The Quest for Cosmic Justice

by Thomas Sowell

  One of the many differences between human beings and God on Judgment Day is that God does not have to worry about what is going to happen the day after Judgment Day. Our decisions do not take place at the end of time, but rather in the midst of the on-going stream of time, so that what we do today affects how others will respond tomorrow and thereafter. History is full of examples of countries which made it difficult for individuals to acquire or retain great wealth in the marketplace—and which then found it difficult to attract or to hold the capital needed to raise the living standards of the masses.

  Conversely, places where money is easily made, easily repatriated, and lightly taxed have made phenomenal economic progress, even when they have had pathetically few natural resources—Hong Kong as a British colony and Singapore as an independent city-state being classic examples. It is by no means clear that most of those who earned great wealth in Hong Kong or Singapore did so solely, or even primarily, as a result of personal merit. But to drive out or discourage their capital and entrepreneurship through confiscatory policies would be to sacrifice the standard of living of millions of others, in order to produce income and wealth distribution statistics pleasing to that small number of intellectuals who follow such things.

  In short, two intractable obstacles stand in the way of rewarding merit: First and most fundamentally, we do not know how to do it. While we may be able to surmise from a few dramatic examples that personal merit need not correspond with reward, we have no generally applicable way to know how much of each individual’s success or failure was due to such windfall gains as innate ability, a favorable upbringing, family wealth, or simply being in the right place at the right time, and how much was due to such personal merits as hard work and sacrifice. Moreover, even the latter virtues are often to some extent a consequence of upbringing. But even if we could somehow miraculously acquire the omniscience to know all these things and how they interact in complex ways, we would still be left with the fact that changing rewards today changes incentives tomorrow—not just for those benefitting from unmerited good fortune, but for millions of others in the same society.

  Wishing to see a poor but meritorious man win a lottery is radically different from instituting government redistributive policies. A lottery creates no precedent, no system of legal entitlements, and no reason for millions of people to change their behavior in ways that may prove to be detrimental to society as a whole. Nor does a lottery require vast amounts of knowledge about individuals, since everyone knows that it is just a matter of luck. Private charity is likewise neither precedential nor a basis on which millions of people can depend for support for a changed lifestyle of avoiding work and living off others.

  Merit justifications for income and wealth differences are also fundamentally different from productivity justifications, even though the two are often confused. Someone with an inborn knack for mathematics or music may be just as productive as someone who was born with lesser talents in these fields and who had to work very hard to achieve the same level of proficiency. However, we reward productivity rather than merit, for the perfectly valid reason that we know how to do it. Moreover, since rewards represent not merely retrospective judgments but prospective incentives as well, a society can become more productive by rewarding productivity, whether by encouraging some to work hard to achieve such productivity or by encouraging others to step forward to reveal and apply their existing productivity.

  The incentive effects of rewarding productivity operate in other ways as well. While the existing practitioners in a given field may be adequately (or even excessively) rewarded for their performance level, there may nevertheless be a case to be made for raising salaries in a particular field, in order to attract a higher caliber of person, capable of a higher level of performance, than the current norm in that field. This argument might be made for school teachers but it applies even more so to politicians and judges. Yet people who are preoccupied with merit are highly susceptible to demagogues who denounce the idea of paying politicians, for example, more money that they clearly do not deserve, in view of their current dismal performances. To get beyond this demagoguery requires getting beyond the idea of considering pay solely from the standpoint of retrospective reward for merit and seeing it from the standpoint of prospective incentives for better performances from new people.

  Pay for productivity, rather than merit, encourages better performances in yet another way. In a constantly developing economy, new and better ways of accomplishing various tasks mean that obsolescence is continually forcing older products and older methods of production out of the economy. In other words, equally meritorious people may receive very different rewards, simply because one group happens to be in a declining industry or using obsolete technology, while another happens to be in a rising industry or using advanced technology. These are not zero-sum games, however. Society as a whole has more prosperity when it is more productive. Put differently, the injustice of such unmerited rewards can be corrected only at the cost of creating an injustice to millions of others, who can become needlessly poorer, or fail to rise to the level of prosperity that existing technology and resources would permit.

