… is from page 202 of Thomas Sowell’s 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed; it appears in a section of the book where Sowell criticizes what he calls “[t]he hubris of imagining that one can judge merit, as distinguished from judging behavior and performance”:
The case for rewarding performance is that we can do it, not that it is the same as rewarding merit. Likewise, holding individuals personally responsible for the consequences of their own actions is a social expedient for prospective control, not a cosmic retrospective moral judgment.