Monday, 28 September 2009

What's Wrong With Meritocracy?

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2009/09/whats-wrong-with-meritocracy.html
Meritocracy means that those who deserve to, succeed, and those who succeed are
those who deserve to. What could possibly be fairer than that? While it seems ea
sy to agree that a functioning and successful society should endorse meritocracy
to some extent, a society based on merit alone would not only be impossible to
achieve - it's a conception of ideal justice after all - but also likely become
more awful the more it resembled that ideal.
What is a meritocracy? It would seem to require the interaction of 3 distinct co
mponents - personal endowments (such as native intelligence, rude health, social
opportunities, etc); personal moral character (those virtues such as self-disci
pline, effort, ambition that we want to 'reward'); and a socio-economic structur
e that reflects some agreed standards of merit so that people who do 'good work'
(scientists and doctors, perhaps?) are encouraged and rewarded.
Note immediately that these components are harder to separate than one would lik
e. Personal endowments are always conflated with individual virtues: you can't d
o good work just by good intentions - you also have to have the position and res
ources (including resources provided by others such as their education, honesty,
and active assistance) to act effectively. That is why John Rawls, the giant of
20th Century political philosophy, definitively rejected distribution on the ba
sis of personal merit in his Theory of Justice.
Nor can objective standards be identified completely independently from social n
orms, for two reasons. Firstly, in the absence of a perfect moral theory, societ
y can only vaguely agree on what counts as meritorious: individuals' own ranking
s of deserving success will likely be incomplete and different from each other,
and society's aggregate valuation will then necessarily be limited to the areas
of intersection. (Further agreement would have to be political, perhaps ideally
with some kind of public reasoning and decision procedure, but that would still
be incomplete.) So 'objectivity' must be replaced by partial inter-subjective ag
reement even on such basic issues as whether fairness or efficiency are most imp
ortant. Secondly, any socio-economic structure must have at least one other goal
besides rewarding merit - sustaining and reproducing itself. And this will lead
to inefficiencies (or 'injustices', since they are deviations from ideal merito
cracy).
Some (controversial) solutions.
1) Those concerned with fairness often try to separate moral character from pers
onal endowments by emphasising the equalisation of 'natural luck': everyone shou
ld have a level playing field to start with in that talents and opportunities mu
st be equally, or at least equally randomly distributed if we are to claim that
individuals deserve any credit for their achievements (i.e. for their effort, no
t their luck). But note that this vision of a meritocratic society would exhibit
no fixed pattern in achievement, since it requires quite redistributive state p
olicies: taking away some of the 'just' rewards of the successful to protect, at
the least, the equality of opportunity of future generations by giving children
the resources for an equal chance at succeeding in life.
Those concerned with efficiency argue that the point of meritocracy is not to gi
ve everyone the chance to be good, but to maximise the total amount of good work
that gets done. They claim that the definition of merit should therefore be bas
ed on relative productivity, so that to those who are best able to convert resou
rces into wealth, more should be given. And to those who are least able to gener
ate wealth, for example due to disability or poorer education, even less should
be given.

2) Market capitalism is sometimes proposed as a solution to the social valuation

and sustainability problems: what counts as merit and what kind of reward (and
how much) it should get. The idea is that free markets naturally produce supply
and demand equilibria at prices that reflect society's (aggregate) demand for, s
ay teachers and vets, and we can read off the right answer about how important t
hings are to society according to its members' willingness to buy them. No perfe
ct and universally accepted moral theory is required! But this seems problematic
:i) markets often show demand for non-socially beneficial things (like twinkies o
r pornography) which we don't normally want to say are 'meritorious';
ii) many valuable things are not traded in the market, but we'd still want them
rewarded (like parents' care for their children);
iii) in any case there is no such thing as 'the market' outside specific and con
tingent socio-institutional settings, there is only a disembodied 'logic of the
market': self-interested prudence. The extent to which economically efficient in
dividual prudence will coincide with or lead to the morally efficient outcome of
meritocracy depends on how the economic structures we have, or choose to have,
channel that prudence;
iv) assigning marginal value to an individual's marginal productivity is difficu
lt for goods produced by teams (e.g. within firms and institutions). If a group
of people put on blue shirts and beat another group at basketball, which one of
them won the game and should get the reward?
v) defining merit merely as economic success, even if possible, seems to miss th
e point. It's like defining 'fitness' with the pat phrase, 'survival of the fitt
est' and then pointing to the ones that survive. But that simply reduces 'fitnes
s' to survival and begs the question, why should fitness be defined that way?
Markets therefore offer no real escape from the problem of moral evaluation of w
hat and how society should reward.
So a pure meritocracy doesn't seem possible. But the ideal of meritocracy can st
ill cause harm, if taken beyond such unarguable principles as giving a job to th
e most qualified person (other things, including the fairness of the interview p
rocess, being equal). Meritocracy goes wrong because it stretches morality beyon
d its limits either by trying to change the world to fit a theory (crazy), or by
assuming that the world is already perfectly meritocratic (stupid). In the form
er, a single moral theory is politically imposed on a whole society, which is al
ways accompanied by a decreased respect for individual moral responsibility (see
Communist Cuba and the Islamic Republic of Iran for object examples). In the la
tter, people may believe that a society is in fact meritocratic despite its impo
ssibility (as in an extreme version of the 'American Dream'), so that losers wil
l see themselves (and be seen as) thoroughly deserving of their moral failure; w
hile the successful refuse to help because they believe the meritocratic society
's perfect functioning already answers all moral claims, and since they thorough
ly deserve everything they have, why should they give any of it up to the undese
rving?
All in all a society fully committed to meritocracy seems a thoroughly unpleasan
t prospect. It conceives of society as a race, not as our shared home. I much pr
efer what I call 'mediocracy', in which we all muddle along trying to do our bes
t, a best that includes helping those who can't run as fast or who trip up along
the way.