  An even more serious injustice can occur if government officials are given greater powers, in order to have them create “social justice,” for once the powers have been given, they can be used to create despotism instead—as has happened in the French, Bolshevik, and other revolutions, for example.

  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 cosmic justice or traditional justice. Even the most degenerate member of the underclass may in 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.

  Even if his brothers and sisters, raised under the same roof, turned out well, who can be certain that some other combination of circumstances—whether gentler treatment or stricter discipline—might not have turned him around before it was too late? But, from the standpoint of traditional justice, the question is entirely different: Failing to know specifically how particular individuals could have been prevented from becoming dangers to others, especially when their siblings came out of the same home with a sense of decency, are we better off to pretend to know how to fine-tune children’s upbringing to this degree or instead to put individuals on notice that certain violations of other people’s rights will subject the violators to an array of punishments?

  Again, if we were creating our own cosmos, surely we would not wish to have in it some individuals so impervious to decent influences that they could turn out to be menaces to society and disgraces to their families. But, given that we must cope with a universe that was not tailor-made to our desires, the question becomes whether disgrace itself may not be a useful instrument of social control, providing an incentive for families to raise their children to the best of their abilities and to remonstrate with those who have gone astray, in hopes that some residual conscience may restrain them from tarnishing the good name of those who have been closest to them?

  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 relatives. 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.

  The concept of merit adds insult to misfortune and arrogance to achievement. In an era when even lower-income members of Western societies seldom suffer hunger or physical deprivation, nevertheless the concept of merit provides them with grounds to fear and resent the disdain of others—whether that disdain is real or imagined
. Where the widely varying fortunes of individuals and groups are seen as consequences of innumerable and ever-changing cross-currents, resulting differences in amenities should not provoke the same bitterness as in times and places where hunger, cold, and disease were the consequences of being less fortunate. Yet the concept of merit and the quest for cosmic justice can generate bitterness over differences that are far less consequential in themselves. It is one thing to be bitter because one cannot feed one’s children and something very different to be resentful because one cannot afford designer jeans or expensive watches that keep no better time than cheap watches.

  The Costs of Justice

  With justice, as with equality, the question is not whether more is better, but whether it is better at all costs. We need to consider what those who believe in the vision of cosmic justice seldom want to consider—the nature of those costs and how they change the very nature of justice itself.

  There are so many very different conceptions of justice that we need to begin with some examples of things that most of us can readily agree are unjust. Primogeniture—the practice of leaving an estate entirely to the eldest son—is something that most of us today would consider unjust to the other children. Arbitrarily selecting the ruler of a nation by a similar principle would likewise be widely objected to on moral grounds, among other objections to monarchy.

  The purpose of primogeniture was of course to keep an estate intact from generation to generation. The point was not simply to make a given sum of wealth in one individual’s hands larger than it would be if the land were shared. The point was to make the total wealth available to the family as a whole larger than it would have been under equal inheritance, where it would have been broken up into smaller and smaller pieces with the succeeding generations—creating economic inefficiencies that reduce the total value of the fragmented estate. Primogeniture relied on family ties and a sense of duty to guide the eldest son in looking out for his younger siblings.

  Land was often worth more when it could be farmed in one piece than the sum total of smaller separate pieces after being subdivided. There are what economists call “economies of scale” in production and these can be lost as land is fragmented over time by being repeatedly divided equally among heirs. The poverty in a number of countries has been attributed to the fact that there are minute landholdings in those countries,20 with a given farmer often having several of these tiny plots—inherited from different family branches—located at some distance from one another, requiring his working day to be similarly broken up and time lost in transit from one place to another. In short, cosmic justice for heirs can mean unnecessary poverty for society as a whole.

