First, thanks for another outstanding article.

The bigger problem is that all of politics comes down to people seeking for the community as a whole conform to their beliefs regarding whatever issue is at stake. Beyond even that, the basic structure and (sanctioned) functioning of democratic political processes themselves has been based on beliefs. The ultimate problem is that no belief, however much anyone may claim to have examined it, is demonstrably more valid than any other belief. That makes acting on belief always arbitrary from the point of view of anyone with a contrary belief, and as John Locke did get right, in human relations arbitrariness is injustice.

We simply must pivot from that to an ethic for governing the governance of society that involves no beliefs. I have developed one that follows from the observation (from Warren J. Samuels), that people (like societies) have no choice but to effect choices, i.e., choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition. It's all about respecting one another's capacity to choose for oneself. A society governed by that ethic would have a democratic political process. How could it not? People's beliefs would still inform their participation in the process, but the structure and functioning of the process itself would be absolved of the arbitrariness that beliefs inexorably bring into the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole — which choices include establishing the structure and (sanctioned) functioning of that process.