Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Easy

PT128 S4 P4 Q23 Explanation

Cosmic Justice

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsAnalogyLaw

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Passage

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.

What this question is testing

Analogy

Your task

Pin down exactly what the question asks about the passage — a detail, the author's view, the structure, or the main point — before looking at the choices.

Common trap

Answers that restate a true detail from the passage but don't answer the specific question being asked.

Winning move

Anticipate the answer in your own words from the passage, then find the choice that matches that prediction.

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
23.

Which one of the following is most analogous to the kind of approach

Answer choices

  1. Weak Match2% picked this

    A local library charges children lower fines for overdue materials and lost books than

    This is a form of lessening punishment for some offenders, and it might be based on thinking that children, as offenders, are at disadvantages relative to adult offenders, and thus the children deserve lighter punishments. But it's at least a straightforward system to implement. You've got juvenile justice and adult justice. You don't have to assess a complicated constellation of factors to decide on the lower fine.

  2. Correct91% picked this

    In assigning grades, a teacher takes into account not only written assignments and class performance, but also background

    Why this is right

    This seems like an impossible data + judgment burden. How could a teacher know enough about every single student and know how to judge the unique particulars of each student's situation in order to translate that unique, complex backstory into a letter grade. Furthermore, if the grade is meant to measure performance on one specific written assignment, then what the heck do all these remote / tangential concerns have to do with quantifying how someone did when it comes to this one deed?

    Skill tested: Analogy · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  3. Not Complex2% picked this

    In assigning employee parking spaces, management takes into account an employee's rank within, and years of

    This is a very easy system to implement and judge. It's very easy to obtain the data of an employee's rank and tenure, and those are simple variables to translate into a priority ranking for parking spaces.

  4. No Match3% picked this

    An employer with a proven history of age discrimination is forced by a court to

    It's hard to even relate this to the task at hand. This involves an appropriate punishment being levied by a court against a certain offender. There doesn't seem to be any aspect of, "Let me somehow quantify a holistic assessment of your entire life's backstory".

  5. Weak Match2% picked this

    A university admits students based not just on academic achievement, but also on documented extracurricular

    There is definitely some fuzzy, holistic, "Hey, how really judge one person's extracurriculars and community service against someone else's in making this determination?" But academic achievement is quantifiable, and documented extracurriculars and community service are quantifiable (they can also be qualitatively compared, which gets trickier, but 100 hrs of community service is obviously much more than 10 hrs). This doesn't have as strong a match as the correct answer does when it comes to, "How could you possibly access all the data you'd need? How can you judge such disparate things for different people? What do these variables even have to do with the situation you're judging?"

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