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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
This book is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom - amounting to a quiet repeal of the American revolution. The Quest for Cosmic Justice is the summation of a lifetime of study and thought about where we as a society are headed - and why we need to change course before we do irretrievable damage.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
453 people are currently reading
7571 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Sowell
88 books5,557 followersThomas Sowell is an American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he became a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. He was a recipient of the National Humanities Medal from President George W. Bush in 2002.
Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina and grew up in Harlem, New York City. Due to poverty and difficulties at home, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and worked various odd jobs, eventually serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. Afterward, he took night classes at Howard University and then attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958. He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In his academic career, he held professorships at Cornell University, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked at think tanks including the Urban Institute. Since 1977, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
Sowell was an important figure to the conservative movement during the Reagan era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner in the Ford administration, and was considered for posts including U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, but declined both times.
Sowell is the author of more than 45 books (including revised and new editions) on a variety of subjects including politics, economics, education and race, and he has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers. His views are described as conservative, especially on social issues; libertarian, especially on economics; or libertarian-conservative. He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with the "libertarian movement" on some issues, such as national defense.
Sowell was born in Gastonia, North Carolina and grew up in Harlem, New York City. Due to poverty and difficulties at home, he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School and worked various odd jobs, eventually serving in the United States Marine Corps during the Korean War. Afterward, he took night classes at Howard University and then attended Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1958. He earned a master's degree in economics from Columbia University the next year and a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1968. In his academic career, he held professorships at Cornell University, Brandeis University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He has also worked at think tanks including the Urban Institute. Since 1977, he has worked at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he is the Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow on Public Policy.
Sowell was an important figure to the conservative movement during the Reagan era, influencing fellow economist Walter E. Williams and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He was offered a position as Federal Trade Commissioner in the Ford administration, and was considered for posts including U.S. Secretary of Education in the Reagan administration, but declined both times.
Sowell is the author of more than 45 books (including revised and new editions) on a variety of subjects including politics, economics, education and race, and he has been a syndicated columnist in more than 150 newspapers. His views are described as conservative, especially on social issues; libertarian, especially on economics; or libertarian-conservative. He has said he may be best labeled as a libertarian, though he disagrees with the "libertarian movement" on some issues, such as national defense.
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March 23, 2022
When John Rawls published his famous treatise on justice he popularized the view that if a group doesn’t have the same prospects as another group then that’s an example of injustice. However, as Sowell shows in this classic using history and economics, equal prospects are neither logical nor possible. This book is a damning indictment of Rawlsian thinking and it’s a shame Rawls never got the chance to debate Sowell. I’m sure they would’ve had a blast.
Edit: Oh dear, I cringed so hard returning to this review. Now that I understand Sowell better I know that Sowell definitely wouldn't have enjoyed debating John Rawls lol
Edit: Oh dear, I cringed so hard returning to this review. Now that I understand Sowell better I know that Sowell definitely wouldn't have enjoyed debating John Rawls lol
November 20, 2020
Thomas Sowell is remarkable. Even though a lot of the arguments in this book felt familiar since I run in the circles that quote him often, I continually find something more to learn. Highly recommend.
August 12, 2023
Brilliant! This should be required reading for all high school aged students. I will certainly have my kids read this when they’re old enough to grasp the concepts.
This book contains some incredibly profound thoughts and shocking insights into our current society. And if you think Sowell is sounding an alarm only for how our government currently operates, read it again and think about the leanings of society, parents and churches - a search for “cosmic justice” has permeated main stream thinking and it’s causing everything to spiral downward.
Ages: 15+
Cleanliness: nothing to note.
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This book contains some incredibly profound thoughts and shocking insights into our current society. And if you think Sowell is sounding an alarm only for how our government currently operates, read it again and think about the leanings of society, parents and churches - a search for “cosmic justice” has permeated main stream thinking and it’s causing everything to spiral downward.
Ages: 15+
Cleanliness: nothing to note.
**Like my reviews? Then you should follow me! Because I have hundreds more just like this one. With each review, I provide a Cleanliness Report, mentioning any objectionable content I come across so that parents and/or conscientious readers (like me) can determine beforehand whether they want to read a book or not. Content surprises are super annoying, especially when you’re 100+ pages in, so here’s my attempt to help you avoid that!
So Follow or Friend me here on GoodReads! And be sure to check out my bio page to learn a little about me and the Picture Book/Chapter Book Calendars I sell on Etsy!
January 22, 2022
Man is not God. No one on this earth can ever have complete equity or give another human complete equity. But if you do try to play God and provide perfect justice for one, or even one group, are prepared to face the unintended consequences? Do you even care what the real-world results are? Or are you just elated over the simple results, or seeming successes, your meddling creates in one or two cases?
This book forces you to look at the results of such meddling from the unchanging facts of the past. It is certainly humbling. Do you need a reminder that the human mind is finite? That experts are can’t be experts in all areas of knowledge? This would be a good book for you.
It was a wonderful defense of the rule of law and traditional justice. I couldn’t agree with it more. Still, it left me feeling that it left too much unsaid. This book builds a case for a return to the rule of law on logic and historical examples of its success or failure. It completely leaves out the final basis for any universal law. It doesn’t really answer why there is a universal set of laws, standards, morals that apply to all men, rich or poor, powerful or oppressed. It is a secular book. It certainly doesn’t have any answer to the problem of envy that it so rightly identifies as motivating so many of the movements today. Without an answer to any of those questions this book feels a little empty. I find those answers in the Bible, and strongly recommend you look there for them as well.
This book forces you to look at the results of such meddling from the unchanging facts of the past. It is certainly humbling. Do you need a reminder that the human mind is finite? That experts are can’t be experts in all areas of knowledge? This would be a good book for you.
It was a wonderful defense of the rule of law and traditional justice. I couldn’t agree with it more. Still, it left me feeling that it left too much unsaid. This book builds a case for a return to the rule of law on logic and historical examples of its success or failure. It completely leaves out the final basis for any universal law. It doesn’t really answer why there is a universal set of laws, standards, morals that apply to all men, rich or poor, powerful or oppressed. It is a secular book. It certainly doesn’t have any answer to the problem of envy that it so rightly identifies as motivating so many of the movements today. Without an answer to any of those questions this book feels a little empty. I find those answers in the Bible, and strongly recommend you look there for them as well.
May 31, 2014
“A society that puts equality – in the sense of equality of outcomes – ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.” Milton Friedman
“In short, traditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects.”
“The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantage and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggest hubris.”
“Even those who proclaim the principles of justice, and call these principles more important than other benefits, as Professor Rawls does, seem unlikely to act on such principles in real life, given the costs of doing so. Imagine that a ship is sinking in the ocean with 300 passengers on board and only 200 life-preservers. The only just solution is that everyone drown. But most of us would probably prefer the unjust solution, that 200 lives be saved, even if they are no more deserving than those who perish.”
“We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or farmer, but only believers in the vision of cosmic justice are likely to take moral solace from that.”
“Recognizing that many people “through no fault of their own” have windfall losses, while those same people – and others – also have windfall gains, the time is long overdue to recognize also that taxpayers through no fault of their own have been forced to subsidize the moral adventures which exalt self-anointed social philosophers.”
“The abstract desirability of equality, like the abstract desirability of immortality, is beside the point when choosing what practical course of action to follow. What matters is what we are prepared to do, to risk, or to sacrifice, in pursuit of what can turn out to be a mirage.”
“However, most income cannot be redistributed because it was not distributed in the first place. It is paid directly for services rendered and how much is paid is determined jointly by those individuals rendering the service and those to whom it is rendered.”
“But to invoke the blanket slogan ‘Question Authority’ is to raise the question: By what authority do you tell us to question authority?”
“Virtually no one seriously questions the principle of equal regard for human beings as human beings…It is the fatal step from equal regard to equal performance – or presumptively equal performance in the absence of social barriers – that opens the door to disaster.”
“On issue after issue, the morally self-anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin. This has long been a hallmark of those with a cosmic vision of the world and of themselves as saviors of the world, whether they are saving it from war, overpopulation, capitalism, genetic degradation, environmental destruction, or whatever the crisis du jour might be.”
“The British, American, and other Allied soldiers who paid with their lives in the early years of the war for the quantitatively inadequate and qualitatively obsolete military equipment that was a legacy of interwar pacifism were among the most tragic of the many third parties who have paid the price of other people’s exalted visions and self-congratulation.”
“…it is necessary to explore what purposes are served by these visions, by their evasions of particular evidence, and – especially in the case of the humanities – by their denigration of the very concepts of evidence and cognitive meaning.”
“Desperately ingenious efforts to evade particular evidence, or to denigrate objective facts in general, are all consistent with the heavy emotional investment in their vision, which is ostensibly about the well-being of others but is ultimately about themselves.”
“The prerequisites of civilization are not an interesting subject to those who concentrate on its shortcomings – that is, on the extent to which what currently exists as the fruits of centuries of efforts and sacrifices is inferior to what they can produce in their imagination immediately at zero cost, in the comfort and security provided by the society they disdain.”
“It may easily be seen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers themselves.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“As Aristotle said, ‘things that are true and things that are better are almost always easier to believe in.’ In short, the truth often seems ‘simplistic’ by comparison with elaborate attempts to evade the truth.”
“There is no way to specify in precise general rules, known beforehand, what might be necessary to achieve results that would meet the standards of cosmic justice.”
“Just as freedom of the press does not exist for the sake of that tiny minority of the population who are journalists, so property rights do not exist for the sake of those people with substantial property holdings.”
“The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.”
“For the courts to strike like a bolt from the blue hitting an unsuspecting citizen, who was disobeying no law that he could have known about beforehand, is the essence of judicial tyranny, however moral or just the judges may imagine their innovation to be.”
“In other words, the federal government may do only what it is specifically authorized to do, while the people or the individual states may do whatever they are not specifically forbidden to do.” (Referring to the 10th amendment)
“Schemes to extend federal power into the nooks and crannies of local and even private activities are never publicly advertised as expansions of federal power, much less erosions of the Tenth Amendment, but always in terms of the wonderful goals they are said to achieve – ‘universal health care, ‘investing in our children’s futures,’ ‘insuring a level playing field for all,’ etc.”
