This article makes clear where philosophy has gone wrong: a misrepresentation of rationality.

My studies have taught me that seeing ideology as a secular version of theology makes clear much that is otherwise obscured from our understanding. Both are based on beliefs.

The 'Reason' of 'Enlightenment' philosophers obscured the fact that it followed from beliefs (e.g., 'equality', 'Natural Rights'), making the products of such reasoning as non-rational (though not necessarily irrational) as--and as arbitrary as, from the point of view of people not sharing a belief--any sacral religion. Beliefs are (along with any 'transcendent', a priori, etc. anything) a form of extra-rational knowledge.

Postmodernists have mistakenly continued to equate such Reason with 'the rational'. As a result, their critique, which is valid for reason applied to secular beliefs, has been misapplied to actual rationality--as in science, in which reasoning is applied to observations of material existence, not beliefs.

Postmodernists have established that 'objectivity', as a state of mind in which no extraneous subjective influences (which includes all forms of extra-rational knowledge and psychological influences as well) are operative, is a human impossibility. Still, the findings of science are not subjective in the way that beliefs, such as believing in God or believing in the moral equality of human beings, must necessarily be.

To further our understanding of justice we must ditch ideology to take a strictly rational approach to it. The ethic of justice must follow from observation within material existence, without involving any form of extra-rational knowledge--not for the sake of (unobtainable) objectivity, but due to the (sufficiently) knowable commonality that only observation within material existence can provide.