Thank you for that thoughtful reply. As it happens, my Master’s Thesis (1988) contained a Review of the Literature of the academic debate concerning ‘distributive justice’ that was initiated by the publication of Rawls’s book (1971). So, I’m familiar.

Mutual respect, in one form or another, is coextensive with Modern (secular) thinking about justice (basically, Liberalism). I got “effecting choices” from Warren J. Samuels, who all but defined “social power” as the ability to effect choices in “Welfare Economics, Property, and Power” in Perspectives of Property, edited by Gene Wunderlich and W.L. Gibson (1972).

Having both the determiners of justice (the observations from which the ethic of ‘real justice’ follows) and its referents (interactions among human beings in the process of effecting choices) contained within material existence legitimately de-legitimates going outside material existence, to beliefs, to claim immunity from that ethic. Again, anyone who accepted the validity of those observations would be unable to deny the applicability of that ethic to all people, including oneself.

Even so, reading Foucault convinced me that people are entitled to their own realities. A person might sincerely dispute the validity of those observations. That would mean consistently acting as though those observations were invalid, not merely making the claim. Anyone who did assert by the way one acted that those observations were invalid for that person would still be treated as a human being, but could not be allowed to break the law. As I said, that seems to be the best we can do.