“The much-vaunted ‘complexity’ of constitutional law comes in most cases not from the Constitution itself but from clever attempts to evade the limits on government power set by the Constitution.”
“The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political, and military power in the world was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.”
“In short, traditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects.”
“The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantage and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggest hubris.”
“Even those who proclaim the principles of justice, and call these principles more important than other benefits, as Professor Rawls does, seem unlikely to act on such principles in real life, given the costs of doing so. Imagine that a ship is sinking in the ocean with 300 passengers on board and only 200 life-preservers. The only just solution is that everyone drown. But most of us would probably prefer the unjust solution, that 200 lives be saved, even if they are no more deserving than those who perish.”
“We can, of course, create new injustices among our flesh-and-blood contemporaries for the sake of symbolic expiation, so that the son or daughter of a black doctor or executive can get into an elite college ahead of the son or daughter of a white factory worker or farmer, but only believers in the vision of cosmic justice are likely to take moral solace from that.”
“Recognizing that many people “through no fault of their own” have windfall losses, while those same people – and others – also have windfall gains, the time is long overdue to recognize also that taxpayers through no fault of their own have been forced to subsidize the moral adventures which exalt self-anointed social philosophers.”
“The abstract desirability of equality, like the abstract desirability of immortality, is beside the point when choosing what practical course of action to follow. What matters is what we are prepared to do, to risk, or to sacrifice, in pursuit of what can turn out to be a mirage.”
“However, most income cannot be redistributed because it was not distributed in the first place. It is paid directly for services rendered and how much is paid is determined jointly by those individuals rendering the service and those to whom it is rendered.”
“But to invoke the blanket slogan ‘Question Authority’ is to raise the question: By what authority do you tell us to question authority?”
“Virtually no one seriously questions the principle of equal regard for human beings as human beings…It is the fatal step from equal regard to equal performance – or presumptively equal performance in the absence of social barriers – that opens the door to disaster.”
“On issue after issue, the morally self-anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin. This has long been a hallmark of those with a cosmic vision of the world and of themselves as saviors of the world, whether they are saving it from war, overpopulation, capitalism, genetic degradation, environmental destruction, or whatever the crisis du jour might be.”
“The British, American, and other Allied soldiers who paid with their lives in the early years of the war for the quantitatively inadequate and qualitatively obsolete military equipment that was a legacy of interwar pacifism were among the most tragic of the many third parties who have paid the price of other people’s exalted visions and self-congratulation.”
“…it is necessary to explore what purposes are served by these visions, by their evasions of particular evidence, and – especially in the case of the humanities – by their denigration of the very concepts of evidence and cognitive meaning.”
“Desperately ingenious efforts to evade particular evidence, or to denigrate objective facts in general, are all consistent with the heavy emotional investment in their vision, which is ostensibly about the well-being of others but is ultimately about themselves.”
“The prerequisites of civilization are not an interesting subject to those who concentrate on its shortcomings – that is, on the extent to which what currently exists as the fruits of centuries of efforts and sacrifices is inferior to what they can produce in their imagination immediately at zero cost, in the comfort and security provided by the society they disdain.”
“It may easily be seen that almost all the able and ambitious members of a democratic community will labor unceasingly to extend the powers of government, because they all hope at some time or other to wield those powers themselves.” Alexis de Tocqueville
“As Aristotle said, ‘things that are true and things that are better are almost always easier to believe in.’ In short, the truth often seems ‘simplistic’ by comparison with elaborate attempts to evade the truth.”
“There is no way to specify in precise general rules, known beforehand, what might be necessary to achieve results that would meet the standards of cosmic justice.”
“Just as freedom of the press does not exist for the sake of that tiny minority of the population who are journalists, so property rights do not exist for the sake of those people with substantial property holdings.”
“The inefficiency of political control of an economy has been demonstrated more often, in more places, and under more varied conditions, than almost anything outside the realm of pure science.”
“For the courts to strike like a bolt from the blue hitting an unsuspecting citizen, who was disobeying no law that he could have known about beforehand, is the essence of judicial tyranny, however moral or just the judges may imagine their innovation to be.”
“In other words, the federal government may do only what it is specifically authorized to do, while the people or the individual states may do whatever they are not specifically forbidden to do.” (Referring to the 10th amendment)
“Schemes to extend federal power into the nooks and crannies of local and even private activities are never publicly advertised as expansions of federal power, much less erosions of the Tenth Amendment, but always in terms of the wonderful goals they are said to achieve – ‘universal health care, ‘investing in our children’s futures,’ ‘insuring a level playing field for all,’ etc.”
“The much-vaunted ‘complexity’ of constitutional law comes in most cases not from the Constitution itself but from clever attempts to evade the limits on government power set by the Constitution.”
“The rise of American society to pre-eminence as an economic, political, and military power in the world was thus the triumph of the common man and a slap across the face to the presumptions of the arrogant, whether an elite of blood or books.”
May 7, 2018
Finally read my first Thomas Sowell book; picked this one up based on a recommendation by @jimmy__delacruz. To put it simply, Sowell is a giant who is way ahead of his time. His story is a remarkable one--Southern-born and Harlem-raised, Sowell's father died before he was born and he was raised in poverty by his aunt. As the first person in his family to study beyond the 6th grade, Sowell dropped out of high school to provide for his family but eventually went on to receive his PhD in Economics from Univ of Chicago.
In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Sowell shows how misguided notions of equality and justice end up producing inequality and injustice. He shows how the tyranny of visions produces self-exalting "solutions" to social problems that not only ignore contrary empirical evidence, but ignore the actual consequences of enforced policies on the ostensible beneficiaries and on 3rd parties. He discusses the difference between cosmic justice and traditional justice—a terribly important distinction—with incredible clarity. His input is data, and his output is facts—facts that tend to crush the souls of the "morally anointed". The man is 87 years old and has written 30+ books, but he's still kicking and I'm incredibly excited to read more.
In The Quest for Cosmic Justice, Sowell shows how misguided notions of equality and justice end up producing inequality and injustice. He shows how the tyranny of visions produces self-exalting "solutions" to social problems that not only ignore contrary empirical evidence, but ignore the actual consequences of enforced policies on the ostensible beneficiaries and on 3rd parties. He discusses the difference between cosmic justice and traditional justice—a terribly important distinction—with incredible clarity. His input is data, and his output is facts—facts that tend to crush the souls of the "morally anointed". The man is 87 years old and has written 30+ books, but he's still kicking and I'm incredibly excited to read more.
April 17, 2018
I am utterly "Sowelled out" at this point, after reading three other Sowell books before this one, but I have to say something about this magnificent work. Contrary to what one reviewer stated, Sowell is not obsessed with economics. Rather, he is obsessed with facts and data that run contrary to the prevailing "vision" (narrative) in controlling society. I appreciate his works for this reason alone; Sowell cares about making distinctions and he cares about logic and facts when combating fallacies. He is meticulous, perspicuous, and intelligent without being condescending.
Despite his erroneous views on "libertarianism" as being too atomistic (an error often made by people who misidentify libertarianism as a Randian philosophy despite its origins in Murray Rothbard and ongoing work in Hans Hermann-Hoppe), the book was overall an excellent indictment against self-anointed authoritarians with their vain pursuits to correct "cosmic injustices" via the State.
Despite his erroneous views on "libertarianism" as being too atomistic (an error often made by people who misidentify libertarianism as a Randian philosophy despite its origins in Murray Rothbard and ongoing work in Hans Hermann-Hoppe), the book was overall an excellent indictment against self-anointed authoritarians with their vain pursuits to correct "cosmic injustices" via the State.
September 14, 2020
A fantastic exploration of the meaning of justice. He focuses on the consequences of trying to implement a kind of social justice (and the tradeoffs for freedom). He touches on lots of areas like war, gender equality, pacifist movements, educational funding, affirmative action, racial disparities, income inequality, and taxes. Sowell is very well spoken and obviously experienced, and I loved listening to his opinions. This is the first time I've read him, and I look forward to picking up more of his work in the future.
Also on my list: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
Also on my list: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy
January 22, 2015
For me, the book had two main counterpoints:
1) THE GOOD
The book presents a very interesting core hypothesis, one I'd never actually encountered before, which is that when people casually use the words "justice" and "equality", there are actually two fundamentally different meanings for these words - and amazingly, not just different but also *incompatible* with each other. The consequences of this range from the lesser, like friends talking past each other in an argument at a complete loss as to how the other person can have such a different worldview (assuming of course that they have the same hidden meaning of the word "justice"), to the greater, like split decisions and multiple rounds of repeals of decisions in local, state, federal, and ultimately Supreme Courts for both as judges use different conceptions of justice. I found this very compelling and I think it will actually very concretely change how I approach conversations about justice and equality, and stories about such legal questions in the news.
2) THE BAD
After making this initial point very well, the author proceeds to set about essentially arguing that attempts to enforce "cosmic justice", one of the two main types, has inevitably led to undesirable consequences. His point is generally fair, but he goes about trying to prove it by bringing up case after case of historical incident in which the underlying context is explained poorly (so often I felt like I just didn't understand enough to even get his point, and didn't feel like researching every single case he goes through), and then he makes very broad pronouncements/judgements about complex cases without citing real evidence, oftentimes without even citing a reference! It left the skeptic in me often just responding, "ok, well that's a bold claim without anything backing it up - guess I'll ignore that". This tendency, together with a clearly libertarian bias (which would be perfectly fine *if* the arguments were actually presented in well-a argued-with-clear-evidence-and-logic form), made the second half of the book really drag on and even grate for me a bit.
Overall, I feel mixed. I think the core concept is well worth understanding and a real eye-opener for me, and probably would be for many others who care about issues like this. But the actual book is not particularly enjoyable to read. I think that if someone were to read just the first chapter (of the four chapters in the book), they would get almost all of the value of it. And I think even more ideal would be a concise article just summarizing the main idea. Nonetheless, the book must get some chops for actually changing the way I will think about core issues of justice, and how many books can claim a tall order like that. So overall, I come out mixed and give it a 3/5.
