- Internet Archive
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Over the years, “Social Justice Reconsidered” evolved into “The Quest for Cosmic Justice,” completely recast yet again, but still not finished a decade later. Nor was it certain that it ever would be finished, given the various other projects I was involved in. However, in the spring of 1996, some particularly sophomoric remarks by one of my Stanford colleagues not only provoked my anger but also convinced me that there was a real need to untangle the kind of confusions that could lead any sen- » sible adult to say the things he had said—and which all too many other people were saying. I went home and immediately resumed work on the essay on cosmic justice, writing it now for the general public, rather than for an academic audience.
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By the autumn of 1996, the new version was completed and I presented “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” as a lecture in New Zealand. Much to my pleasant surprise, large excerpts from it were published in the country’s leading newspapers. This press coverage, as well as the enthusiastic reception of the talk by a non-academic audience, convinced me that this was something that the general public would understand—perhaps more read- ily than some academics who are locked into the intellectual fashions of the day.
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responsibility and justice into the cosmos, seeking to rectify the tragic misfortunes of individuals and groups through collective action in the name of “social justice.” Yet this collective action is not limited to correcting the consequences of social decisions or other collective social action, but extends to mitigating as well the misfortunes of the physically and mentally disabled, for example. In other words, it seeks 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.
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Here, in this simple example, we have all the elements of the quest for cosmic justice. Since most people are not criminals, even in a high-crime neighborhood, large numbers of inno- cent people have various additional costs imposed on them through no fault of their own—in this case, the cost of being unable to receive deliveries of food, furniture, packages, and other things that other people take for granted elsewhere. They are treated unequally. From a cosmic perspective, this is an injustice, in the sense that, if we were creating the universe from
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Once we begin to consider how many deliveries are worth how many dead truck drivers, we have abandoned the quest for cosmic justice and reduced our choices to the more human scale of weighing costs versus benefits. Across a wide spectrum of issues, the difference between seeking cosmic justice and seeking traditional justice depends on the extent to which costs are weighed. The enormous difference that this can make needs to be made explicit, so that we do not keep talking past one another on something as important as justice.
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Cosmic justice is not simply a higher degree of traditional justice, it is a fundamentally different concept. Traditionally, jus- tice or injustice is characteristic of a process. A defendant in a criminal case would be said to have received justice if the trial were conducted as it should be, under fair rules and with the
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In its pursuit of justice for a segment of society, in disregard of the consequences for society as a whole, what is called “social justice” might more accurately be called anti-social justice, since what consistently gets ignored or dismissed are precisely the costs to society. Such a conception of justice seeks to correct, not only biased or discriminatory acts by individuals or by social institutions, but unmerited disadvantages in general, from what- ever source they may arise. In American criminal trials, for example, before a murderer is sentenced, the law permits his unhappy childhood to be taken into account. Seldom is there any Claim that the person murdered had anything to do with that presumptively unhappy childhood. In a notorious 1996 case in California, the victim was a twelve-year-old girl, who had not even been born when the murderer was supposedly going through his unhappy childhood. It is only from a cosmic per- spective that his childhood had any bearing on the crime.
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If punishment is meant to deter crime, whether by example or by putting existing criminals behind bars or in the graveyard, then mitigating that punishment in pursuit of cosmic justice pre- sumably means reducing the deterrence and allowing more crime to take place at the expense of innocent people. Ata more mundane level, the enormously increased amount of time required to ponder the imponderables of someone else’s child-
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Prosecutors who should be moving on to other criminals after securing a murder conviction must instead spend additional time putting together a rebuttal to psychological speculation. Even if this speculation does not in the end affect the outcome in the case at hand, it affects other cases that are left in limbo while time and resources are devoted to rebutting unsubstanti- ated theories. A significant amount of the violent crimes com- mitted in America is committed by career criminals who are walking the streets—and stalking the innocent—while awaiting trial. This too is one of the costs of the quest for cosmic justice.
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Much, if not most, of the concerns billed as “social justice” revolve around economic and social inequalities among groups. But the general principles involved are essentially the same as in other examples of pursuing cosmic justice. These principles have been proclaimed by politicians and by philosophers, from the soapbox to the seminar room and in the highest judicial chambers. Such principles deserve closer scrutiny and sharper definition.
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Back in the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson made one of the classic statements of the vision of cosmic justice:
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Note how the word “fair” has an entirely different meaning in this context. Cosmic justice is not about the rules of the game. It is about putting particular segments of society in the position that they would have been in but for some undeserved misfor- tune. This conception of fairness requires that third parties must wield the power to control outcomes, over-riding rules, stan- dards, or the preferences of other people.
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Such attitudes are found from college admissions offices to the highest courts in the land. Thus a long-time admissions director at Stanford University has said that she never required applicants to submit Achievement Test scores because “requir- ing such tests could unfairly penalize disadvantaged students in the college admissions process,” since such students “through no fault of their own, often find themselves in high schools that pro- vide inadequate preparation for the Achievement Tests.” Through no fault of their own —one of the key phrases in the quest for cosmic justice. Nor are such attitudes unique to Stanford. They are in fact common across the country.“
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Since “undeserved inequalities” extend beyond prejudicial decisions made by others to encompass biological differences among individuals and groups—the fact that women are usu- ally not as large or as physically strong as men, for example— and profound differences in the geographical settings in which whole races and nations have evolved culturally,’ not to men- tion individual and group differences in child-rearing practices and moral values, cosmic justice requires—or assumes —vastly more knowledge than is necessary for traditional justice.
