Letting the Chips Fall Where they May

I think Sowell’s view of “letting the chips fall where they may” is accurate but could use some qualifying so as not to sound anarchistic. Sowell would argue for a system of justice that has rules/laws that are based on time-tested structures and empirical evidence that are applied equally to everyone.

In his book “The Quest for Cosmic Justice” he differentiates between two views of justice: Traditional justice, which places the individual at the locus/end of value and applies standards equally to everyone. And Cosmic justice is concerned with equalizing the prospects of everyone. Rawls might call the former “fair equality of opportunity” and the latter “formal ‘genuine’ equality of opportunity.” Cosmic justice is “genuine” according to Rawls because according to him “undeserved inequalities call for redress.” On the traditional view, McGwire   Sowell notes “If you apply the same rules and standards to everyone in baseball, Mark McGwire is going to hit 70 home runs and there are going to be other people who spend an entire career who will never hit 70 home runs, including people in the Hall of Fame like Luke Appling, who twice won the batting championship.

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The cosmic view, on the other hand, attempts to level the playing field. Fairness is only possible if both sides have the same prospect of winning. Sowell notes that cosmic justice is what some might call “social justice,” but those people are “unduly modest” because they are trying to correct not only the inequities they see in society, they are trying to correct the oversights of God or the defects of the cosmos.

You said, “I don’t think that it’s either/or: either we reject luck, collective responsibility, communal agency formation, whatever, or we reject individual responsibility and agency.” My concern isn’t whether we accept or reject luck, it’s how we go about “redressing” luck. On traditional justice it’s simple: You on,merely treat everyone the same. Cosmic justice must be tailored to each case. It’s complex. It requires a much larger amount of government power. Someone must have the power to “redress.” A third party must intervene to determine if the outcomes and prospects are right. You also said “Justice, in my limited view, is bound up with the ends, the telos, of the thing’s justice, pertains to, and, as such, its implementation is not either neutral or primarily concerned to promote freedom, choice, or consent…” and went on to connect justice with “promoting virtue.” I think this would fall under the category of “cosmic justice.” In an earlier book Sowell writes, “A Conflict of Visions”, he distinguishes between two distinct intuitions that prompt our conceptions of justice. The “constrained vision” (or what Steven Pinker later refers to as the “tragic vision”), and the “unconstrained vision” (pinker calls “utopian vision”).

The unconstrained vision ultimately believes that man is morally perfectible. Because of this, they believe that there exist some people who are further along the path of moral development, have overcome self-interest and are immune to the influence of power, and therefore can act as surrogate decision-makers for the rest of society. Those favoring cosmic justice are motivated by an unconstrained vision. The constrained vision, however, believes compromise is essential because there are no ideal solutions, only trade-offs. Ultimately, the constrained vision demands checks and balances and refuses to accept that all people could put aside their innate self-interest. Those favoring traditional justice are motivated by the constrained vision. You said, “I concede that a general kind of approach like this has had actual consequences that ‘have too often been written on the pages of history in blood.’ But what follows from this? Not much, I think. For if that’s the measure by which we determine the validity of some approach, then it would seem modern liberal individualism fares a little better.” You’re correct that there has been “blood” under both approaches.

What follows, however, is that under traditional justice the blood isn’t contingent on, the system. Again, if the system is properly instantiated, the individual is the end/telos of the system. Under cosmic justice, however, the blood is a direct consequence of the system. Sowell notes that If some ideal is the ultimate aim/telos of justice, then “collateral damage is merely the price of moving forward on the road to perfection.” In a chapter called “The Tyranny of Vision” Sowell states that Communists didn’t set out to create gulags, secret police, and territorial aggrandizement. They set out to seek social justice. But if an idea (rather than an individual) is the ultimate good, then one can justify bloody means to achieve that goal. You may even be morally required to use decimating means if someone/something threatens your goal, and you can do it under the guise of compassion and justice. This is why Jonathan Haidt states “the unconstrained vision, I believe, has the worst track record in the history of ideas.”