1) THE GOOD
The book presents a very interesting core hypothesis, one I'd never actually encountered before, which is that when people casually use the words "justice" and "equality", there are actually two fundamentally different meanings for these words - and amazingly, not just different but also *incompatible* with each other. The consequences of this range from the lesser, like friends talking past each other in an argument at a complete loss as to how the other person can have such a different worldview (assuming of course that they have the same hidden meaning of the word "justice"), to the greater, like split decisions and multiple rounds of repeals of decisions in local, state, federal, and ultimately Supreme Courts for both as judges use different conceptions of justice. I found this very compelling and I think it will actually very concretely change how I approach conversations about justice and equality, and stories about such legal questions in the news.
2) THE BAD
After making this initial point very well, the author proceeds to set about essentially arguing that attempts to enforce "cosmic justice", one of the two main types, has inevitably led to undesirable consequences. His point is generally fair, but he goes about trying to prove it by bringing up case after case of historical incident in which the underlying context is explained poorly (so often I felt like I just didn't understand enough to even get his point, and didn't feel like researching every single case he goes through), and then he makes very broad pronouncements/judgements about complex cases without citing real evidence, oftentimes without even citing a reference! It left the skeptic in me often just responding, "ok, well that's a bold claim without anything backing it up - guess I'll ignore that". This tendency, together with a clearly libertarian bias (which would be perfectly fine *if* the arguments were actually presented in well-a argued-with-clear-evidence-and-logic form), made the second half of the book really drag on and even grate for me a bit.
Overall, I feel mixed. I think the core concept is well worth understanding and a real eye-opener for me, and probably would be for many others who care about issues like this. But the actual book is not particularly enjoyable to read. I think that if someone were to read just the first chapter (of the four chapters in the book), they would get almost all of the value of it. And I think even more ideal would be a concise article just summarizing the main idea. Nonetheless, the book must get some chops for actually changing the way I will think about core issues of justice, and how many books can claim a tall order like that. So overall, I come out mixed and give it a 3/5.
February 27, 2020
Sowell discusses two very different conceptions of justice in this thoughtful and important book. The traditional conception is that the rules or standards are known to all participants and applied equally. Rewards and punishments are doled out based on these widely known, equally applicable rules. Sowell argues that this is the conception known to the founding fathers and the one that works best in practice. The amount of knowledge required to implement this form of justice is manageable—one need only know the rules and whether these rules have been violated in a given situation. This consistent principle allows people to behave and plan with reasonable certainty, which leads to economic growth and relative societal harmony.
Cosmic justice, on the other hand, is the idea that humans should be judged based on all factors that impact their lives, including the circumstances and events over which they had no control. This latter conception of justice is part of what is meant by "social justice" and seeks to take into account literally everything; it seeks to equalize nature, which is inherently unequal. For example, when a man named Richard Allen Davis in 1996 brutally murdered a 12 year old girl named Polly Klaas, his difficult childhood was brought into consideration even though the victim, the girl, did not cause his past difficulties. Only cosmic justice would consider Davis's past relevant. Another illustration: those born with physical or mental handicaps obviously did not choose these disabilities. But, in the quest for cosmic justice, some attempt to force others to hire these disabled people no matter what additional costs must be borne by the employer. The law requires "reasonable" accommodations, but the employer is better positioned than anyone to know the costs of their business. Cosmic justice is much more difficult for humans to sift through and tally. Sowell is correct when he argues that it is beyond the capabilities of humans to know or implement cosmic justice. Those who advocate it do so out of a sense of self-righteous moral superiority. They never consider the additional costs that others must bear, the perverse incentives it creates, the uncertainty it generates, and the trampling of some people’s freedoms that invariably ensues.
After introducing these two different views of justice, the rest of this work exposes how these two competing visions are mutually exclusive, why the traditional conception is better and the cosmic conception is impossible and undesirable, the motivations of those supporting cosmic justice, and specific examples of the harm brought about in the attempt to implement cosmic justice. Sowell specifically discusses:
1. Equal processes are replaced by an attempt to generate equal results that those with the cosmic vision of justice mistakenly believe would occur naturally, despite a complete lack of evidence for this belief;
2. Property rights are infringed to the detriment of all;
3. Judicial activism and all its related uncertainty arises;
4. Burdens of proof are shifted to the accused in cases such as anti-trust law, employment discrimination, environmental law, tort liability, sexual harassment, and others; and
5. The erosion of the Constitution.
As always, Sowell peppers his general analysis with relevant data to support his claims. The following are specific examples from this book, many of which are unfortunately drawn from Sowell's earlier efforts.
Sowell points out that slavery is not the cause of many of the social problems faced by modern blacks. The data does not support this simplistic and incorrect causal explanation. For instance, many try to argue that it is the legacy of slavery that has created such large numbers of illegitimate black children. But the marriage rates of blacks living chronologically closer to slavery (the late 1800's and early 1900's) were on par with and sometimes higher than whites living at the same time. It wasn't until the 1960's, when so many of America's problems first arose, that black illegitimacy rates skyrocketed. Stated a different way: If slavery is indeed the explanation for or cause of illegitimacy, then it only makes sense that blacks actually living under slavery or those living closer to it would have higher illegitimacy rates, much like the damage from a volcano or hurricane is greatest at the epicenter and dissipates as the distance from the epicenter increases. The data, however, do not support this explanation.
Sowell blasts the concept of proportional representation here as he has done elsewhere. Many legal rulings and pieces of legislation operate under the assumption that in the absence of discrimination, the demographics of any profession or subset of the population will be distributed in a manner equal to the demographic makeup of society as a whole. So, for instance, if blacks make up 13% of the American population, then they should make up 13% of the PhD's, medical doctors, engineers, software engineers, etc. Women, constituting half of the population, should make up half of every profession. Cubans should make up their proportion, Asians, etc. Many courts, operating under this assumption, have reversed the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" in these cases. In other words, the plaintiffs are often not required to actually prove discrimination, but the defendants must prove they are NOT discriminating given the racial breakdown of their employees. Of course, one can never prove a negative, so many companies take the economically rational route and just settle, which activists then cite as evidence of discriminatory practices. Sowell does what so many refuse to do when considering this argument: he looks at the facts. Nowhere throughout human history has there been this equal proportional distribution. In different places and in different times across the globe, various groups of people have excelled in certain areas or professions. Here are some examples Sowell gives:
1. More than 80% of doughnut shops in California are owned by people of Cambodian ancestry.
2. During the 1900s, over 80% of the world's sugar-processing machinery was made in Scotland.
3. As of 1909, Italians in Buenos Aires owned more than twice as many food and drinking establishments as the native Argentines, more than three times as many shoe stores, and more than ten times as many barbershops.
4. During the decade of the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia supplied between 80 and 90 percent of all university students in medicine, science, and engineering.
5. In the early twentieth century all the firms in all the industries producing the following products were owned by people of German ancestry in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap, glass, watches, beer, confections, and carriages.
There are many more examples, but all have the same theme: none of these extraordinarily overrepresented people were themselves in a position to discriminate. They were minorities who simply out-competed others in their various industries. I would add to Sowell's list the overrepresentation of blacks in modern professional American sports. No one argues that these athletes are discriminating against whites, Hispanics, or Asians. Everyone just accepts that Kobe Bryant is a better basketball player than John Doe, Juan Doe, or Jian Doe, who didn't make the cut for the L.A. Lakers. Why then is it so difficult to accept that some groups are simply better at taking the MCAT, LSAT, SAT, or firefighters' exams in Connecticut?
Society benefits most when the rules are known by all and apply equally to all. America is about putting the best person in the job regardless of ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, gender, income level, childhood advantages or disadvantages, and all the other innumerable factors that impact a person's life and skills. Sowell maintains that disregarding standards, lowering standards, or shifting standards to meet some elusive conception of cosmic justice is detrimental to human progress and peaceful coexistence in a heterogeneous society. We should celebrate our strengths and abilities--from whatever source derived--and enjoy the fruits of other people's skill. We can all watch Kobe Bryant or Tiger Woods compete at the highest level of sport on a TV made by Sony's engineers while sipping a Shiner Bock distilled from centuries of German brewing knowledge. We acquire the means to pay for these products, the best humankind has to offer, by marketing whatever particular skills we have.
Freedom is a higher ideal than equality. They are also incompatible. Despite the self-congratulatory desires of some to make a name for themselves regardless of the costs or harm they impose upon others, it's neither possible nor meaningful nor desirable to have equality in any sense other than opportunity. The quest for cosmic justice, a world devoid of any “unfairness,” is a Quixotic and dangerous one.
Memorable Quotes:
"We better start doing something about our defenses. We are not going to be lucky enough to fight some Central American country forever. Build all we can, and take care of nothing but our own business, and we will never have to use it. Our world heavy-weight champion hasn't been insulted since he won the title." - Will Rogers
"Nature can be neither just nor unjust. Only if we mean to blame a personal creator does it make sense to describe it as unjust that somebody has been born with a physical defect, or been stricken with a disease, or has suffered the loss of a loved one." - Friedrich Hayek
"A society that puts equality--in the sense of equality of outcome--ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests." - Milton Friedman
"You do not take a man who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, and bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'You are free to compete with all others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." - Lyndon Johnson
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” – Anatole France
"We must begin with the universe that we were born into and weigh the costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end. We cannot simply 'do something' whenever we are morally indignant, while disdaining to consider the costs entailed."
"Such a conception of justice [cosmic justice:] seeks to correct, not only biased or discriminatory acts by individuals or by social institutions, but unmerited disadvantages in general, from whatever source they may arise."
"Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It is about putting particular segments of society in the position they would have been in but for some undeserved misfortune. This conception of fairness requires that third parties must wield the power to control outcomes, over-riding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people."
"Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own. True as this may be, the knowledge required to sort this out intellectually, much less rectify it politically, is staggering and superhuman."
“What the American Constitution established was not simply a particular system but a process for changing systems, practices, and leaders, together with a method of constraining whoever or whatever was ascendant at any given time. Viewed positively, what the American revolution did was to give to the common man a voice, a veto, elbow room, and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of his "betters".”
“James FitzJames Stephen pointed out in 1873 that every law and every moral rule, being general propositions, ‘must affect indiscriminately rather than equally.’”
“Too often this confusion has been made a virtue with claims that the “complexity” of the issues precluded a “simplistic” choice. But irreconcilability [between traditional and cosmic justice:] is not complexity. Nor are attempts to square the circle signs of deeper insight. More generally, there is no a priori reason to prefer complex resolutions over simpler ones for, as Aristotle said, ‘things that are true and things that are better are almost always easier to believe in.’ In short, the truth often seems “simplistic” by comparison with elaborate attempts to evade the truth.”
