Who says there’s no explicit liberal ethic? The liberal ethic is open-ended, but it’s explicit and clear. It’s based on reasoning about human nature, as opposed to deference to religious scriptures. The liberal ethic is that people are free and should be allowed to pursue their interests unless they start interfering with other people’s equal freedom.
As the IEP article observes, this led to an important shift in liberal thought, from emphasizing negative to positive rights, or from saying that individuals should be free only to try, to saying that they should be empowered to succeed. That’s the difference between free-market liberalism or neoliberalism, and social-democratic, progressive liberalism.
I don’t see how your view of justice as mutual respect for beings that “effectuate choices” goes beyond the classic liberal principle of toleration, that our explicit primary imperative is to respect each other as free beings so that, as social democrats say, even when we fail we should be helped back up rather than discarded, as in the “conservative’s” social Darwinian framework.
