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For the last several decades, the language of merit has dominated public discourse, with little recognition of the downside. Even in the face of deep… - Michael Sandel
" "For the last several decades, the language of merit has dominated public discourse, with little recognition of the downside. Even in the face of deepening inequality, the rhetoric of rising has provided, for mainstream parties of the center-left and center-right, the primary language of moral progress and political improvement. “Those who work hard and play by the rules should be able to rise as far as their talents will take them.” Meritocratic elites had become so accustomed to intoning this mantra that they failed to notice it was losing its capacity to inspire. Tone-deaf to the mounting resentments of those who had not shared in the bounty of globalization, they missed the mood of discontent. The populist backlash caught them by surprise. They did not see the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they were offering.
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About Michael Sandel
Michael Joseph Sandel (born 5 March 1953) is an American political philosopher and a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for the Harvard course "Justice", and for his critique of John Rawls' A Theory of Justice in his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982).
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Michael J. Sandel
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Michael Joseph Sandel
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Where the self is conceived as prior to its ends, independent of the roles it may occupy at any given time, reputation cannot be a matter of honor in the traditional sense. For the unencumbered self, not honor but dignity is the basis of respect―the dignity that consists in the capacity of persons as autonomous agents to choose their ends for themselves. Unlike honor, which ties respect for persons to the roles they inhabit, dignity resides in a self antecedent to social institutions, and so is invulnerable to injury by insult alone. For selves such as these, reputation matters, not intrinsically, as a matter of honor, but only instrumentally, as a business asset for example.
Despite their differences, both Hayek and Rawls reject the idea that economic rewards should reflect what people deserve. In doing so, they acknowledge that they are challenging conventional wisdom. The notion that justice means giving people what they deserve seems deeply embedded in untutored common opinion. Rawls notes the “tendency for common sense to suppose” that income and wealth should be distributed according to moral desert, and Hayek admits that his renunciation of merit “may appear at first so strange and even shocking” that he must “ask the reader to suspend judgment” until he can explain.
But even as free-market liberalism and welfare state liberalism set the terms of public discourse over the past half century, they did not dislodge the widely held conviction that what people earn should reflect what they deserve. To the contrary, during those decades, meritocratic attitudes toward success tightened their hold, even as mobility stalled and inequality deepened.
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Luck egalitarianism defends inequalities that arise from effort and choice. This highlights a point of convergence with free-market liberalism. Both emphasize personal responsibility and make the community’s obligation to help the needy conditional on showing that their neediness is no fault of their own.
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