“Judge-made innovations are, in effect, ex post facto laws, which are expressly forbidden by the Constitution and abhorrent to the very concept of the rule of law. For the courts to strike like a bolt from the blue hitting an unsuspecting citizen, who was disobeying no law that he could have known about beforehand, is the essence of judicial tyranny, however moral or just the judges may imagine their innovation to be. The harm is not limited to the particular damage this may do in the particular case, great as this may sometimes be, but makes all other laws into murky storm clouds, potential sources of other bolts from the blue, contrary to the whole notion of ‘a government of laws and not of men.’”
Cosmic justice, on the other hand, is the idea that humans should be judged based on all factors that impact their lives, including the circumstances and events over which they had no control. This latter conception of justice is part of what is meant by "social justice" and seeks to take into account literally everything; it seeks to equalize nature, which is inherently unequal. For example, when a man named Richard Allen Davis in 1996 brutally murdered a 12 year old girl named Polly Klaas, his difficult childhood was brought into consideration even though the victim, the girl, did not cause his past difficulties. Only cosmic justice would consider Davis's past relevant. Another illustration: those born with physical or mental handicaps obviously did not choose these disabilities. But, in the quest for cosmic justice, some attempt to force others to hire these disabled people no matter what additional costs must be borne by the employer. The law requires "reasonable" accommodations, but the employer is better positioned than anyone to know the costs of their business. Cosmic justice is much more difficult for humans to sift through and tally. Sowell is correct when he argues that it is beyond the capabilities of humans to know or implement cosmic justice. Those who advocate it do so out of a sense of self-righteous moral superiority. They never consider the additional costs that others must bear, the perverse incentives it creates, the uncertainty it generates, and the trampling of some people’s freedoms that invariably ensues.
After introducing these two different views of justice, the rest of this work exposes how these two competing visions are mutually exclusive, why the traditional conception is better and the cosmic conception is impossible and undesirable, the motivations of those supporting cosmic justice, and specific examples of the harm brought about in the attempt to implement cosmic justice. Sowell specifically discusses:
1. Equal processes are replaced by an attempt to generate equal results that those with the cosmic vision of justice mistakenly believe would occur naturally, despite a complete lack of evidence for this belief;
2. Property rights are infringed to the detriment of all;
3. Judicial activism and all its related uncertainty arises;
4. Burdens of proof are shifted to the accused in cases such as anti-trust law, employment discrimination, environmental law, tort liability, sexual harassment, and others; and
5. The erosion of the Constitution.
As always, Sowell peppers his general analysis with relevant data to support his claims. The following are specific examples from this book, many of which are unfortunately drawn from Sowell's earlier efforts.
Sowell points out that slavery is not the cause of many of the social problems faced by modern blacks. The data does not support this simplistic and incorrect causal explanation. For instance, many try to argue that it is the legacy of slavery that has created such large numbers of illegitimate black children. But the marriage rates of blacks living chronologically closer to slavery (the late 1800's and early 1900's) were on par with and sometimes higher than whites living at the same time. It wasn't until the 1960's, when so many of America's problems first arose, that black illegitimacy rates skyrocketed. Stated a different way: If slavery is indeed the explanation for or cause of illegitimacy, then it only makes sense that blacks actually living under slavery or those living closer to it would have higher illegitimacy rates, much like the damage from a volcano or hurricane is greatest at the epicenter and dissipates as the distance from the epicenter increases. The data, however, do not support this explanation.
Sowell blasts the concept of proportional representation here as he has done elsewhere. Many legal rulings and pieces of legislation operate under the assumption that in the absence of discrimination, the demographics of any profession or subset of the population will be distributed in a manner equal to the demographic makeup of society as a whole. So, for instance, if blacks make up 13% of the American population, then they should make up 13% of the PhD's, medical doctors, engineers, software engineers, etc. Women, constituting half of the population, should make up half of every profession. Cubans should make up their proportion, Asians, etc. Many courts, operating under this assumption, have reversed the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" in these cases. In other words, the plaintiffs are often not required to actually prove discrimination, but the defendants must prove they are NOT discriminating given the racial breakdown of their employees. Of course, one can never prove a negative, so many companies take the economically rational route and just settle, which activists then cite as evidence of discriminatory practices. Sowell does what so many refuse to do when considering this argument: he looks at the facts. Nowhere throughout human history has there been this equal proportional distribution. In different places and in different times across the globe, various groups of people have excelled in certain areas or professions. Here are some examples Sowell gives:
1. More than 80% of doughnut shops in California are owned by people of Cambodian ancestry.
2. During the 1900s, over 80% of the world's sugar-processing machinery was made in Scotland.
3. As of 1909, Italians in Buenos Aires owned more than twice as many food and drinking establishments as the native Argentines, more than three times as many shoe stores, and more than ten times as many barbershops.
4. During the decade of the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia supplied between 80 and 90 percent of all university students in medicine, science, and engineering.
5. In the early twentieth century all the firms in all the industries producing the following products were owned by people of German ancestry in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul: trunks, stoves, paper, hats, neckties, leather, soap, glass, watches, beer, confections, and carriages.
There are many more examples, but all have the same theme: none of these extraordinarily overrepresented people were themselves in a position to discriminate. They were minorities who simply out-competed others in their various industries. I would add to Sowell's list the overrepresentation of blacks in modern professional American sports. No one argues that these athletes are discriminating against whites, Hispanics, or Asians. Everyone just accepts that Kobe Bryant is a better basketball player than John Doe, Juan Doe, or Jian Doe, who didn't make the cut for the L.A. Lakers. Why then is it so difficult to accept that some groups are simply better at taking the MCAT, LSAT, SAT, or firefighters' exams in Connecticut?
Society benefits most when the rules are known by all and apply equally to all. America is about putting the best person in the job regardless of ethnicity, religious affiliation, age, gender, income level, childhood advantages or disadvantages, and all the other innumerable factors that impact a person's life and skills. Sowell maintains that disregarding standards, lowering standards, or shifting standards to meet some elusive conception of cosmic justice is detrimental to human progress and peaceful coexistence in a heterogeneous society. We should celebrate our strengths and abilities--from whatever source derived--and enjoy the fruits of other people's skill. We can all watch Kobe Bryant or Tiger Woods compete at the highest level of sport on a TV made by Sony's engineers while sipping a Shiner Bock distilled from centuries of German brewing knowledge. We acquire the means to pay for these products, the best humankind has to offer, by marketing whatever particular skills we have.
Freedom is a higher ideal than equality. They are also incompatible. Despite the self-congratulatory desires of some to make a name for themselves regardless of the costs or harm they impose upon others, it's neither possible nor meaningful nor desirable to have equality in any sense other than opportunity. The quest for cosmic justice, a world devoid of any “unfairness,” is a Quixotic and dangerous one.
Memorable Quotes:
"We better start doing something about our defenses. We are not going to be lucky enough to fight some Central American country forever. Build all we can, and take care of nothing but our own business, and we will never have to use it. Our world heavy-weight champion hasn't been insulted since he won the title." - Will Rogers
"Nature can be neither just nor unjust. Only if we mean to blame a personal creator does it make sense to describe it as unjust that somebody has been born with a physical defect, or been stricken with a disease, or has suffered the loss of a loved one." - Friedrich Hayek
"A society that puts equality--in the sense of equality of outcome--ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests." - Milton Friedman
"You do not take a man who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, and bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, 'You are free to compete with all others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." - Lyndon Johnson
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.” – Anatole France
"We must begin with the universe that we were born into and weigh the costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end. We cannot simply 'do something' whenever we are morally indignant, while disdaining to consider the costs entailed."
"Such a conception of justice [cosmic justice:] seeks to correct, not only biased or discriminatory acts by individuals or by social institutions, but unmerited disadvantages in general, from whatever source they may arise."
"Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It is about putting particular segments of society in the position they would have been in but for some undeserved misfortune. This conception of fairness requires that third parties must wield the power to control outcomes, over-riding rules, standards, or the preferences of other people."
"Implicit in much discussion of a need to rectify social inequities is the notion that some segments of society, through no fault of their own, lack things which others receive as windfall gains, through no virtue of their own. True as this may be, the knowledge required to sort this out intellectually, much less rectify it politically, is staggering and superhuman."
“What the American Constitution established was not simply a particular system but a process for changing systems, practices, and leaders, together with a method of constraining whoever or whatever was ascendant at any given time. Viewed positively, what the American revolution did was to give to the common man a voice, a veto, elbow room, and a refuge from the rampaging presumptions of his "betters".”
“James FitzJames Stephen pointed out in 1873 that every law and every moral rule, being general propositions, ‘must affect indiscriminately rather than equally.’”
“Too often this confusion has been made a virtue with claims that the “complexity” of the issues precluded a “simplistic” choice. But irreconcilability [between traditional and cosmic justice:] is not complexity. Nor are attempts to square the circle signs of deeper insight. More generally, there is no a priori reason to prefer complex resolutions over simpler ones for, as Aristotle said, ‘things that are true and things that are better are almost always easier to believe in.’ In short, the truth often seems “simplistic” by comparison with elaborate attempts to evade the truth.”
“Judge-made innovations are, in effect, ex post facto laws, which are expressly forbidden by the Constitution and abhorrent to the very concept of the rule of law. For the courts to strike like a bolt from the blue hitting an unsuspecting citizen, who was disobeying no law that he could have known about beforehand, is the essence of judicial tyranny, however moral or just the judges may imagine their innovation to be. The harm is not limited to the particular damage this may do in the particular case, great as this may sometimes be, but makes all other laws into murky storm clouds, potential sources of other bolts from the blue, contrary to the whole notion of ‘a government of laws and not of men.’”
October 13, 2017
Всички искаме равенство. Но какво представлява равенството? Равенство на всички пред закона и еднакви възможности за всички? Оказва се, вече не.
В „В търсене на върховната справедливост“ (което е единственият имащ някакъв близък до английското заглавие смисъл превод, който успях да измисля) Томас Соуъл изследва понятието „справедливост“ и как неговото значение постепенно се променя в политическата и правната практика.
