I have to say, such an essay from a candidate for Congress is as heartening as it is surprising.

The ‘us and them’ problem is as old as humanity. To transcend it we need an ethic of justice that resides in our commonality as human beings.

Heretofore justice has been assumed to be a matter of (theological) spiritual beliefs or (ideological) secular beliefs. A belief in equality would be an example of the latter; it is a belief many atheists hold.

The commonality in human being that justice requires is our shared experience of material existence, including our relationships with one another within that existence. I have developed an ethic of justice that has both its determiners and its referents located in material existence: mutual respect in effecting choices.

I call that ethic and its implications for human relations ‘real justice’ (a “5 min read” here in Medium). It follows from the observations that we humans are social beings who co-exist in groups we call societies and have no choice as individuals but to effect choices (choose among perceived alternatives and take action to bring that choice to fruition). To acknowledge someone as a fellow human being is to respect that person’s capacity to choose for oneself.

Whoever accepts the validity of those observations must accept the validity of that ethic and be governed by it in the large but finite domain of effecting choices. (Outside that domain personal morality takes over.) I have learned that applying the ethic of real justice to the governance of society would maximize liberty as a practical matter, reinforce political democracy as we know it, and transform the functioning of the existing economy and its relation to the rest of society — all for the better.

Equality does imply an ethic of mutual respect (of a basic kind — taking one another into account). Still, that is a belief. Beliefs inexorably divide people into ‘us and them’.