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Requirements for Cosmic Justice
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THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Much of the quest for cosmic justice involves racial, regional, religious, or other categories of people who are to be restored to where they would be but for various disadvantages they suffer from various sources. Yet each group tends to trail the long shadow of its own cultural history, as well as reflecting the consequences of external influences. The history of every people is a product of innumerable cross-currents, whose tim- ing and confluence can neither be predicted beforehand nor always untangled afterward. There is no “standard” history that everyone has or would have had “but for” peculiar circum- stances of particular groups, whose circumstances can be “cor- rected” to conform to some norm. Unravelling all this in the quest for cosmic justice is a much more staggering task than seeking traditional justice.
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The larger point here is how easy it is to go wrong, by huge margins, when presuming to take into account complex his- torical influences. 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, pre- sumably, 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 peo- ple are or to what extent they were capable of taking extra pre- cautions to guard against their own natural tendencies. In other words, human courts should not presume to dispense cosmic justice.
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No small part of the legal shambles of the American crimi- nal justice system since the 1960s, accompanied by skyrocketing rates of violent crime, resulted from attempts to seek cosmic jus- tice in the courtrooms. In a series of U.S. Supreme Court deci- sions in the early 1960s, various restrictions were placed on the police in their arrest and interrogation of suspects in criminal cases, and in the search of their property. The rationales for these restrictions included the claim—undoubtedly true —that inex- perienced and amateurish criminals, ignorant of the law, were more likely to make admissions that would later prove to be fatally damaging to their own legal defense, while sophisticated professional criminals and members of organized crime syndi- cates were far less likely to trap themselves in this way.
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Clearly this is an injustice from some cosmic perspective — and correcting this inequity among criminals was explicitly the perspective of the Attorney General of the United States and of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at that time.’? However, as in other instances of the quest for cosmic justice, the costs to third parties were largely disregarded, pretended not to exist, or dismissed with some such lofty phrase as “That is the price we pay for freedom.” Presumably, the United States was not a free country until the 1960s.
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THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
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“Merit” and Cosmic Justice Related to cosmic justice is the seductive, misleading, and often pernicious concept of “merit,” which is either explicit or implicit in much that is said by people in various parts of the philo- sophical spectrum.
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Those who argue as to whether the poor are “deserving” or “undeserving” often argue past each other because they are not clear as to whether their respective frameworks are those of cos- mic justice or traditional justice. Even the most degenerate member of the underclass may 7m some cosmic sense be said to be what he is because of circumstances —at least in the sense that he might have been raised in other ways that might have increased the likelihood of his becoming a decent human being.
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THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
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Family disgrace has proven to be a powerful instrument of social control in Japan, for example, though no one can doubt that individual injustices result from innocent family members’ suffering from shame generated by the misdeeds of guilty rela- tives. The point here is not to be for or against such practices on a blanket basis. The more limited objective is to illustrate how radically differently we must proceed if our framework is one of cosmic justice rather than traditional justice. .
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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the quest for cosmic justice can generate bitterness over differ- ences that are far less consequential in themselves. It is one thing to be bitter because one cannot feed one’s children and some- thing very different to be resentful because one cannot afford designer jeans or expensive watches that keep no better time than cheap watches.
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With justice, as with equality, the question is not whether more is better, but whether it is better at all costs. We need to con- sider what those who believe in the vision of cosmic justice sel- dom want to consider—the nature of those costs and how they change the very nature of justice itself.
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While the great arena for the discussion of cosmic justice has been in social policy, the concept has been applied even in international relations, in matters involving grave decisions about war and peace. During the 1930s, when the shadow of an impending war hung over Europe, and weighty questions of mil- itary preparedness and military alliances had to be decided, there were still people in the Western democracies who regarded the Treaty of Versailles that ended the First World War as hav- ing been unjust to Germany—which then became for them a reason to be tolerant of Hitler’s policies and actions, as the Nazi
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Looking back at events over which no one now had any con- trol distracted attention from the urgent need to build offsetting military power to deter a future war that would dwarf in its hor- rors even the appalling carnage of the First World War. Never has preoccupation with cosmic justice had a higher price. Yet the power of the concept was demonstrated by the fact that, in the face of the gravest dangers, it prompted many to look back at the past, instead of ahead to a future which threatened the devastation of a continent, the slaughter of tens of millions of human beings, and the attempted extermination of entire races.
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When it comes to social policy as well, some of those who consider themselves the most forward-looking are in fact most likely to look backward at a history that is beyond anyone’s power to change. An historian writing about Czechoslovakia, for example, said that the policies of this newly created state after the First World War were “to correct social injustice” and to “put right the historic wrongs of the seventeenth century.”” Presumably, no one from the seventeenth century was still alive at the end of the First World War. One of the many contrasts between traditional justice and cosmic justice is that traditional justice involves the rules under which flesh-and-blood human beings interact, while cosmic justice encompasses not only con- temporary individuals and groups, but also group abstractions extending over generations, or even centuries.
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THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
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Nevertheless, it remains painfully clear that those people who were torn from their homes in Africa in centuries past and forcibly brought across the Atlantic in chains suffered not only horribly, but unjustly. Were they and their captors still alive, the reparations and the retribution owed would be staggering. Time and death, however, cheat us of such opportunities for justice, however galling that may be. We can, of course, create new injus- tices 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. We can only make our choices among alternatives actually available, and rectifying the past is not one of those options.
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Believers in the quest for cosmic justice do not give up easily. In politics, in law, and in intellectual circles, statistical disparities between the achievements, performances, or rewards of one group and those of the general population are often regarded as proof of either the present-day consequences
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Those who believe in cosmic justice sometimes argue that this simply shows how widespread discrimination is. But many groups who are in no position to discriminate against anyone are over-represented in high-paying occupations, prestigious aca- demic institutions, and numerous other desirable sectors of the economy and society. It would be possible to go through a long | list of statistical disparities involving either people or things, where not even a plausible case for discrimination can be made. Here are just a few:
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for cosmic justice often confuse the fate of statistical abstractions with the fate of flesh-and-blood human beings. Much has been written, for example, about how small percentages of the popu- lation receive large percentages of the nation’s income or hold some large percentage of the nation’s wealth. The implicit assumption is that we are talking about classes of people when, in the United States at least, we are in fact often talking about individuals at different stages of their lives.