Доскоро справедливост общо взето означаваше „всекиму – според делата“ и равенство на всички пред закона, независимо от техния пол, произход, етнос, религия, социално положение. Един съвсем практически, приложим и даващ резултати подход към справедливостта, за приемането на който много хора са се борили в продължение на столетия и който бе основата на законовата и правната система на цивилизованито общества.
Оказва се обаче, че за някои хора тази индивидуална справедливост – към всеки човек да се отнасят еднакво, според делата му и всички да имат равни права – не е достатъчна. Идеята за глобална, върховна справедливост става все по-разпространена – „справедливост“ към цели групи хора, справедливост, пренебрегваща равенството пред закона и изискваща специално, преференциално отношение към определени групи и хора. Защото справедливо не било всички да имат еднакви възможности и да са равни пред закона – справедливо вече било отношението на закона към всеки да е различно, за да може всички да постигат еднакви резултати – независимо от възможностите си.
Може би си мислите, че книгата е пълна с отвлечени от реалността разсъждения, но описаният нов възглед за справедливостта има съвсем реални последици върху правото и политиката в последните години – у нас все още в съвсем начална фаза, за щастие. Политическата коректност, превърнала се в директна цензура на реални факти, които били „обидни“ за тия, за които се отнасят, „affirmative action“ и квотите за назначаване на определен процент малцинства независимо от техните умения и знания, отношението към престъпниците „с тежко детство“… изобщо пренебрегване на равенството между хората, в името на… равенство?!?
В правото този възглед има един революционен резултат – за пръв път от столетия в цивилизованите държави, възникват случаи, в които ответникът е смятан за виновен до доказване на противното и на него пада задължението да докаже собствената си невинност! В пълно противоречие с най-базисните принципи на прилагането на закона, в които човек е невинен докато обвинението не докаже неговата вина! Това става случаите, свързани с политически коректна реч, сексуален тормоз и най-вече дискриминация.
Представи си – вадят ти статистика че в България има 7% роми а сред работниците в твоята фирма има само 2% роми – значи ти дискриминираш ромите, независимо, че си провеждал честни, отворени интервюта и си назначил най-квалифицираните кандидати. Това е действителен случай от САЩ (става дума за чернокожи, не за роми), където фирма е съдена в продължение на 13 г. от държавата, без обвинението да може да представи даже 1 (един) човек, който да твърди, че е дискриминиран от тази фирма. Съдят ги само въз основа на статистики. И това е само един от хилядите случаи, в които ответникът трябва да се бие срещу мъгла и е задължен да доказва своята невинност (т.е. да доказва негатив, което логически е невъзможно).
Но това е „върховната справедливост“ – тя не е истинска справедливост и равенство пред закона, а просто нечии субективни визии за това какво би трябвало да е правилно в едно общество, които биват налагани без оглед на практическите резултати на фактическо неравенство и несправедливост, които тези визии произвеждат.
В „В търсене на върховната справедливост“ (което е единственият имащ някакъв близък до английското заглавие смисъл превод, който успях да измисля) Томас Соуъл изследва понятието „справедливост“ и как неговото значение постепенно се променя в политическата и правната практика.
Доскоро справедливост общо взето означаваше „всекиму – според делата“ и равенство на всички пред закона, независимо от техния пол, произход, етнос, религия, социално положение. Един съвсем практически, приложим и даващ резултати подход към справедливостта, за приемането на който много хора са се борили в продължение на столетия и който бе основата на законовата и правната система на цивилизованито общества.
Оказва се обаче, че за някои хора тази индивидуална справедливост – към всеки човек да се отнасят еднакво, според делата му и всички да имат равни права – не е достатъчна. Идеята за глобална, върховна справедливост става все по-разпространена – „справедливост“ към цели групи хора, справедливост, пренебрегваща равенството пред закона и изискваща специално, преференциално отношение към определени групи и хора. Защото справедливо не било всички да имат еднакви възможности и да са равни пред закона – справедливо вече било отношението на закона към всеки да е различно, за да може всички да постигат еднакви резултати – независимо от възможностите си.
Може би си мислите, че книгата е пълна с отвлечени от реалността разсъждения, но описаният нов възглед за справедливостта има съвсем реални последици върху правото и политиката в последните години – у нас все още в съвсем начална фаза, за щастие. Политическата коректност, превърнала се в директна цензура на реални факти, които били „обидни“ за тия, за които се отнасят, „affirmative action“ и квотите за назначаване на определен процент малцинства независимо от техните умения и знания, отношението към престъпниците „с тежко детство“… изобщо пренебрегване на равенството между хората, в името на… равенство?!?
В правото този възглед има един революционен резултат – за пръв път от столетия в цивилизованите държави, възникват случаи, в които ответникът е смятан за виновен до доказване на противното и на него пада задължението да докаже собствената си невинност! В пълно противоречие с най-базисните принципи на прилагането на закона, в които човек е невинен докато обвинението не докаже неговата вина! Това става случаите, свързани с политически коректна реч, сексуален тормоз и най-вече дискриминация.
Представи си – вадят ти статистика че в България има 7% роми а сред работниците в твоята фирма има само 2% роми – значи ти дискриминираш ромите, независимо, че си провеждал честни, отворени интервюта и си назначил най-квалифицираните кандидати. Това е действителен случай от САЩ (става дума за чернокожи, не за роми), където фирма е съдена в продължение на 13 г. от държавата, без обвинението да може да представи даже 1 (един) човек, който да твърди, че е дискриминиран от тази фирма. Съдят ги само въз основа на статистики. И това е само един от хилядите случаи, в които ответникът трябва да се бие срещу мъгла и е задължен да доказва своята невинност (т.е. да доказва негатив, което логически е невъзможно).
Но това е „върховната справедливост“ – тя не е истинска справедливост и равенство пред закона, а просто нечии субективни визии за това какво би трябвало да е правилно в едно общество, които биват налагани без оглед на практическите резултати на фактическо неравенство и несправедливост, които тези визии произвеждат.
December 11, 2020
A sobering book.
A discussion of the attempts to work out great plans of justice and the knowledge necessary -- vastly more than humanly possible -- and the disasters that have ensued.
A discussion of the attempts to work out great plans of justice and the knowledge necessary -- vastly more than humanly possible -- and the disasters that have ensued.
September 30, 2023
The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell defends traditionally liberal notions of justice, challenging emerging paradigms, specifically the idea of social justice. Sowell argues that the increasingly vogue model of social justice is not coherent and is likely dangerous. Without a built in limiting principle, social justice is a vague and subjective notion, infused with envy, that can be invoked to justify any agenda or policy. Sowell argues that advocates of social justice often ignore the trade-offs, costs, and consequences, imposing intransigently utopian visions on others without regard for their preferences, values, or rights.
Polemics attacking social justice are common today from right-of-center thinkers like Sowell, but this one remains a helpful historical evaluation of nascent ideas yet to spillover into the American mainstream. Sowell wrestles with the inchoate moral impulse that would eventually grow into 21st century American progressivism, seeing them often more clearly than they see themselves. Unsurprisingly, his insight were ignored to our collective detriment, and we've been required to endure our share of wailing and gnashing of teeth to little avail. Nonetheless, I think this is something Sowell, or at least I, expected to be the case. These impulses are going to be part of a human society like our. We just have to hope the institutions we've inherited are robust enough to absorb and diffuse this (fairly confident on this point).
As suggested by the title, Sowell organizes his thesis with contrasting notions of justice, traditional versus cosmic. This could probably be more broadly construed as a grand argument between deontology and consequentialism, but this is not an approach Sowell follows, especially because many of those in pursuit of cosmic justice aren't always concerned with results. But what is cosmic justice? As opposed to traditional justice, cosmic justice is based on the idea of equality of outcomes. It requires that people are compensated for disadvantages, iniquities, or inequalities however the manifest: race, gender, class, disability, or luck. Traditional justice, on the other hand, is based on the principle of equality before the law. This requires that people are treated impartially by the rules and institutions of society regardless of the outcome. Sowell was perceptive to identify this dichotomy in 1999, but it is also a bit of a simplistic framework. Despite, or maybe because of its simplicity, much of sociopolitical discourse is downstream of conceptions Sowell criticizes and champions.
Ultimately, the point of the work is to show how wrongheaded the quest for cosmic justice is. Sowell makes an extended effort to illustrate how myopic most common narrative of injustice are. He sums this up as follows:
What's clear from Sowell's efforts (or from any moderate amount of reflection on pleas for social justice) is that such ends are impossible to achieve. Sowell suggests there is possible danger lurking in such efforts, which may be the case, but I think these issues are mostly an exercise in futility. The risk that is created by Utopianism is that these movements are easy for those with agendas to cynically hijack. Our recent political history can be view as a microcosm of this where no one is blameless.
This potent critique of the assumptions of and arguments for social justice is a good reminder of the limit of our ability to rectify wrongs, and why building healthy and productive institutions should be our focus, if we truly crave prosperity for the greatest number.
Polemics attacking social justice are common today from right-of-center thinkers like Sowell, but this one remains a helpful historical evaluation of nascent ideas yet to spillover into the American mainstream. Sowell wrestles with the inchoate moral impulse that would eventually grow into 21st century American progressivism, seeing them often more clearly than they see themselves. Unsurprisingly, his insight were ignored to our collective detriment, and we've been required to endure our share of wailing and gnashing of teeth to little avail. Nonetheless, I think this is something Sowell, or at least I, expected to be the case. These impulses are going to be part of a human society like our. We just have to hope the institutions we've inherited are robust enough to absorb and diffuse this (fairly confident on this point).
As suggested by the title, Sowell organizes his thesis with contrasting notions of justice, traditional versus cosmic. This could probably be more broadly construed as a grand argument between deontology and consequentialism, but this is not an approach Sowell follows, especially because many of those in pursuit of cosmic justice aren't always concerned with results. But what is cosmic justice? As opposed to traditional justice, cosmic justice is based on the idea of equality of outcomes. It requires that people are compensated for disadvantages, iniquities, or inequalities however the manifest: race, gender, class, disability, or luck. Traditional justice, on the other hand, is based on the principle of equality before the law. This requires that people are treated impartially by the rules and institutions of society regardless of the outcome. Sowell was perceptive to identify this dichotomy in 1999, but it is also a bit of a simplistic framework. Despite, or maybe because of its simplicity, much of sociopolitical discourse is downstream of conceptions Sowell criticizes and champions.
