I am certainly not alone in recognizing the shortcomings of contracturalism. I gave a couple of the most general criticisms of that approach to justice in my previous Reply.

I do appreciate that someone as well read as you are is taking seriously my immodest proposal for a different approach to justice. I do get frustrated when exchanges like this constantly shift and morph with nothing being resolved, but the exchanges themselves are still worthwhile for me (especially if the person on the other end has done one's reading). I have no doubt that my intellectual project would have benefited from exchanges with someone as willing and as erudite as you are.

Still, I can't help but wonder whether claiming that my writing is beyond someone's ability to understand (which I have gotten from many people) is merely a tactic for avoiding having to acknowledge the validity of what I am saying. Given what I know of myself and what I already know of you, my intellect can't be superior to yours.

For example, you persist in taking "respect" in a way I explicitly reject as pertaining to justice. Given the sufficient condition of justice as mutual respect that the effects of our actions on other people must be taken into account, much less the necessary condition that prohibits killing, harming, coercing, stealing, or manipulating in our relations with all other people, it is surely perfectly clear that neither feudalism nor bondage slavery can be an example of justice. For me, for you to continue to insist on the contrary casts a deep shadow on your critique.

Rawls's book and the academic debate it generated formed the focus of my Master's Thesis. That was forty years ago, though, and I really only remember certain highlights along with general conclusions at which I had arrived at the time.

He was forthright at the start of his book about the place of equality is his approach to justice. He took pains to make clear that he was writing within the Liberal tradition. As I see it, in that whole tradition, starting with Locke (for whom the matter of equality was the subject of first of his Treatises), where equality is not explicit it exists implicitly as a precondition for a just society. Moreover, to repeat, a belief in equality generates a requirement of mutual respect. Contracturalism, as a way of generating a form of governance consistent with Liberalism (which Hobbes's contract was not), presumes mutual respect following from an equal standing among the contractors (which even Hobbes's contract did: they all voluntarily agreed to all being subject to a supreme power--which actually would not necessarily be an individual).

It is true that Kant and Hegel did not make equality explicit, but that was the result of their idealism: within Kant's noumenal realm, where the 'essence' of humanness resides, it goes without saying that all are 'equal' by the nature of that realm of immaterial existence. Both Kant and Hegel are universally acknowledged to recognize the place of mutual respect in justice. (Note: to be clear, single quotes connote something like, "if you will," not direct quotes from Kant.)

Kant is often viewed as having gone too far with epistemology (e.g., Michael J. Sandel's Liberalism and the Limits of Justice)--which, as many philosophers have noted, Hegel made his mission to correct without rejecting Kant. I have sought to minimize epistemology and locate justice in ontology--Kant's phenomenal realm--as much as possible. That is where knowledge is possible that we can share without having to take anyone else's word for anything or to make a Kierkegaardian "leap of faith" (of which I take accepting any belief, whether sacral/theological or secular/ideological, to be an example)--which we can only do as an individual; we cannot take anyone else, much less society as a whole, with us when we go internally to any such place.

I have coupled recognizing material reality as the necessary starting point for justice with an emphasis on the practical aspects of governance. What does justice require of us as unavoidably coexisting individuals inescapably generating effects one another? What is a just political process? What is a just economy? Why is the domain of justice (as opposed to morality) limited to those three areas of life? Whatever else might be said of my efforts, I have produced a coherent, consistent answer for those questions.