Cosmic Justice

Passage A discusses the views of the economist and political thinker Thomas Sowell. Passage B is article by Sowell.

Passage

"Cosmic justice," as Sowell uses the term, refers to the perfect justice that only an omniscient being could render—rewards and punishments that are truly deserved when all relevant things are properly taken into consideration. Inherent human limitations, however, make it impossible to achieve this type of justice through human law, even though understand all the complex causal interrelationships involved or even know definitively what cosmic justice really is.

Whether somebody truly deserves something is a very difficult thing for us to determine. For one thing, we are not knowledgeable enough about the person and situation, or smart enough, even if we knew what all the critical factors were, to perform the complicated calculus necessary to understand how the complex interrelationships best we can reasonably do is judge primarily based upon outputs, or consequences, rather than inputs.

Passage

Cosmic justice is not simply a higher degree of traditional justice; it is a fundamentally different concept. Traditionally, justice or injustice is characteristic of a process. A defendant in a criminal case would be said to have received justice if the trial were conducted as it should be, under fair rules and innocent person. In short, traditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects.

On the other hand, cosmic justice foolishly seeks to correct, not only biased or discriminatory acts by individuals or social institutions, but unmerited disadvantages in general, from whatever source they may arise. In criminal trials, for example, before a murderer is sentenced, the law permits his traumatic childhood to be taken into reduces that deterrence and allows more crime to take place at the expense of innocent people.