Thought for Today

Libertarians, which some have misaligned me with, believe that justice is based on the “libertarian rights of self-ownership and Lockean appropriation, expressed in laws that apply to everyone and do not discriminate between different classes of people.

However Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a proponent of what Thomas Sowell calls cosmic justice.

Sowell remarks: “However, unlike God at the dawn of Creation, we cannot simply say, “Let there be equality!” or “Let there be justice!” We must begin with the universe that we were born into and weigh the costs of making any specific change in it to achieve a specific end. We cannot simply ‘do something’ whenever we are morally indignant, while disdaining to consider the costs entailed. . . Cosmic justice is not simply a higher degree of traditional justice, it is a fundamentally different concept. Traditionally, justice or injustice is characteristic of a process. A defendant in a criminal case would be said to have received justice if the trial were conducted as it should be, under fair rules and with the judge and jury being impartial. After such a trial, it could be said that ‘justice was done’—regardless of whether the outcome was an acquittal or an execution. Conversely, if the trial were conducted in violation of the rules and with a judge or jury showing prejudice against the defendant, this would be considered an unfair or unjust trial—even if the prosecutor failed in the end to get enough jurors to vote to convict an innocent person. In short, traditional justice is about impartial processes rather than either results or prospects.”