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Whatever the intellectual deficiencies of the vision of cosmic justice, it has become politically entrenched in many countries
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Those pursuing the quest for cosmic justice have tended to assume that the consequences would be what they intended— which is to say, that the people subject to government policies would be like pieces on a chessboard, who could be moved here and there to carry out a grand design, without concern for their own responses. But both the intended beneficiaries and those on whom the costs of those benefits would fall have often reacted in ways unexpected by those who have sought cosmic justice.
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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There has been a particularly tragic consequence of the quest for cosmic justice for young black Americans. Just as some par- ents make the mistake of talking around small children as if they cannot hear or understand, so those promoting a vision of cos- mic injustices as the cause of all the problems of black Americans have failed to understand the consequences of this vision for young blacks who do not yet have either the personal experience or the maturity to weigh those words against reality. The net result in many ghetto schools has been the development of an attitude of hostility to learning or to conforming to ordinary stan- dards of behavior in society. Worse, those young black students who do wish to get an education, to speak correct English, and to behave in ways compatible with getting along with others, are accused of “acting white” — betraying the race —and are subject to both social pressures and outright intimidation and violence.
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What of those whose interests are to be sacrificed in the quest for cosmic justice? They too respond quite rationally, in light of the options presented to them. Individuals may cease to strive as hard for posts that they are less likely to get or may remove them- selves from the whole society, as some highly educated Chinese have done in Malaysia and some highly educated Indians have done in Fiji, or as highly skilled and highly entrepreneurial Huguenots removed themselves from France in centuries past.
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In this and other circumstances, the quest for cosmic justice does not necessarily mean an end result of greater equality or justice than under policies meant to carry out traditional, mun-
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dane human justice. The only clear-cut winners in the quest for cosmic justice are those who believe in the vision it projects — a vision in which those believers are so morally and/or intellec- tually superior to others that their own relentless pursuit of this vision is seen as all that offers some modicum of hope to those who would otherwise be victims of the lesser people who make up the rest of society. It is a very self-flattering vision —and hence one not easily given up. Evidence to the contrary is not only likely to be dismissed, but is often blamed on the malevolence or dishonesty of those who present such evidence.
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It is difficult to explain the fury and ruthlessness of those with this vision of cosmic justice, whenever they are challenged, by the simple fact that they consider policy A to be better than pol- icy B. What is at stake for them is not merely a policy option, but a whole vision of the world and of their own place in that world. No wonder it is seldom possible to have rational discus- sions of some of these issues.
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Nobody should be happy with cosmic injustices. The real questions are:
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Just as those seeking cosmic justice must become aware of the enormous costs of their quest, so those who see cosmic justice as a dangerous mirage must also recognize how naturally peo- ple of all philosophical persuasions prefer the vision embodied in this quest and attempt to practice it, whenever circumstances permit without ruinous costs or dangerous risks. Not only have such conservative intellectual leaders as Milton Friedman and
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THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
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The very attractiveness of cosmic justice in the close personal relations and mutually felt reciprocal obligations within a family makes it a seductive danger as a government policy of “entitle- ments” (implying vo reciprocal obligations) in a large, imper- sonal society. The alternative to political crusades and government programs is not that we should “do nothing,” as it is sometimes thoughtlessly phrased. There has never been a moment in the entire history of the United States when nothing was being done to offset the undeserved misfortunes of the poor and the disadvantaged. Indeed, as Milton Friedman has pointed out, the period of the greatest opposition to the role of govern- ment in the economy in the nineteenth century was also a period of an unprecedented growth of private philanthropy. It was also a period of private social uplift efforts by volunteers all across America. Such efforts, incidentally, had a dramatic effect. in reducing crime and other social ills such as alcoholism, so these were hardly ineffectual gestures. Indeed, they were far more effective than the more massive government-run programs that began in the 1960s.
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Not only does cosmic justice differ from traditional justice, and conflict with it, more momentously cosmic justice is irrec-
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oncilable with personal freedom based on the rule of law. Traditional justice can be mass-produced by impersonal prospective rules governing the interactions of flesh-and-blood human beings, but cosmic justice must be hand-made by hold- ers of power who impose their own decisions on how these flesh- and-blood individuals should be categorized into abstractions and how these abstractions should then be forcibly configured to fit the vision of the power-holders. Merely the power to select beneficiaries is an enormous power, for it is also the power to select victims —and to reduce both to the role of supplicants of those who hold this power.
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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Material well-being is of course not everything. Justice mat- ters as well. But, whatever one’s vision of a just world, what is crucial is to recognize that (1) different visions lead to radically different practical policies, that (2) we shall continue to talk past one another so long as we do not recognize that cosmic justice changes the very meaning of the plainest words, and that (3) whatever we choose to do, it should be based on a clear under- standing of the costs and dangers of the actual alternatives, not simply the heady feeling of exaltation produced by particular words or visions. Recognizing that many people “through no fault of their own” have windfall losses, while those same peo- ple —and others —also have windfall gains, the time is long over- due to recognize also that taxpayers through no fault of their own have been forced to subsidize the moral adventures which exalt selfanointed social philosophers. Victims of violent crimes have been forced to bear even more painful losses from those same
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There is no question that a world in which cosmic justice prevailed would be a better world than a world limited to tradi- tional justice. However, it is one thing to rail against the fates, but no one should confuse that with a serious critique of exist- ing society, much less a basis for constructing a better one.
