The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?

Comparing an aristocracy to a meritocracy is a useful exercise in examining the assumptions and desires of a particular society. The difference is the manner in which wealth is attained and retained. In an aristocratic society, being born into wealth would be preferable, but in a meritocratic society, there is a possibility of rising or falling based on one’s merits alone. The difference is largely one of mental perspective, as “meritocratic success brings a sense of achievement for having earned one’s place” (115), and yet a society composed of an aristocracy and serfdom would take away an enormous mental burden: “[Y]our life would be hard, but you would not be burdened by the thought that you were responsible for your subordinate position” (115). The downside of a meritocracy is that it is intrinsically morally arbitrary.

The paradox is that the current meritocracy has created a kind of liberal aristocracy, where the wealthy easily create and pass on their wealth to their heirs while the poor create wealth only rarely and with great difficulty. The two objections that need to be addressed are related to justice, and to the attitudes regarding success. The first objection “doubts that even a fully realized meritocracy, in which jobs and pay perfectly reflected people’s efforts and talents, would be a just society” (120), while the second doubts that even a technically fair meritocracy would fail to be deemed a good society on account of the values that meritocracy champions and instills.

On the one hand, a meritocracy allows for great freedom in mobility and choice of lifestyle and career, while also creating a sense of hope in the populace: If success is based on one’s talent and determination, then it is up to the individual to get ahead. In a meritocracy, one is free to do this. The problem with this simplistic view is that even one’s own talents and circumstances are often not based on the individual alone. One’s inborn talent is based purely on good luck (often genetic), one’s family circumstances that are (again) based on luck, and the fact that a society would happen to value and reward one’s particular skills is also based on factors completely outside of one’s control: “If our talents are gifts for which we are indebted—whether to the genetic lottery or to God—then it is a mistake and a conceit to assume we deserve the benefits that flow from them” (123-24).

In the face of this criticism, it remains to ask if there are any legitimate alternatives. Two alternatives seem to put themselves forward: “One might be called free-market liberalism, the other welfare state liberalism (or ‘egalitarian liberalism’)” (125). Free-market liberalism opposes government intervention in the markets and resists any extrinsic efforts to create a level playing field in the economic realm. The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek makes a distinction between merit and value that is important for this approach, distinguishing between what people might deserve (i.e., merit), and what people are willing to pay for and consume (i.e., the creation of value). In a liberal society such as this, one’s remuneration is based purely on value, and has nothing at all to do with what might be judged as an individual’s moral worth or merit.

In contrast to this is welfare state liberalism—endorsed, for instance, by John Rawls—that attempts to compensate for stark differences in class, finances, and innate ability: “Rawls calls this way of dealing with unequal talents ‘the difference principle’” (129), whereby the best and brightest are allowed to flourish, but those who fall behind are assisted in various ways to catch up. In this sense, Rawls is devoted to a conception of society as needing to bend towards a common good. As he states, “[W]e are indebted in various ways to the community that makes our success possible and therefore obligated to contribute to its common good” (130-31).

What unites these two contrasting views is their mutual rejection of merit as “the basis of justice” (132), denying the view that those who have achieved financial success are somehow more worthy or deserving than those at the bottom of the financial ladder. The split between merit and value is an important one, but what needs to be denied is that value is somehow of moral worth: “meeting market demand is not necessarily the same thing as making a truly valuable contribution to society” (138). An example is given comparing a high school chemistry teacher to a drug dealer: The drug dealer clearly provides more economic value if he makes 10 times the money that a teacher does, but that has nothing to do with the moral worth of his contribution to society.