Ultimately, the point of the work is to show how wrongheaded the quest for cosmic justice is. Sowell makes an extended effort to illustrate how myopic most common narrative of injustice are. He sums this up as follows:
The challenge of determining the net balance of numerous windfall advantages and disadvantages for one individual at one given time is sufficiently daunting. To attempt the same for whole broad-brush categories of people, each in differing stages of their individual life cycles, in a complex and changing society, suggests hubris.
What's clear from Sowell's efforts (or from any moderate amount of reflection on pleas for social justice) is that such ends are impossible to achieve. Sowell suggests there is possible danger lurking in such efforts, which may be the case, but I think these issues are mostly an exercise in futility. The risk that is created by Utopianism is that these movements are easy for those with agendas to cynically hijack. Our recent political history can be view as a microcosm of this where no one is blameless.
This potent critique of the assumptions of and arguments for social justice is a good reminder of the limit of our ability to rectify wrongs, and why building healthy and productive institutions should be our focus, if we truly crave prosperity for the greatest number.
September 4, 2019
Sowell is the best exponent of the principles of conservatism that I’ve come across. Progressivism takes risks, throwing prudence and tradition to the wind when something seems amiss. In contrast, conservatism sticks to time-tested principles, always wary of unintended consequences. This tension is what much of The Quest for Cosmic Justice is about (with Sowell siding almost exclusively with the conservative camp).
Even though I disagree with much of his politics, it’s always a treat reading his take on the dangers of left-wing progressive thought. He is a beautiful writer and his rhetorical skills are unmatched in the world of non-fiction writing. That said, he often fails to assess the more moderate strands of left-wing thought, which makes conservatism seem like the only sane stance (eg. instead of a mixed economy vs. a more free market state, he looks at old-fashioned socialism vs. capitalism).
Progressives and conservatives alike should read Sowell. The former, so that they can better appreciate that not all conservatives are evil, and the latter, so they can rediscover the respectable basis that’s been lost in modern conservative politics. (For those who’ve never read Sowell, I’d recommend starting here. It reads less academic than some of his other stuff.)
Even though I disagree with much of his politics, it’s always a treat reading his take on the dangers of left-wing progressive thought. He is a beautiful writer and his rhetorical skills are unmatched in the world of non-fiction writing. That said, he often fails to assess the more moderate strands of left-wing thought, which makes conservatism seem like the only sane stance (eg. instead of a mixed economy vs. a more free market state, he looks at old-fashioned socialism vs. capitalism).
Progressives and conservatives alike should read Sowell. The former, so that they can better appreciate that not all conservatives are evil, and the latter, so they can rediscover the respectable basis that’s been lost in modern conservative politics. (For those who’ve never read Sowell, I’d recommend starting here. It reads less academic than some of his other stuff.)
April 19, 2023
Thomas Sowell is a national treasure and will never get the recognition due him due to his refusal to tow the liberal line of expected of a minority intellectual.
He’s not just brilliant, but has the ability to boil down the facts of his study into easy to understand and impactful to today’s important issues.
Highly recommend this book and anything and everything with his name on it.
He’s not just brilliant, but has the ability to boil down the facts of his study into easy to understand and impactful to today’s important issues.
Highly recommend this book and anything and everything with his name on it.
November 19, 2021
We as humans (myself included) excel at pointing out flaws in the values and logic of those who oppose us, but we are not so good at recognizing those exact same flaws in our own logic and values. I’m currently trying to read more books with a conservative lean to them to broaden my perspective, and thus far, that fact is the biggest takeaway. As I read conservative thinkers attacking progressives for some of the very same reasons that I myself criticize conservatives, it helps me realize that I can be just as blind as “the other side.”
In this book in particular, one of the main points that keeps coming back is the idea that those pursuing social justice are clinging to a vision with no regard for facts, and Sowell presents these people as having self-aggrandizing moral superiority and caring more about their vision than about actual people.
I have a lot to say about this.
First of all, this is a large generalization. Sowell does bring up some isolated cases that show specific progressive individuals caring more about their vision than facts and real people, and if the book were about the problematic nature of any one of these specific cases, I could be on Sowell’s side. However, he uses these isolated cases to create swooping claims about anyone fighting for social justice, and that just doesn’t sit well with me.
Secondly, there are people on all sides who cling to a vision with no regard for facts. The progressive leaning books I’ve read (which is, admittedly, not a lot) tend to focus on a specific issue and then dive deeply into the issue. They’ve all had deep, nuanced arguments that are rooted in academic literature with long works cited sections at the end. I’m sure there are plenty of conservative-leaning books like this, too, though I haven’t read them yet, and I’m also sure that you can find books by progressives that are as divisive and shallow as Candace Owens’s Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation. So the fact that Sowell is using this critique against ALL progressives and NO conservatives is deeply flawed.
Take, for example, the housing crisis. This was an example Sowell used to show that progressives care about the vision more than the people, and that they fight for their vision with no regard for facts. Just this year I read the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, which does a fantastic job of painting the personal nature of the housing crisis in the USA as well as presenting a research-based discussion of what can be done about it with an analysis of consequences. I suppose the book leans left, if only because our divisive two-party system (and books like The Quest for Cosmic Justice) tells us that only Democrats are allowed to care about social justice. But the point is that it’s an example of someone who leans left using research and analysis to make a case for social justice in the very area that Sowell is trying to use to discredit all who fight for social justice.
And thirdly, Sowell spends most of the book condemning progressives as being self-righteous and of caring about their vision first and logic/data second. Interestingly, this is essentially the premise of another book I read this year called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. However, Haidt’s book is a far less biased discussion of how this flaw is part of ALL humanity, not just one side of the USA political system. So if you’re interested in learning more about human self-righteousness and retroactive reasoning in a much less biased, offensive, and hypocritical manner, THAT is the book I recommend that you read.
Overall, I was less impressed than I thought I could be. Sowell spends most of the book in a blindly hypocritical attack against progressives as well as reminding us that it’s too hard to achieve cosmic justice so we shouldn’t even try. I would’ve been much more interested if the book had been focused on the negative consequences that a blind, well-meaning quest for cosmic justice can bring about if the discussion hadn’t turned into a broadly generalized “party vs party,” “good guys vs bad guys,” “progressives are self-righteous and dumb” kind of argument. He had some decent points to make, but instead of trying to communicate them in a way that would make a progressive individual think, he presents them in a self-righteous, lemme-just-pat-myself-on-the-back kind of way.
In this book in particular, one of the main points that keeps coming back is the idea that those pursuing social justice are clinging to a vision with no regard for facts, and Sowell presents these people as having self-aggrandizing moral superiority and caring more about their vision than about actual people.
I have a lot to say about this.
First of all, this is a large generalization. Sowell does bring up some isolated cases that show specific progressive individuals caring more about their vision than facts and real people, and if the book were about the problematic nature of any one of these specific cases, I could be on Sowell’s side. However, he uses these isolated cases to create swooping claims about anyone fighting for social justice, and that just doesn’t sit well with me.
Secondly, there are people on all sides who cling to a vision with no regard for facts. The progressive leaning books I’ve read (which is, admittedly, not a lot) tend to focus on a specific issue and then dive deeply into the issue. They’ve all had deep, nuanced arguments that are rooted in academic literature with long works cited sections at the end. I’m sure there are plenty of conservative-leaning books like this, too, though I haven’t read them yet, and I’m also sure that you can find books by progressives that are as divisive and shallow as Candace Owens’s Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation. So the fact that Sowell is using this critique against ALL progressives and NO conservatives is deeply flawed.
Take, for example, the housing crisis. This was an example Sowell used to show that progressives care about the vision more than the people, and that they fight for their vision with no regard for facts. Just this year I read the book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond, which does a fantastic job of painting the personal nature of the housing crisis in the USA as well as presenting a research-based discussion of what can be done about it with an analysis of consequences. I suppose the book leans left, if only because our divisive two-party system (and books like The Quest for Cosmic Justice) tells us that only Democrats are allowed to care about social justice. But the point is that it’s an example of someone who leans left using research and analysis to make a case for social justice in the very area that Sowell is trying to use to discredit all who fight for social justice.
And thirdly, Sowell spends most of the book condemning progressives as being self-righteous and of caring about their vision first and logic/data second. Interestingly, this is essentially the premise of another book I read this year called The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. However, Haidt’s book is a far less biased discussion of how this flaw is part of ALL humanity, not just one side of the USA political system. So if you’re interested in learning more about human self-righteousness and retroactive reasoning in a much less biased, offensive, and hypocritical manner, THAT is the book I recommend that you read.
Overall, I was less impressed than I thought I could be. Sowell spends most of the book in a blindly hypocritical attack against progressives as well as reminding us that it’s too hard to achieve cosmic justice so we shouldn’t even try. I would’ve been much more interested if the book had been focused on the negative consequences that a blind, well-meaning quest for cosmic justice can bring about if the discussion hadn’t turned into a broadly generalized “party vs party,” “good guys vs bad guys,” “progressives are self-righteous and dumb” kind of argument. He had some decent points to make, but instead of trying to communicate them in a way that would make a progressive individual think, he presents them in a self-righteous, lemme-just-pat-myself-on-the-back kind of way.
March 29, 2019
Another great work by Thomas Sowell. He covers a combination of economics, history, and politics, and is surely one of the most significant economic authors of our time. This book is no exception. This is a good book for those who want to hear a rational response to why "social justice" and "equality of outcome," while sounding noble, have very significant flaws.
The quest for cosmic justice, or social justice, tends to occur with a corresponding loss of freedom. Historically countries that have the most freedom are among the most prosperous. A greater amount of growth occurs, and a significant amount of the population will rise in their living standards. He warns about the dangers of pursuing equality of outcome, and echoes Milton Friedman, that people who give up freedom to obtain equality end up with neither. Freedom leads to prosperity, but that prosperity often comes about unequally. The poor in the US today enjoy a standard of living far above all but the very richest at the start of the 20th century. The inefficiency of political control of the economy has lead to many middle class citizens of those countries still have a lower standard of living than the poor in free countries. This may be best showed in the difference between East and West Germany, and North and South Korea. In these cases similar populations have followed two very different political and economic structures, and the result has been night and day.
