My studies have lead me to the conclusion that people have confused reason with rationality. Reasoning is basically the employment of sound logic. If the premise from which a chain of sound reasoning follows is non-rational, however, then any conclusion that might be reached is non-rational.

When it comes to morality, values, etc. all reasoning proceeds from beliefs, assertions of true knowledge that have referents that are immaterial. They are therefore not amenable to being evaluated within the context of material existence. Beliefs can be sacral or secular, such as believing in human equality or believing some person or group is inherently superior or inferior--or believing in the existence of a priori 'Rights', e.g., 'Natural Rights'.

There is a connection between materiality and rationality. Only knowledge referring to material existence can be completely rational. Even then non-rational subjective factors can have an influence. The upshot, though, is that knowledge gleaned form material existence can have a commonality for people, in the possibility of a shared experience that is the determiner of that knowledge, that non-rational beliefs as knowledge can never have.

That is transformatively important because justice requires commonality: common knowledge, i.e., knowledge held in common, as to what justice is. That in turn requires material existence as its determiner. So to find true justice the ethic of justice must follow from observation within material existence.

As it happens, I have found such an ethic: mutual respect in effecting choices. It might sound rather flaccid, but it is most robust. In our understanding of justice it would take us "Beyond Liberalism" (here in Medium, but not behind the paywall).

Liberalism is based on believing in equality and a priori Rights — especially, for the governance of society, a ‘Right’ to liberty. A belief in equality does require an ethic of mutual respect, and a society governed by mutual respect would have the maximum liberty teat co-existing people can share simultaneously. So a society governed by this ethic would be similar to, but way, way better than any Liberal society.