Inferences about views | Law passage | Cosmic Justice
About this video
A reading-comprehension walkthrough of a passage question about Thomas Sowell's view of cosmic justice. The video works through the answer choices one by one, using the author's stated position in passage A to eliminate options that Sowell would reject, and settles on the choice about human law focusing on consequences of actions rather than the many factors that influence them.
You'll be able to
- explain what 'cosmic justice' means in the argument, as the video presents it.
- eliminate answer choices that contradict the author's stated position.
- justify the best answer by tying it to specific reasoning in the passage.
Key words
- Cosmic justice
- The idea of correcting for unmerited disadvantages so that outcomes are fair across people.
- Unmerited disadvantage
- A hardship a person did not earn, which some argue should be considered in judging their actions.
- Deterrent
- Something that discourages people from acting, such as the threat of punishment.
- Process of elimination
- Ruling out answer choices that conflict with the passage until one choice remains.
- Consequences
- The outcomes of human actions, which the correct answer says law should focus on.
Transcript
- [Narrator] Which one of the following is a view advanced by the author of passage A, with which the author of passage B would be most likely to agree? Okay, so the answer here is going to be something that Thomas Sowell would agree with. And because passage A was about articulating a part of Sowell's point of view on cosmic justice, it should be pretty easy to pick out.
But let's see what we have here. A, it is sometimes possible for the legal system to take unmerited disadvantages into account in rendering judgment on people and their actions. That sounds pretty good. Sowell was saying, yes there are those in the legal system that attempt to implement this kind of cosmic justice.
So A sounds pretty good, let's see what B has to say. Whether or not cosmic justice is an attainable ideal, human law should strive for it, because doing so produces more just legal outcomes. No, Sowell is against cosmic justice, so B is out. C, impartial legal processes are a better means of achieving cosmic justice than are efforts to address unmerited disadvantages directly.
So that's interesting, there are parts of this that are right. He definitely would say that impartial legal processes are a great means of rendering justice, but he does not want to achieve cosmic justice, or he doesn't believe it's achievable. And if people try to use cosmic justice, it runs the risk of the law not providing sufficient deterrents for people to murder each other.
So, Sowell would not agree with that. D, human law should be concerned with the consequences of human actions, not with the myriad of factors that influence human actions. Okay so D looks pretty promising also, because he was talking about consequences. That's the outputs the passage A was talking about.
And Sowell is also against using a myriad of factors to influence human actions. And our law should not concern itself with that. So D is looking good too. It looks like we're narrowing it down, we're gonna have a couple to look at in a second. E, human legal systems can in theory achieve cosmic justice by focusing upon factors that tend to mitigate punishment.
No, Sowell is basically arguing against cosmic justice, how we should not be attempting to achieve cosmic justice. E is wrong. So we're now just having to consider A and D. And when you look more closely at A, there definitely are reasons why A is wrong. It is sometimes possible for the legal system to take unmerited disadvantages.
So these unmerited disadvantages mentioned in passage B are these inputs that the author of passage A is saying we should not be considering. So it's not possible for us to take there is unmerited disadvantages into account, because it's just not fair. Passage A goes further to say, look, we shouldn't even try to implement cosmic justice because we can not know all these inputs and so we should not even try to take unmerited disadvantages into account.
So A is wrong, and D is definitely our answer.
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