One example he gives drives home the point with the sinking of the Titanic. Some lifeboats were launched from the Titanic, but not nearly enough for everyone onboard. Some people got on lifeboats while others did not. The most equitable solution in this case would have been having nobody get on a lifeboat (and resulting in a greater tragedy). However, rational people will clearly say that the having some people saved through lifeboats was the better outcome, despite it being a clearly unequal outcome.
He addressed some other common used phrases like "through no fault of their own" that have made their made their way into political discourse, and points out the flaws and inconsistencies they hold.
I would recommend this book to anyone, and easily give it a 5 star rating.
The quest for cosmic justice, or social justice, tends to occur with a corresponding loss of freedom. Historically countries that have the most freedom are among the most prosperous. A greater amount of growth occurs, and a significant amount of the population will rise in their living standards. He warns about the dangers of pursuing equality of outcome, and echoes Milton Friedman, that people who give up freedom to obtain equality end up with neither. Freedom leads to prosperity, but that prosperity often comes about unequally. The poor in the US today enjoy a standard of living far above all but the very richest at the start of the 20th century. The inefficiency of political control of the economy has lead to many middle class citizens of those countries still have a lower standard of living than the poor in free countries. This may be best showed in the difference between East and West Germany, and North and South Korea. In these cases similar populations have followed two very different political and economic structures, and the result has been night and day.
One example he gives drives home the point with the sinking of the Titanic. Some lifeboats were launched from the Titanic, but not nearly enough for everyone onboard. Some people got on lifeboats while others did not. The most equitable solution in this case would have been having nobody get on a lifeboat (and resulting in a greater tragedy). However, rational people will clearly say that the having some people saved through lifeboats was the better outcome, despite it being a clearly unequal outcome.
He addressed some other common used phrases like "through no fault of their own" that have made their made their way into political discourse, and points out the flaws and inconsistencies they hold.
I would recommend this book to anyone, and easily give it a 5 star rating.
February 27, 2020
This is an information-packed, non-emotional exposition of "cosmic justice", which often bears little resemblance to true justice. Very interesting and concerning, if only in recognition to how the US Constitution has been thusly eroded.
September 24, 2020
I seriously disagree with almost everything in this book. There is a great divide between rich and poor in America that is built into the system. There is a huge amount of racial and social injustice that is caused by the way that we have built our society. The poor do not choose to be poor. They are not poor because they are lazy or indifferent to prosperity. There is a long history rich white men consciously constructing legal bulwarks for their position at the expense of everyone else. This injustice is not "cosmic" as Mr. Sowell would have us believe. It is the result of generations of oppression of the weak by the strong and wealthy. To pretend that we all got where we are through individual choice is absurd. We don't have to make everyone equal. We don't have to completely reengineer society. However, we do have an obligation as caring human beings to take at least some crude steps to make amends for what was done in the past and to help everyone to be treated fairly in the future. And, yes, despite what Mr Sowell suggests, this will require some affirmative steps to be taken to make up for past wrongs.
August 8, 2013
Typical Libertarian attack on social policy with a bunch of anecdotal illustrations and plenty of straw man arguments.
December 9, 2021
The (1999) book foreshadows the contemporary American political divide. Sowell contrasts two forms of justice. In one – and one that he vigorously subscribes to – “traditional justice is about impartial process rather than either results or prospects.” This is closely aligned with equality: Everyone plays by the same rules and you either make it or not on your own. This view is contrasted with those who believe that government’s role is to “mitigate and make more just the undeserved misfortunes arising from the cosmos, as well as from society. It seeks to produce cosmic justice, going beyond strictly social justice, which becomes just one aspect of cosmic justice.”
Cosmic/social justice types not only give preference to those down on their luck but they also seek to redistribute benefits from those who have to those who don’t. Thus, equality becomes equity. For Sowell, this ostensible an effort to give everyone a fair opportunity to compete is the argument for victimhood, entitlement, free riders and the welfare state; and it’s the argument for punishing those who have taken responsibility for their lives and have done well. These advocates want to make everyone the same (same results) even if, in Sowell’s mind, they didn’t work for or deserve it, and regardless of the cost on the rest of society. The cosmic justice mentality extends to foreign affairs. The peace and harmony that can be imagined becomes peace at any price. And defense expenditures are morally wrong. The money should be used to help the poor. For these advocates, “the quest for peace, like the quest for cosmic justice…exalts them morally.” It becomes “the vision of morally anointed visionaries.
This is the politics of today in the USA. On the one (and Sowell's) side, it’s the survival of the fittest mentality. You make it or you don’t; few excuses are allowed. On the other, it’s to rectify grievance. Sowell’s argument is enlightening, though it comes across as a near rant that I found distracting. Just as he sees the quest for cosmic justice as extreme, the same could be said for his point of view. It ignores these fundamentals: (a) one can’t compete fairly when the odds are stacked against one from the start; (b) unequal power leads to the slanting of rules, including for electoral success, that leads to further inequality of power and inevitably to greater and intolerable Hobbesian-like division; (c) racial discrimination continues and his white social Darwinism justifies doing not much about it; and (d) in this country’s polarized extremes, we’ve lost our common sense.
Cosmic/social justice types not only give preference to those down on their luck but they also seek to redistribute benefits from those who have to those who don’t. Thus, equality becomes equity. For Sowell, this ostensible an effort to give everyone a fair opportunity to compete is the argument for victimhood, entitlement, free riders and the welfare state; and it’s the argument for punishing those who have taken responsibility for their lives and have done well. These advocates want to make everyone the same (same results) even if, in Sowell’s mind, they didn’t work for or deserve it, and regardless of the cost on the rest of society. The cosmic justice mentality extends to foreign affairs. The peace and harmony that can be imagined becomes peace at any price. And defense expenditures are morally wrong. The money should be used to help the poor. For these advocates, “the quest for peace, like the quest for cosmic justice…exalts them morally.” It becomes “the vision of morally anointed visionaries.
This is the politics of today in the USA. On the one (and Sowell's) side, it’s the survival of the fittest mentality. You make it or you don’t; few excuses are allowed. On the other, it’s to rectify grievance. Sowell’s argument is enlightening, though it comes across as a near rant that I found distracting. Just as he sees the quest for cosmic justice as extreme, the same could be said for his point of view. It ignores these fundamentals: (a) one can’t compete fairly when the odds are stacked against one from the start; (b) unequal power leads to the slanting of rules, including for electoral success, that leads to further inequality of power and inevitably to greater and intolerable Hobbesian-like division; (c) racial discrimination continues and his white social Darwinism justifies doing not much about it; and (d) in this country’s polarized extremes, we’ve lost our common sense.
October 27, 2020
This made me think hard on what justice really is. How justice to some is sometimes injustice to others, how trying to do justice by some people will only cause them harm since we are applying our own definitions of justice disregarding the beliefs of those we are trying to help and what they want.
I think this is an important book for anyone heavily involved in social justice (whatever side of it you think you are) as it could identify issues with some of their ideologies that they might not have considered.
I think this is an important book for anyone heavily involved in social justice (whatever side of it you think you are) as it could identify issues with some of their ideologies that they might not have considered.
March 19, 2021
I've been grappling with a lot of conservative authors and ideas lately and finding them a lot more palatable than I would have thought. I guess I'm just another filthy centrist. :(
February 22, 2019
I'm a Sowell fan and enjoyed this book. That said, I felt like The Quest for Cosmic Justice and Discrimination and Disparities were too similar. In fact I'm certain many of the arguments were exactly the same, just rephrased in a new context.
Sowell can be a little smug and is also guilty of a lot of the things he accuses other intellectuals of, like hand-picking data to build his arguments.
Summary of my notes
There are two types of justice:
- Justice of process: When you have an unbiased process where all parties abide by the agreed-on rules
- Cosmic justice: When you "correct" the disadvantages that people have through no fault of their own.
Sowell argues that policies to address cosmic justice usually do far more harm than good, because the proponents usually care more about the intent than actual results.
An example that illustrates this point. A man in San Franscisco called for pizza delivery. The company told him they didn't make deliveries where he lived because it's a high crime area. There was a public uproar and the city passed a law requiring that any company making public deliveries must make deliveries all over the city.
The man did nothing to deserve the company's decision not to deliver in their neighborhood. So on a cosmic level justice was served. But the cost of the law they introduced was not considered: how many pizza deliveries are worth how many dead or injured truck drivers?
Sowell can be a little smug and is also guilty of a lot of the things he accuses other intellectuals of, like hand-picking data to build his arguments.
Summary of my notes
There are two types of justice:
- Justice of process: When you have an unbiased process where all parties abide by the agreed-on rules
- Cosmic justice: When you "correct" the disadvantages that people have through no fault of their own.
Sowell argues that policies to address cosmic justice usually do far more harm than good, because the proponents usually care more about the intent than actual results.
An example that illustrates this point. A man in San Franscisco called for pizza delivery. The company told him they didn't make deliveries where he lived because it's a high crime area. There was a public uproar and the city passed a law requiring that any company making public deliveries must make deliveries all over the city.
The man did nothing to deserve the company's decision not to deliver in their neighborhood. So on a cosmic level justice was served. But the cost of the law they introduced was not considered: how many pizza deliveries are worth how many dead or injured truck drivers?
June 7, 2020
In this book, Thomas Sowell describes the difficulty of seeking cosmic justice and the trade-offs and costs that are often ignored while doing so. Those who seek this sort of justice call it “social justice,” but Sowell thinks that a misnomer. After all, “All justice is inherently social. Can someone on a desert island be either just or unjust?” What they are really seeking, he argues, is cosmic justice, but the problem with seeking cosmic justice is that “unlike God at the dawn of Creation, we cannot simply say, ‘Let there be equality!’ or ‘Let there be justice!’ We must begin with the universe that we were born into and weigh the costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end. We cannot simply ‘do something’ whenever we are morally indignant, while disdaining to consider the costs entailed.”
While well written and thoughtful, “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” seems to be somewhat of a rehashing of ideas and material that can already be found in Sowell’s other books. Because I’ve read Sowell widely, it therefore only held limited interest for me and was more of a refresher than a new exploration. If you’ve never read Sowell, though, it’s a fairly good condensation of his outlook and way of thinking and uses some classic examples of his. At under 190 pages, it will be easier to read than some of his weightier works. And this would be a particularly poignant time to read this book, just as the quest for cosmic justice is ramping up all around us.
