mutual respect in effecting choices. Any being living among beings who recognized themselves to be human, who could claim that those observations were invalid, would by making that claim reveal one’s humanness for the other members of that society — and thereby enjoy that ethic’s protections while being subject to that society’s laws.

I call the account of justice that includes that ethic and its implications for human life “real justice.” A society governed by the ethic of real justice would have maximum liberty, political democracy, and an economy with no unemployment, poverty, taxes, or public debt and more sustainability (as outcomes of applying that ethic to the economic system, not as being definitive of justice). [A fuller but still brief (“5 min read”) summation of it, especially its implications for the political process and the economy, is here in Medium.]

I do not say that knowledge of this ethic to govern human interactions can create a Utopia. I do say that knowledge of it is a quantum leap for justice.

This idea needs advocates. The world needs for this idea to have advocates — unless there is a more impelling account of justice of which I am unaware.