Previous research has identified several coping strategies that people may use to restore psychological equanimity after being exposed to the suffering of an innocent person, including victim blaming, victim derogation, and helping / prosocial behavior. In this investigation, I proposed an alternative strategy for coping with just-world threats, the offsetting rationalization, in which people reinforce their belief that the world is just by selectively viewing undeserved good and bad events as balancing each other out in the lives of others. In three experiments, I sought to assess (1) whether people would consciously engage in offsetting rationalizations, and (2) whether engaging in offsetting rationalizations would reduce people’s need to use other strategies for coping with just-world threats. I found that participants were indeed willing to explicitly construe positive events experienced by victims as offsetting their misfortunes, with undeserved positive events possessing the greatest offsetting capacity (Experiment 1). However, contrary to predictions, participants’ use of other threat reduction strategies was not influenced by their ability to engage in an offsetting rationalization, with participants showing victims the same level of kindness (Experiment 2) and blaming victims to the same extent (Experiment 3) regardless of the type of event that preceded their misfortune. Although the current investigation provides insight into people’s reactions to co-occurring good and bad events in the lives of other people, the results of the three experiments reported here must be considered in the context of several important methodological limitations.