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There is an ancient fable about a dog with a bone in his mouth. He looked down into a pool of water and saw a reflec- tion that looked to him like another dog with another bone— and that other bone seemed to be larger than his bone. Determined to get the other bone instead, the dog opened his mouth and prepared to jump into the water. This of course caused his own bone to drop into the water and be lost. Cosmic justice is much like that illusory bone and it too can cause us to losé what is attainable in quest of the unattainable.
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These examples are merely particular illustrations of a more general set of attitudes which exalt envy and seldom count the cost of doing so. These costs include crimes of envy, where the purpose is neither to acquire someone else’s possessions nor to avenge any loss of one’s own, but simply to lash out against the “unfair” good fortune of another.” Such dog-in-the-manger crimes are often considered senseless or irrational but they are logical corollaries of the quest for cosmic justice.
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Similar reasoning has promoted educational policies which seek to create more equal outcomes for “special education” students with mental, physical, or psychological handicaps— again, with little or no regard for the financial costs of this to the taxpayers or the educational costs to other children in whose classrooms they are to be “mainstreamed,” often with | little regard to the disruptive effects of their special needs. These financial costs can be several times what it costs to educate the average student, while the educational results for a severely mentally retarded student may be imperceptible. The educa- tional cost can also include a substantial part of a teacher’s time being devoted to one or a few students, to the neglect of the majority. Yet, clearly, it is an injustice, from a cosmic perspec- tive, that the minds and psyches of some are unable to cope with what ordinary students handle routinely. But just as some students suffer handicaps through no fault of their own, so can other children suffer from mainstreaming policies, likewise through no fault of their own.
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Nor was this principal unique. A member of a national com- mission on teaching mathematics opposed teaching computa- tional skills because that means “anointing the few” who master these skills readily and “casting out the many” who do not, and urged that we throw off “the discriminatory shackles of compu- tational algorithms.” More broadly, ability-grouping in differ- ent classes or in different schools is bitterly opposed by most public school officials on similar grounds. In short, both the mentally gifted and the mentally retarded are to be “main- streamed” as part of the quest for cosmic justice —with little or no regard to the costs of this for the students, the taxpayers, or the society into which they are to go as adults.
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The crucial question is not whether reducing or eliminat- ing envy is a desirable goal, any more than the question is whether cosmic justice is desirable. In both cases, the ques- tion is: What is the cost of promoting this goal? Insofar as reduc- ing envy is attempted by purely intellectual means, such as showing how illogical or counterproductive envy can be, the costs are small and the results are likely to be correspondingly small. A more common and mote costly way of attempting to deal with envy is by seeking political support for policies to reduce the disparities that promote it. However, in a demo- cratic society, this effort must take the form of a public decry- ing of these disparities, as a prelude to seeking policies to reduce them. That means that this approach promotes envy in hopes of ultimately reducing it. One cost of this envious pre-
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The more sweeping the vision—the more it seems to explain and the more its explanation is emotionally satisfying —the more reason there for its devotees to safeguard it against the vagaries of facts. Cosmic visions are more likely to be cherished in this way, whether these are visions which explain society and history by racial superiority (as with Hitler) or by class struggle (Marx, Lenin) or by some other grand simplicity that is cosmic in its scope. Visions of cosmic justice are just one variety of cosmic visions. Hitler’s cosmic vision was quite different from anything conceived by John Rawls.
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Cosmic visions of society are not just visions about society. They are visions about those people who hold these visions and the role of such people in society, whether these people are deemed to be leaders of a master race, the vanguard of the pro- letariat, saviors of the planet, or to have some other similarly self- flattering role as an anointed visionary group “making a difference” in the unfolding of history. Heady cosmic visions which give this sense of being one of the anointed visionaries can hold tyrannical sway in disregard or defiance of facts. This becomes painfully apparent, whether we look at visions of war and peace or at social visions.
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This asymmetry in presumptions of moral superiority is cen- turies old and by no means confined to different theories of pre- venting war. On issue after issue, the morally self-anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if no honest disagree- ment 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 sav- iors of the world, whether they are saving it from war, overpop- ulation, capitalism, genetic degradation, environmental destruction, or whatever the crisis du jour might be.
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Here, as elsewhere, the question as to which method of avoiding war in fact tends to produce the desired result and which turns out to be counterproductive receives remarkably little empirical examination from the anointed visionaries. It is the quest for peace, like the quest for cosmic justice, that exalts them morally—irrespective of whether their strategy actually reduces the dangers of war or even increases those dangers. Here, as in other expressions of cosmic visions, results are not the test. Taking a moral stand is the test, as economist Roy Harrod discovered at a 1934 rally of the British Labour Party. A Labour Party candidate proclaimed that Britain ought
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Personal exaltation, not empirical consequences for other people, has long marked cosmic visions and their advocates, however much they may proclaim their love of humanity, peace, the environment, the poor, or other ostensible beneficiaries of their activities.
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While those with the opposite vision—advocates of military deterrence — typically see other human beings as rational decision- makers like themselves, and accordingly seek to present poten- tial aggressor nations with sufficient counter-force to deter military action, those with the cosmic vision of the anointed visionaries are more likely to define the problem psychologically as hostile emotions and irrational behavior that may get out of hand and thereby lead to war. This second and more psycho- logical explanation casts the visionaries in a superior—almost therapeutic—role as they seek to “relieve international ten- sions,” to dispel “misunderstandings” through more contact with both the leaders and the peoples of adversary nations, and to por- tray these potential enemies as “human beings like ourselves.” Two of the great conflicts of the twentieth century —first between the Western democracies and the Nazis and then between the Western democracies and the Communists— both illustrate this pattern, which can be seen in the events that led
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At the heart of the spiritual disarmament behind the military disarmament was the cosmic vision of anointed visionaries. Both the rhetoric and the foreign policy of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain reflected virtually every aspect of that vision. First, there was the therapeutic vision of war, that “if you want to secure a peace which can be relied on to last, you have got to find out what are the causes of war and remove them.”#° Among these causes were “misunderstandings,’* “grievances, differences and suspicions”” and other psychological problems such as “enmities”#3 and “an atmosphere of ill will.”44 Given this therapeutic vision of the causes of war, Chamberlain’s inces- sant repetition of the theme that “personal contacts”* between heads of state were the way to dissipate this psychological malaise and defuse emotions was perfectly consistent.
