Book Review: Revised Reparations

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, who teaches philosophy at Georgetown University, has a very different view of justice from ours.We 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 races or classes of people.Our view is a version of what Thomas Sowell calls traditional justice.Táíwò, by contrast, is a proponent of what Sowell calls cosmic justice.Sowell (2000) explains: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.