  This by itself does not necessarily justify primogeniture. It simply says that the costs of achieving justice matter. Another way of saying the same thing is that “justice at all costs” is not justice. What, after all, is an injustice but the arbitrary imposition of a cost—whether economic, psychic, or other—on an innocent person? And if correcting this injustice imposes another arbitrary cost on another innocent person, is that not also an injustice? In the world of today, where most wealth is no longer in land but in financial assets which can be divided among heirs without such high costs, a very different situation exists, but this is not to say that primogeniture, when and where it existed in a different world, was without any rational or moral foundation.

  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 would probably prefer it even if we suspected that the most selfish and ruthless of those on board would probably end up with the life-preservers.

  Even in less urgent circumstances, a similar principle applies. Imagine that Professor Rawls has arranged an important and remunerative lecture tour in Europe, only to discover on the eve of his departure date from America that (1) an unjust local tax assessment of $100 has been made against him, that (2) he has documents which can prove conclusively that he owes no such tax, and that (3) the time limits within which he is legally allowed to challenge the assessment are such that he would have to cancel his European lecture tour in order to achieve the just result to which he is entitled. Does anyone imagine that Professor Rawls would cancel his lecture tour, rather than pay the unjust tax? More to the point, if he did cancel the tour in order to fight that tax, would we regard him as a rational man of high principle or as a doctrinaire, a moral exhibitionist, or an egomaniac?

  Adam Smith and John Rawls each said that justice was the prime virtue of a society, and yet they said it in such different senses that they meant nearly opposite things. To Smith, it was essential for the very existence and survival of any society that there be some predictable order, with some degree of moral principle, so that people could pursue their lives with their minds at peace, and not destroy each other and the whole social order with unremitting strife over the distribution of financial or other benefits. To Rawls, in any society that is advanced beyond a certain minimum of physical requirements, more justice was categorically more important than more of any other benefit—more important than additional material progress, artistic achievement, or personal or national safety. In short, for Smith a certain measure of justice was a prerequisite for social survival but, beyond that point, justice was simply one among many social and individual benefits to be weighed against one another. By contrast, Rawls’ justice remained the over-riding benefit in any society that could be considered civilized.

  Precisely because we are not used to deciding categorically whether it is better or worse to have justice, it is deceptively easy to glide into the Rawlsian position that more justice is always better. Indeed, what makes Rawls’ conception of justice significant beyond the ranks of professional philosophers is that he systematically articulated a conception and a vision that already formed the underlying foundation of much legal theory and social policy.

  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 military 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 having been unjust to Germany—which then became for them a reason to be tolerant of Hitler’s policies and actions, as the Nazi regime began a massive military buildup, in preparation for wars of aggression.

  Looking back at events over which no one now had any control distracted attention from the urgent need to build offsetting military power to deter a future war that would dwarf in its horrors 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.

  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.”21 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 contemporary individuals and groups, but also group abstractions extending over generations, or even centuries.

  A similar approach is found in the United States today, where issues of group “reparations” have been raised—reparations to blacks for slavery or to the indigenous American Indian population for the dispossession of their ancestors and the collateral damage that went with it. Here again, the issue encompasses what can be called inter-temporal group abstractions, rather than simply flesh-and-blood contemporaries. Seldom is the claim made that black Americans alive at this moment are worse off than if their ancestors had been left in Africa. Any attempt to make that case with statistics on income, life expectancy, or numerous other variables would collapse like a house of cards. Ultimately, of course, what matters are not such objective data but how the individuals involved feel and react. Here no one can say—or rather, those who choose to make ringing denunciations cannot be conclusively contradicted by objective evidence, since objective evidence is irrelevant to how they feel. However, it may be worth noting that the number of contemporary black Americans who have immigrated to Africa does not begin to approach the number of contemporary Africans who have immigrated to the United States.

  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 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. We can only make our choices among alternatives actually available, and rectifying the past is not one of those options.