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Among nations, it would be possible to see whether the acquisition of colonies led to an accelerated enrichment of the imperialist nations and whether the loss of such colonies led to economic setbacks in the imperialist nations and/or an improved prosperity among the liberated peoples. Yet remark- ably little attention has been paid to such empirical questions by those with cosmic visions of exploitation. One of the master- pieces of propaganda has been Lenin’s Jmperialism, which bril- liantly illustrates his theory with statistics, without subjecting it to the slightest test.
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Marxism-Leninism is the ultimate in a common pattern among intellectuals with cosmic visions—highly sophisticated defenses of primitive misconceptions. In this case, the miscon- ception is that the rich are rich decause the poor are poor—that what is involved, in one way or another, is that wealth is extracted from the many for the benefit of the few, whether among classes or among nations. ‘This might make sense if wealth were a zero- sum game, but that such theories could flourish in an era when the total wealth of the human race has been increasing at a rate unprecedented in the history of the species is both a triumph of propaganda and a symptom of something in the human psyche that makes it susceptible to such a picture.
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Not only sweeping theories but also more limited reform move- ments can reflect cosmic visions. More specifically, reform movements often reflect the vision of cosmic justice —opposi- tion to a situation deemed morally intolerable, regardless of whether the reform makes those trapped in that situation better off or worse off. For example, reformers shocked by housing con- ditions in the slums or working conditions in the Third World have often banned by law the housing conditions which offended them or used import bans or public vilification to keep American firms from importing the products of labor working under conditions that offend American reformers.
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Nothing is easier than to agree with these reformers that it was unjust, in some cosmic sense, that some people should find themselves forced to live so much like animals. However, some slum-dwellers were not financially incapable of getting better housing but were living in overcrowded and run-down buildings as a way to skimp and save money to send to their families back in Europe, either for food and shelter or to buy tickets to come join them in America. Some families saved money in order to
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Like so much that is done in the quest for cosmic justice, it makes observers feel better about themselves—and provides no incentives for those observers to scrutinize the consequences of their actions on the ostensible beneficiaries. As in other cases, human beings are sacrificed to the tyranny of visions because those sacrificed are not the same as those exhilarated by the vision.
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The almost universal disdain toward the middle class—the bourgeoisie—by those with cosmic visions can be more readily understood in light of the role of such visions as personal grati- fication and personal license. The middle classes have been clas- sically people of rules, traditions, and self-discipline, to a far greater extent than the underclass below them or the wealthy
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and aristocratic classes above them. While the underclass pay the price of not having the self-discipline of the bourgeoisie—in many ways, ranging from poverty to imprisonment—the truly wealthy and powerful can often disregard the rules, including laws, without paying the consequences. Those with cosmic visions that seek escape from social constraints regarded as arbi- trary, rather than inherent, tend to romanticize the unruliness of the underclass and the sense of being above the rules found among the elite. :
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Rules, traditions, and self-discipline all represent guidance from the distilled experiences of others, rather than self-indulgence based the inner light of one’s own vision. It is almost axiomatic that those with cosmic visions must disdain the bourgeoisie. The visionaries must also disdain the kind of society that evolves’ over the generations through experience, rather than the kind of society that can be created by the imposition of an inspired vision.
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tion of dreams which have overwhelming importance to them. Some of these dreams revolve around the quest for cosmic jus- tice, in which constitutional constraints may be seen as techni- calities to be finessed. Other dreams may be about personal ambitions that can be fulfilled only in a very different kind of society from that established by the Constitution of the United States. Ego and ideals are of course not mutually exclusive but may readily exist in the same individual, who may even mistake the former for the latter.
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That some leader dangerous to the basic institutions of American society would arise, Lincoln thought inevitable. Safeguarding those institutions would require a public suffi- ciently united, sufficiently attached to freedom, and sufficiently wise, “to successfully frustrate his designs.”+ Today it would also require a public sufficiently resistant to incessant criticisms and condemnations of their society for failing to achieve cosmic jus-
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Unfortunately, what many call “society” is in fact civilization. No one is openly opposed to American civilization, nor even covertly plotting its demise. Many of those pursuing a vision of cosmic justice simply take an adversarial position against tradi- tions, morals, and institutions that make the survival of this civi- lization possible. The prerequisites of civilization are not an interesting subject to those who concentrate on its shortcom- ings—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. What would otherwise be a purely personal idiosyncrasy becomes socially ominous when it generates a whole vision of the world in which very real and often very painful predicaments are dealt with as if they were entirely different from what they are.
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That vision is the vision of cosmic justice. In addition to its other dangers, the quest for cosmic justice is incompatible with the fundamental principles of the American revolution—the tule of law, individual freedom, and democratic government.
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If general rules, known in advance, are at the heart of the rule of law, then such rules are inherently incompatible with cosmic justice. That inherent incompatibility shows itself in many ways, including issues involving equal treatment, property rights, bur- dens of proof, and the general role of judges in the carrying out of laws.