While well written and thoughtful, “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” seems to be somewhat of a rehashing of ideas and material that can already be found in Sowell’s other books. Because I’ve read Sowell widely, it therefore only held limited interest for me and was more of a refresher than a new exploration. If you’ve never read Sowell, though, it’s a fairly good condensation of his outlook and way of thinking and uses some classic examples of his. At under 190 pages, it will be easier to read than some of his weightier works. And this would be a particularly poignant time to read this book, just as the quest for cosmic justice is ramping up all around us.
June 28, 2021
The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell is about the great moral issues underlying many of the headline-making political controversies of our times. It is not a comforting book but a book about disturbing and dangerous trends we see happening all around us. The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end up promoting injustice, how confused conceptions of equality end up promoting inequality, and how the tyranny of social visions prevents many people from confronting the actual consequences of their own beliefs and policies. Those consequences include the steady and dangerous erosion of fundamental principles of freedom - amounting to a quiet repeal of what was won during the American revolution. The Quest for Cosmic Justice is the summation of a lifetime of study and thought about where we as a society are headed - and why we need to change course before it is too late and we do irretrievable damage. This book is a bit more scholarly than many others by Thomas Sowell but still very readable with a serious message for America.
January 28, 2021
An excellent examination of the fault lines between an egalitarian conception of justice and a more traditional conception. Sowell here is really examining the pursuit of what is called "Social Justice" by its contemporary advocates, but argues that cosmic justice is a more apt term, since under this vision of justice, any undeserved inequalities call for redress, even when they aren't caused by society. This vision of justice is contrasted to traditional justice, which is less ambitious and focuses on what might be called equality before the law (which egalitarians such as Rawl's often denigrate as merely "formal equality"). Sowell argues that these two visions of justice are not only different, they are mutually incompatible, since procedural equality in an "unfair" cosmos (one in which advantages are not evenly distributed) will naturally result in unequal outcomes, while a regime that aims to generate equality of outcome will necessarily discriminate among groups and individuals with respect to process in order to better achieve equal results.
Sowell argues that in the abstract, redressing inequalities of all sorts is appealing, even to most conservatives and libertarians. After all, we all know that many benefit from advantages they didn't earn and suffer from disadvantages they do not deserve. The question is what to do about this. And this is where Sowell parts ways with the egalitarians, since in his view, a regime aimed at Cosmic Justice demands more than humans are capable of in terms of understanding the causes of inequalities, finding apt remedies, and weighing the resulting costs to society:
"The demands of cosmic justice vastly exceed those of traditional justice - and vastly exceed what human beings are likely to be capable of. The great U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that there may be some people who are simply born clumsy, so that they may inadvertently injure themselves or others - for which , presumably, they will not be blamed when they stand before the courts of heaven. But, in the courts of man, they must be held to the same standards of accountability as everyone else. We do not have the omniscience to know who these particular people are or to what extent they were capable of taking extra precautions to guard against their own natural tendencies. In other words, human courts should not presume to dispense cosmic justice."
But what about more clear-cut social injustices, such as in societies with well-documented histories of discrimination? Here again, justice advocates must weigh the costs and benefits of proposed remedies. This is where the incompatibility between the two visions of justice really becomes evident. Traditional justice is rooted in the rule of law, and demands general rules known in advance and equally applicable to all. But "rules equally applicable to all are not the same as rules with equal impact on all. "Anatole France dramatized the distinction in his famous sarcastic remark: 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.' In today's American legal doctrine, that is called 'disparate impact.' Many public and private acts and policies with disparate impacts on different segments of the population are banned as discriminatory, even when these acts and policies apply the same procedures and standards to everyone."
This tension between so-called "formal equality" and "real equality" bears on another aspect of the law, and one which is at the root of some of our current cultural divisions: "One of the characteristics of the rule of law is that legal requirements be known in advance. Many laws, such as those dealing with vagrancy, have been invalidated by appellate courts as 'void for vagueness,' on grounds that what they require cannot be known to the citizen beforehand. Yet, increasingly, laws and policies seeking to achieve 'social justice' or cosmic justice have been allowed to stand by the courts, even when there is no way for those subject to these laws to know in advance whether or not they have violated them. [...] An employer cannot avoid a charge of racial discrimination merely by treating all employees and all job applicants the same, regardless of their race. 'Disparate impact' statistics will help determine after the fact whether the employer's conduct is judged to be discriminatory toward minorities [...] Before the fact, there is often no way to know which way a court trial would turn out. In short, there is no rule of law. This is not a result of some deficiency in the way particular laws have been administered. It is inherent in the process of seeking cosmic justice, since general rules can produce only indiscriminate results, not equal results or results fitting some preconceived notion of 'diversity.' [...] Thus 'discrimination' cannot be left with a clear prospective meaning, such as applying different standards to members of different groups or subjecting some to more onerous processes than others. For purposes of cosmic justice, discrimination must be defined by retrospective results, whether 'disparate impact, or 'hostile environments' or a failure to provide 'reasonable accommodation' [to a person with a disability, eg.]. This is only one of many ways in which the quest for cosmic justice is incompatible with the rule of law."
The cosmic justice vision naturally envisions a more expansive role for judges, since an egalitarian pursuit of justice must take many factors into account to rule adequately on a case. The traditional view, on the other hand, sees a restrained role for judges, who should "be allowed to decide as few things as possible," in the words of Aristotle (with most of the heavy-lifting on justice questions done by legislators). The way these differing views play out in the judiciary can be illustrated in an amusing exchange involving Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (an exemplar of the traditional view): "After having lunch with Judge Learned Hand, Holmes entered his carriage to be driven away. As he left, Judge Hand's parting salute was: 'Do justice, sir, do justice.' Holmes ordered the carriage stopped. 'That is not my job,' Holmes said to Judge Hand. 'It is my job to apply the law.'"
The arguments Sowell presents here deserve to be grappled with by anyone concerned about justice and equality. And at only 190 pages, the investment required is very modest. Highly recommend.
Sowell argues that in the abstract, redressing inequalities of all sorts is appealing, even to most conservatives and libertarians. After all, we all know that many benefit from advantages they didn't earn and suffer from disadvantages they do not deserve. The question is what to do about this. And this is where Sowell parts ways with the egalitarians, since in his view, a regime aimed at Cosmic Justice demands more than humans are capable of in terms of understanding the causes of inequalities, finding apt remedies, and weighing the resulting costs to society:
"The demands of cosmic justice vastly exceed those of traditional justice - and vastly exceed what human beings are likely to be capable of. The great U.S. Supreme Court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that there may be some people who are simply born clumsy, so that they may inadvertently injure themselves or others - for which , presumably, they will not be blamed when they stand before the courts of heaven. But, in the courts of man, they must be held to the same standards of accountability as everyone else. We do not have the omniscience to know who these particular people are or to what extent they were capable of taking extra precautions to guard against their own natural tendencies. In other words, human courts should not presume to dispense cosmic justice."
But what about more clear-cut social injustices, such as in societies with well-documented histories of discrimination? Here again, justice advocates must weigh the costs and benefits of proposed remedies. This is where the incompatibility between the two visions of justice really becomes evident. Traditional justice is rooted in the rule of law, and demands general rules known in advance and equally applicable to all. But "rules equally applicable to all are not the same as rules with equal impact on all. "Anatole France dramatized the distinction in his famous sarcastic remark: 'The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread.' In today's American legal doctrine, that is called 'disparate impact.' Many public and private acts and policies with disparate impacts on different segments of the population are banned as discriminatory, even when these acts and policies apply the same procedures and standards to everyone."
This tension between so-called "formal equality" and "real equality" bears on another aspect of the law, and one which is at the root of some of our current cultural divisions: "One of the characteristics of the rule of law is that legal requirements be known in advance. Many laws, such as those dealing with vagrancy, have been invalidated by appellate courts as 'void for vagueness,' on grounds that what they require cannot be known to the citizen beforehand. Yet, increasingly, laws and policies seeking to achieve 'social justice' or cosmic justice have been allowed to stand by the courts, even when there is no way for those subject to these laws to know in advance whether or not they have violated them. [...] An employer cannot avoid a charge of racial discrimination merely by treating all employees and all job applicants the same, regardless of their race. 'Disparate impact' statistics will help determine after the fact whether the employer's conduct is judged to be discriminatory toward minorities [...] Before the fact, there is often no way to know which way a court trial would turn out. In short, there is no rule of law. This is not a result of some deficiency in the way particular laws have been administered. It is inherent in the process of seeking cosmic justice, since general rules can produce only indiscriminate results, not equal results or results fitting some preconceived notion of 'diversity.' [...] Thus 'discrimination' cannot be left with a clear prospective meaning, such as applying different standards to members of different groups or subjecting some to more onerous processes than others. For purposes of cosmic justice, discrimination must be defined by retrospective results, whether 'disparate impact, or 'hostile environments' or a failure to provide 'reasonable accommodation' [to a person with a disability, eg.]. This is only one of many ways in which the quest for cosmic justice is incompatible with the rule of law."
The cosmic justice vision naturally envisions a more expansive role for judges, since an egalitarian pursuit of justice must take many factors into account to rule adequately on a case. The traditional view, on the other hand, sees a restrained role for judges, who should "be allowed to decide as few things as possible," in the words of Aristotle (with most of the heavy-lifting on justice questions done by legislators). The way these differing views play out in the judiciary can be illustrated in an amusing exchange involving Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (an exemplar of the traditional view): "After having lunch with Judge Learned Hand, Holmes entered his carriage to be driven away. As he left, Judge Hand's parting salute was: 'Do justice, sir, do justice.' Holmes ordered the carriage stopped. 'That is not my job,' Holmes said to Judge Hand. 'It is my job to apply the law.'"
The arguments Sowell presents here deserve to be grappled with by anyone concerned about justice and equality. And at only 190 pages, the investment required is very modest. Highly recommend.
March 25, 2021
Love reading anything by the smartest man on the planet; this work is an excellent example why.
August 12, 2022
Back in the stone age I studied economics in my first year at University. If Thomas Sowell had been my professor, I wouldn't have dropped it.
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