Well, the nexus of Liberal justice, based on equality and liberty, and money has been the bane of liberals (in the narrower, political sense such as Democrats and Social Democrats). Almost everyone acknowledges that a flat-out equality of income is out of the question. To claim a minimum, sufficient income for all citizens as a right, it must have the characteristics of a right. Rights, being abstractions, can be shared by an unlimited number of people equally without any kind of redistribution. As it happens, I stumbled upon a way to accomplish that with a minimum income (a “3 min.” read here on Medium, “DDI: A Minimum Income That Performs Like a Right”).

My studies have taught me that ‘rights’ are not the correct determiner of justice. In a just society people do have rights that are shared equally, but those are rights they have given themselves, such as habeas corpus and the right to vote, etc.

In making liberty the predicate of justice Locke had it as both a positive (a priori) “Natural Right” and a negative right. As the former, it is but a belief; anyone can accept it or reject it without being irrational either way.

Locke began his argument for liberty as a negative right with his famous definition of injustice as “being subject to the arbitrary will” of any other person. Since the opposite of that is liberty and the opposite of injustice is justice, he made liberty the predicate of justice. No philosopher since him has challenged that proposition (though Marx, of course, rejected the ‘reality’ of justice); Kant, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, though they qualified justice in different ways, all accepted the priority of liberty.

My studies have taught me that Locke was correct in surmising that arbitrariness in human relations is injustice. But if injustice is being subject to the arbitrary will of any other person, it is more immediate to conclude that justice requires us to refrain from subjecting any other person to one’s own arbitrary will.

That is mutual respect. Mutual respect maximizes liberty as a practical matter.

Unconstrained liberty cannot be justice. It is people doing whatever they want. Justice is inherently about constraints on conduct.

Locke used the mutual respect implied by a belief in equality to constrain liberty, as in limiting it to being ‘consistent with an equal liberty for all’ and ‘ending at the person and property of any other’. Those constraints are the true source of justice in Locke’s thought (though he does not acknowledge them that way).

Respecting others needs no constraints; there is no limit needed on the amount of respect people can show one another in their relations with one another. That is a really big clue to the validity of mutual respect as the predicate of justice. Applying mutual respect to the governance of governance would maximize liberty, reinforce political democracy, and transform the impacts on society of the existing economy.