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In short, the inherent conflict between equal rules and equal results has been recognized in theory for at least two centuries, even though many of our contemporaries proclaim, as if it were some new discovery or deeper insight of theirs, that laws that are “formally” equal may affect different groups differently. From this they conclude that “real” equality must supersede merely formal equality—which is to say that cosmic justice must trump traditional justice. A common expression of this view is that “equality before the law without economic, political, and social opportunities is a mockery.””° What is crucial at this point is not whether we agree or disagree with one or the other of these con- ceptions but that we clearly understand that they are mutually incompatible, that their fundamental contradictions cannot be blended or finessed.
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The difference between the equal treatment of traditional justice and the equal results or equal prospects of cosmic justice affect many other kinds of issues. From the perspective of those who seek cosmic justice, freedom of speech does not mean sim- ply exemption from government control of content but includes as well the means of making speech heard. In other words, it requires more government intervention, rather than less, so as to force some citizens to make available resources to enable other citizens to exercise their free speech rights.
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Thus shopping malls, airports, and even private housing developments have been forced to relinquish their rights as property owners to keep trespassers out and instead are forced to allow people to pass out leaflets or solicit money on their property, in disregard of the desires of those who wish to use these malls, airports, or private housing developments for the purposes for which they were designed and built, without being disturbed or harassed. Those with the cosmic view of justice likewise favor forcing radio and television broadcasters to give, or to sell below the market rate, time for political messages or to broadcast what some third parties choose to define as “pub- lic service” programming.
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All this changes radically, however, within the framework of cosmic justice. If some group is not receiving justice, then whether this is due to governmental or private actions is seen as secondary, if it is relevant at all. Nowhere has this been more acutely felt than in issues involving racial discrimination. Here it is often insisted that everyone is entitled to equal treatment and also that “each group must advocate and insist upon its piece of the pie” and that there has been a “failure of the pri- vate sector to address the issue forthrightly.””
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At this point, with our focus being on the general framework of law, rather than on the merits of particular legislation or poli- cies, what matters most are not the merits or demerits of these particular legal issues and judicial decisions as social policy, but how all this affects the maintenance of the rule of law. Constitutional rights that are essentially exemptions from gov- ernment power under traditional concepts of justice become reasons for the further extension of government power under cosmic concepts of justice. Cosmic justice cannot be achieved with “a government of laws and not of men” that simply estab- lishes a legal framework within which individuals are free to
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make their own decisions and arrange their own voluntary trans- actions on whatever terms are mutually agreeable. For cosmic justice, someone must oversee the social results of these individ- ual transactions and intervene directly to ensure that the desired social results or prospects are arranged.
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Moreover, while traditional justice concerns rules of inter- action between flesh-and-blood human beings, cosmic justice concerns abstract categories, whose prospects or results are to be adjusted to the taste of third parties. These abstractions reach across the generations and the collective claims that are made range from territorial irredentism to affirmative action and group reparations. Since the people involved in these inter-temporal abstractions are never all present as flesh-and-blood human beings at any given time, it is impossible for them to resolve their concerns by engaging in voluntary transactions, so that some superior power must, at some particular point in time, adjudi- cate their differences and impose a “solution.”
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There are many examples of the constraints imposed on the freedom of some in order to produce cosmic justice for others. More to the point, from the perspective of society as a whole, is the undermining of the rule of law in order to achieve particu- lar results. For example, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has decreed that inequalities of employment
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Preferential treatment is prescribed for the mentally ill in the name of equality—or an absence of “discrimination” —since it is equalizing treatment to counter-balance undeserved disadvan- tages. The term “cosmic justice” seems particularly more appro- priate here than “social justice,” since no claim is made that mental illness must be the result of social decisions or social con- ditions, though such disabilities are still unjust from the stand- point of the kind of cosmos we would prefer, if these matters were in our hands.
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As already noted, 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 appel- late courts as “void for vagueness,” on grounds that what they require cannot be known to the citizen beforehand. Yet, increas- ingly, laws and policies seeking to achieve “social justice” or cosmic justice have been allowed to stand by the courts, even
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An employer cannot avoid a charge of racial discrimination merely by treating all employees and all job applicants the sarne, 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—or whether it repre- sented “reverse discrimination” against some members of the majority population. 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 written or 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.”
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Such loose expressions as “reasonably” accommodating _ those with disabilities are not mere verbal lapses. 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. In short, there can be no rule of law for such things and courts seeking cosmic justice can no longer strike down such laws as “void for vagueness.” These edicts do not happen to be vague, they are necessarily vague. They could not be other-
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wise. Thus “discrimination” cannot be left with a clear prospec- tive 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, discrimi- nation must be defined by retrospective results, whether “dis- parate impact” or “hostile environments” or a failure to provide “reasonable accommodation.” This is only one of many ways in which the quest for cosmic justice is incompatible with the tule of law. |
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In summary, cosmic justice attempts to create equal results or equal prospects, with little or no regard for whether the indi- viduals or groups involved are in equal circumstances or have equal capabilities or equal personal drives. To do this, it cannot operate under general rules, the essence of law, but must create categories of people entitled to various outcomes, regardless of their own inputs. Moreover, it often does this sub rosa, by creat- ing huge burdens of proof for any criteria that reveal the inequal- ities of capabilities and circumstances, while assuming with little
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If equality looks radically different from the perspective of cosmic justice, so does bias. Traditional standards of admissions to colleges and universities, for example, have been character- ized as “admissions systems that favored the white and the wealthy.” It is no doubt true that white and wealthy individu- als can meet high academic standards a higher percentage of the time than those who are neither. But it says nothing about the validity of these standards as predictors of later academic or other achievements that those with advantages met the criteria more often than those without them.
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traditional concepts of prospective circumstances, it was the Malays who were favored under both regimes but, in cosmic terms, it was the Chinese. Again, what is crucial is not which per- spective one chooses, but a clear understanding that they are inherently irreconcilable concepts that should not be confused with one another simply because they use the same words, for the actual senses of those same words are diametrically opposed.
