Thank you for that astonishingly erudite essay.

As for President Trump, while I agree that he does seem to be motivated more narrowly by the interests of Big Business and the ‘investor class’, as I see it his “greater goal” is to disrupt and diminish democracy and to promote undemocratic regimes — Putin’s agenda.

I also agree with your assessment of the larger cultural impact of postmodernism. I do have a solution for that problem. I suspect that I have shared it with you previously; perhaps another reader will have not seen it.

First of all, we have to retain the distinction between beliefs and rationalistic propositions. I’m saying that beliefs are assertions that are not amenable to being validated or invalidated within the apparent material existence we experience as human beings. Rationalistic propositions are amenable to being so validated or invalidated (though that does not mean that all such propositions will be validated — or invalidated — to everyone’’s satisfaction). We use our rational capacity to, among other things, negotiate the material existence we apparently experience.

In short, beliefs divide people. Our rational capacity (which I happen to believe was given us, one way or another, by the Lord) is our only given intersubjective commonality.

For us humans, the ultimate problem is to be able to know what justice is. Justice is present when human life is being governed by the ethic of justice. By “the ethic of justice” I mean an ethic for governing (relevant) interactions among human beings, which would include those that comprise the ubiquitous social processes that we create as a matter of our existence — i.e. political process; economy.

That makes justice an inherently inter-subjective matter. It therefore forces both the ontological issue of the existence of other beings like oneself within a shared material existence and the epistemological issue of whether/how there can be any ethic, i.e. any rule to govern interactions among those beings, that no such being can deny as being applicable to all such beings, including oneself.

For such an ethic to be intrinsically intersubjectively valid it must avoid involving even one belief. People can accept or not any belief, but only assertions that can be validated within our shared material existence can be necessarily applicable to all human beings sharing that existence. In the end, since the legitimate applicability of the ethic of justice depends on its validation, anyone who would be governed by it must validate it for oneself.

I have developed an ethic that resolves all of those issues. 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 (which I got from Warren J. Samuels). 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 mutual respect in effecting choices. I call the account of justice that includes that ethic and its implications for human life “real justice.”

Mutual respect in effecting choices is the definitive, sufficient, prescriptive condition of justice. It tells us what we must do to act justly. We can act more or less justly.

Real justice also has a minimum, necessary, proscriptive condition of justice that tells us what we must refrain from doing to keep from acting unjustly: no one may co-opt any other person in the process of effecting any choice. That boils down to a handful of absolute prohibitions: no killing, harming, coercing, lying, cheating, or stealing to get what you want.

The domain of real justice, the range of its applicability, is limited to the large but finite realm of interactions among human beings in effecting choices. Outside its domain personal morality takes over.

[There is a fuller but still brief (“5 min read”) summation of real justice, especially its implications for our inexorable social processes, in Medium.]

I do not say that knowledge of this ethic to govern (relevant) interactions can create a Utopia. There can be no rule humans will not break. I do say that real justice is a quantum jump in our understanding of 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.