Thank you for that exposition. If I may, I would like to add a thought or two.

Like most ideas we have in this area, the notion of natural law goes back to the ancient Greeks. It was revived by the Schoolmen, the Medieval scholars of the (Catholic) Church.

Locke made two cases for liberty as the predicate of justice. One of those involved the “Natural Right” to liberty — Natural Rights being thought of as having been discovered, not invented by people.

His other case for liberty as the predicate of justice began with the assertion that injustice is “being subject to the arbitrary will” of another person (avoiding his genderism). Since the opposite of injustice is justice and the opposite of being subject to the arbitrary will of another person is liberty, liberty. Locke said, is the predicate of justice: justice is liberty.

The idea that there are Rights that are not the invention of human beings is preposterous. For that to be the case they would have to be something material, not conceptual.

If injustice is indeed being subject to the arbitrary will of any other person (and it is), then the most immediate inference that follows from that proposition is that justice requires all people to refrain from subjecting any other person to one’s own arbitrary will.

That is mutual respect. Mutual respect maximizes liberty: if no one is being subjected to the arbitrary will of any other person, that establishes the maximum liberty that co-existing people can share simultaneously. (Democracy is supposed to take arbitrariness out of enacting and enforcing laws.)

For society, progress means advancing justice. Today, the proper task of ‘progressives’ is to advance justice through mutual respect, not liberty, as the predicate of justice.

If interested in more, see “People for Tolerance, Unite!” here in Medium.