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From a cosmic perspective, in whatever circumstances A does better than B, those circumstances can be said to be cir- cumstances “favoring” A. Note that there cannot be any such thing as overcoming disadvantages in this formulation. If busi- nesses set up by poor Lebanese immigrants in colonial West Africa did better in competition with businesses set up there by more prosperous Europeans, then by cosmic definition that was because of Lebanese “advantages” —which consisted in this case of their being willing to work harder and longer hours, charging lower prices, accepting lower profits anda lower standard of liv- ing, and putting more efforts into understanding their African customers.”° In short, performance differences between groups vanish into thin air by being subsumed under the concept of “advantages” or favorably biased prospects, even when the same prospects were available to both groups but only one group made the choices or the sacrifices, or had the capabilities, to make use of these prospects.
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With a cosmic concept of bias or advantage, people seeking or justifying preferential policies often speak of such policies as being necessary to create “a level playing field.” However, this phrase has a wholly different meaning outside the framework of cosmic justice. In traditional terms, what preferential policies create is a playing field tilting in favor of those whose perfor- mance on a level playing field would be inadequate. The point here is not to assess the particular merits of particular preferen- tial policies or of preferential policies in general —which has been done elsewhere’”—but to demonstrate the diametrically opposite meaning of the same phrase when used inside and outside the framework of cosmic justice.
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Among the first rights to be sacrificed in the quest for cosmic jus- tice are property rights. Clearly the owners of substantial prop- erty are very eligible candidates for the role of people enjoying privileged positions and therefore very eligible to have their legal rights sacrificed for the greater good of less fortunate people. However, this way of looking at things completely misconceives the role of property rights and of rights in general. Just as free- dom 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 hold- ings. Both rights exist to serve social purposes reaching far beyond those who actually exercise these rights.
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economic well-being of the many, just as the freedom of the press is not just a special-interest benefit to journalists. Yet prop- erty rights are often treated as if they were in fact only special- interest benefits for the more fortunate and therefore rights to be sacrificed in pursuit of cosmic justice for others.
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Professor Laurence Tribe of the Harvard Law School, for example, sees the constitution’s “built-in bias against redistribu- tion of wealth” as a benefit to “entrenched wealth.” That is, he sees it as simply a benefit to special interests, in a way in which he would not regard freedom of the press as just a special-inter- est benefit to journalists. Note also how the term “bias” is used here in a sense parallel with the usage of those who say that the Chinese have been “favored” over the Malays. When the rule of law is seen as a bias, cosmic justice has been quietly enshrined and the principles of the American constitution quietly repealed.
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The difference between cosmic justice and traditional jus- tice means a huge difference in the power of judges. Under cos- mic justice, the judge’s role is to decide whether the behavior of each of the parties fits the judge’s notions of what they should have done. Under traditional justice, the judge decides the much narrower question as to what each party had a right to do, at that party’s own discretion, under existing laws and agree- ments. Cosmic justice not only makes judges roving second- guessers but surrounds prospective agreements with a penumbra of uncertainty, making such agreements harder to reach and carry out.
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The quest for cosmic justice via the judiciary—law as an “agent of change,” as it is often phrased — quietly repeals one of the foundations of the American revolution. It reduces a free people to a subject people, subject now to the edicts of unelected judges enforcing “evolving standards” and made more heedless by their exalted sense of moral superiority. It is one of the most dangerous of the many ways in which towering presumptions are a threat to the freedom of Americans.
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The first field in which the burden of proof began to shift to the defendant or respondent was anti-trust law. The most sweep- ing and dramatic shift was in civil rights law, which was fol- lowed by similar developments in environmental laws, tort liability, sexual harassment policies, and laws and policies applied to families. In all these areas, what was being sought was cosmic justice for some, with the usual disregard of the costs of this for others. These others include not only the particular losers, or classes of losers, in legal cases. It includes everyone in the society, for all are jeopardized by the ease with which bur- dens of proof can be shifted to the accused—which means not simply existing classes of criminal defendants or respondents in civil cases, but whatever additional classes may be created in future, based on a succession of legal precedents that have qui- etly repealed one of the basic principles of American constitu- tional law.
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The driving purpose of such legal developments has not been a desire to subvert the Constitution. Typically, it has been to pur- sue some aspect of cosmic justice. From this perspective, the subversion of the Constitution is an incidental by-product. Moreover, for each particular piece of legislation or any given legal case, the incremental damage done to the Constitution may seem to be slight. It is only in the aggregate that this pur- suit of cosmic justice “at all costs” becomes a dangerous destruc- tion of the rights that define and defend a free society.
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Those subject to the destruction of their rights—and hence the jeopardizing of others’ rights through legal precedent— have typically been some group easily demonized within the context of a vision of cosmic justice. Big business has histori- cally been a prime target, long before those accused of being racists, environmental polluters, child abusers, and other defen- dants who have become featured targets more recently. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 forbad “monopolization” —a term undefined except ex post in litigation—and the later
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Many anti-trust cases, especially those involving the Robinson-Patman Act, show a pattern that would later appear in the very different realm of affirmative action cases—reversals and re-reversals as the cases go up the chain of appeals, climaxed by 5 to 4 decisions in the Supreme Court. While those with a self-congratulatory bent could attribute this to the “complexity” of the issues and to their unwillingness to be “simplistic,” more fundamentally the problem is not complexity but contradic- tion—between statutory attempts to produce cosmic justice and the underlying principles of the Constitution, which are neces- sarily violated in these attempts.
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Freedom, however, has long been defined in radically differ- ent ways by those with different visions—and especially by those in quest of cosmic justice. The traditional conception of free- dom as exemptions from power has already been illustrated by such language in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights as “Congress shall make no law .. .” Note that the possible merits of these laws is not at issue. When it comes to freedom of religion, or of the press, for example, Congress shall make no law. Exemptions from any laws that Congress might want to make is, in effect, the . definition of these freedoms. By implication, power is the ability to restrict people’s options and freedom is an exemption from hav- ing one’s options restricted in such matters as religion or the expression of ideas.
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All this changes, however, within the framework of cosmic justice, where freedom and power are conceived in entirely dif- ferent terms. Among the many expressions of this very different view is that in R. H. Tawney’s Equality:
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ied in constitutional exemptions from government power. The much broader notion of modifying other people’s behavior includes power in the traditional sense but is by no means lim- ited to it. For example, when an athlete is offered a multimillion- dollar contract to play football, that may well modify any previous plans he had to become a dentist or an accountant. Few people would regard that as a restriction of his pre-existing options. On the contrary, it is adding an option that may prove to be far more attractive, though the athlete remains free to make any of the other choices that were available to him before. From these very different conceptions of freedom and power flow very different practical conclusions about political and eco- nomic issues. In traditional terms, he has lost no freedom to those with power. In cosmic terms, exemplified by Tawney’s definition, he has.
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From the cosmic conception of power flows the otherwise anomalous notion of “economic power” that has exercised an influence ranging from anti-trust policy to apologetics for com- munism. A “concentration of economic power,” as Tawney phrased it, serves as a justification for government restrictions on those businesses which attract a large proportion of the con- sumers of a given product. Thus a firm whose product is bought by two-thirds of the consumers of such products is said to “control” two-thirds of that market and of course to have “economic power” that government must contain or neutral- ize in some way.
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For the sake of following a particular example of the appli- cation of the concept of “economic power,” we may again look to Tawney, though he was in no sense unique or even unusual among those seeking cosmic justice. According to Tawney, “84 percent of the output” in the British coal industry of his time was “produced by 323 concerns employing over 1,000 workers each, and nearly one-fifth was produced by 57 firms” —all of this rep- resenting “a concentration of economic control.”3> Similar sta- tistics have been cited for innumerable industries in many countries, as if such retrospective statistics are proof of prospec- tive “control” of anything. Indeed, in any line of human endeavor, some x number of producers produce two-thirds, three-quarters, or whatever other percentage one chooses, of the total output.
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The relevance of all this here is that the cosmic perspective on the world which leads to such notions as “economic power” and “control” provides a rationale for an expansion of govern- ment power that does indeed reduce pre-existing options and thus constrict freedom.
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For the judiciary, vast expansions of the scope of federal power during the heady crusades of the New Deal—many of them fueled by notions of cosmic justice—were justified by the constitutional provision that Congress had the right to regulate “interstate commerce.” This provision became a blank check by which virtually anything that Congress wanted to regulate was simply called “interstate commerce.” In a landmark case involving federal regulation of agriculture, the Supreme Court tuled that a man who grew his own food in his own back yard was engaged in interstate commerce and thus was subject to fed- eral control. For decades, vast expansions of federal power were
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In politics, the great non sequitur of our time is that (1) things are not right and that (2) the government should make them right. Where right all too often means cosmic justice, trying to set things right means writing a blank check for a never-ending expansion of government power. That in turn means the quiet and piecemeal repeal of the American revolution and the free-
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THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice 1. Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 146. 2. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1976), pp. 115, 120, 355. 3. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978),
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Constitution of the United States, 146, 147, 151, 154, 164, 167, 170, 172, 173, 176, 179, 186, 189 First Amendment, 151 ’ Tenth Amendment, 179, 180, 181, 184, 186 Cosmic Justice and Injustice » (see also Justice, traditional), 1-48, 83, 84-85, 91, 100, 104, 127, 128, 131, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154, 155-56, 159, 160, 162, 164, 167, 171, 173, 175-84, 186 attraction of cosmic justice, 44, 48 cost, 8, 11, 27-29, 43 knowledge requirements, 13, 14-15, 16, 18, 21, 168, 169 meaning, 8-9, 10-11, 158 power requirements, 74, 131, 156, 157 quest for cosmic justice, 8, 12, 13, 15, 19, 40, 42, 85 versus traditional justice, 8-9, 15, 18, 42-43, 154-55, 171 Cosmos, 4, 5, 26, 45, 157, 158 Costs and justice, 6-7, 8, 9-10, 11, 27-39, 43, 45, 48, 77, 84, 91, 157 third parties, 7-8, 9, 12, 13, 19, 25, 28, 42, 85, 116 Crime, 6, 7, 8, 10, 19, 44, 47, 83, 85, 104, 137, 149-59, 171
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Japan, 26, 52-53, 61, 75, 77, 78, 106, 108, 112, 114 Jefferson, Thomas, 184 Jews, 37, 61, 65, 66, 128, 129, 169 Jiang Zemin, 119 Johnson, Lyndon B., 1-12 Johnson, Paul, 97 Judgment Day, 21, 22 Justice, vii, 4, 168-69, 170 anti-social, 10 categorical priority, 29-30 cosmic justice, vili, 11-12 definition, 1, 1 group justice and injustice, 5
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The Quest for Cosmic Justice shows how confused conceptions of justice end
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*“Tn this book, reflecting a lifetime of wide-ranging research and careful reflection, — Sowell makes us understand the difference between results and processes, — between ‘cosmic justice’ and traditional justice, between the rule of law and the power to do good. The ratio of insights to words in this book is remarkably high.”
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“In The Quest for Cosmic Justice Thomas Sowell once again displays his distinc- . tive combination of erudition, analytical power, and uncommon sense.” %
