4 ms·

Meritocracy is incompatible with justice. Either some people are better than others, and deserve more, or they aren't and they don't.

raxxorrax 6y ago
I disagree. Meritocracy is an euphemism for fairness for the vast majority of people valuing it. Is that incompatible with justice? It is not a value judgement of people. If you work harder, you earn more. Some don't even want to do that and are not lesser beings for it. freedom is incompatible with equity is a response on the same level, but there is much more truth in it.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  As explored in the original book [0], it is hypocritical to both succeed because of a meritocracy and also support the idea that the meritocracy is just. The underlying principle is that justice empathizes with everyone, not just those with merit, in determining a path forward. To quote the author, > Educational injustice enabled people to preserve their illusions, while inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality. To get a glimpse at true justice, please consider the following thought experiment, which leads to what I call "algorithmic justice." There is a traditional game that children play where there are two children and a cake. The first child cuts the cake, and the second child selects which piece goes to whom. Let us do the same, but more broadly. Take the resources of our society, the raw inputs and the processed goods and the man-hours of labor, and apportion them to each person as seems fair and just, by asking each person to apportion them amongst each other, and going to the iterated minimization of disagreement and regret. This is a game that many political ideologies have attempted, but they have all failed because they chose to take a shortcut and use some sort of heuristic rule for judging people. However, it turns out that people are too unique to be judged as a single collective group fairly by any single metric. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
  - raxxorrax 6y ago
    I don't take the term as serious as the author of the book, nor do I have political ambitions to implement it. I think it was a rug that appealed to fairness. It was pretty ugly, but that is another story. How the author formulates the critique is specifically not how it is understood by adherents from my experience. Not only for justice, imagine access for disabled people in public services like extra ramps or similar facilities which society provides. Do they have "merit" under natural law? Perhaps not. Does that mean adherents want to just ignore them? No, on the contrary. There are different a priori assumptions by people that like meritocracy and its critics. What about social justice? Which metric do you use here to judge people. By frequency of occurrence by immutable characteristics? You can take both terms to mean the exact same thing. Doesn't mean you cannot have two groups endlessly fighting about who is correct about it. It is not a political ideology. Maybe it is now, but that is more reactionary. But normally it would get some laughs if propped up that much. What it certainly never meant is that you somehow need to earn your keep to receive justice and be treated fairly. But I understand the critique if it is conceived this way. edit: We currently need to earn our keep in society for economic survival. I think working towards changing that is preferable.
david38 6y ago
Uhhh no. Meritocracy promotes justice. Better people become judges, not buddies. Meritocracy doesn’t mean “winners take all”. It means the best person for the job gets the job. If the best people for the job have the job, especially in gov by definition justice will prevail because people who know how to address injustice will have the job.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  By what specific evidence do you suggest that one person is "better" than another, or the "best [person] for the job"? Keep in mind that, historically, such lines of reasoning have not actually been used to seek merit, but to disenfranchise various minorities and underprivileged folk. Humans are broadly similar to each other, and minor athletic differences usually do not matter to job performance, so do we really want to structure our society around such trivialities?
  - jpd- 6y ago
    > By what specific evidence do you suggest that one person is "better" than another, or the "best [person] for the job"? Experience and/or accomplishments for the vast majority of jobs. Under what circumstances do you believe it is not possible to select among candidates based on merit?
    - Kednicma 6y ago
      Let's pick one real-world example: Organ transplants. Do we select candidate recipients based on their life experience and/or accomplishments? Nope, we consider [0]: * Blood type * Immune system mismatch * Organ size * Distance donated organ must travel * Urgency of donation The closest we come to considering life experience is in two time-related criteria: Children and adults are different (relates to organ size), and time spent on waitlists is taken into account (relates to urgency). Certainly, a merit-based organ transplant system is possible. In China, there are reports of (involuntary) organ harvesting from political and religious undesirables [2]; these people have been deemed meritless. China continues to work to deploy a single system for measuring merit, the Social Credit System [1]. For hiring and jobs, we might imagine hiring people based on skill sets and job duties; we would consider people based on their ability to carry out the tasks required of the position. Just like with organ transplants, this is a pragmatic approach, rather than one based on celebrity or subtlety. [0] https://unos.org/transplant/frequently-asked-questions/ https://unos.org/transplant/frequently-asked-questions/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
xondono 6y ago
I know that this is an appeal to wikipedias authority, but the “Justice” article starts with: > Justice, in its broadest sense is the principle that people receive that which they deserve Which contradicts pretty harshly with your concept of it. In fact, one may pretty much get to the opposite conclusion, Meritocracy is Justice.
- Kednicma 6y ago
  Let's keep appealing to Wikipedia. In "Myth of meritocracy" [0]: > Rising wealth disparity increasingly undermines faith in the existence of meritocracy, as beliefs in equal opportunity and social equality lose credibility among lower classes who recognize the preexisting reality of limited class mobility as a feature of the neoliberal version of capitalism. At the same time, the elite use their comparatively greater wealth, power, and influence to unequally benefit themselves and ensure their continued upper class status at the expense of lower classes, which further undermines beliefs in the existence of meritocracy. The myth of meritocracy has been identified by scholars as a tool of the elite of a society to uphold and justify the reproduction of existing economic, social, and political hierarchies. In "Equal opportunity" [1]: > Equality of opportunity is often seen as a major aspect of a meritocracy. One view was that equality of opportunity was more focused on what happens before the race begins while meritocracy is more focused on fairness at the competition stage. > There is general agreement that programs to bring about certain types of equality of opportunity can be difficult and that efforts to cause one result often have unintended consequences or cause other problems. > Efforts to achieve equal opportunity along one dimension can exacerbate unfairness in other dimensions. > Another difficulty is that it is hard for a society to bring substantive equality of opportunity to every type of position or industry. > The consensus view is that trying to measure equality of opportunity is difficult whether examining a single hiring decision or looking at groups over time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity

raxxorrax 6y ago

I disagree. Meritocracy is an euphemism for fairness for the vast majority of people valuing it. Is that incompatible with justice? It is not a value judgement of people. If you work harder, you earn more. Some don't even want to do that and are not lesser beings for it. freedom is incompatible with equity is a response on the same level, but there is much more truth in it.

Kednicma 6y ago
As explored in the original book [0], it is hypocritical to both succeed because of a meritocracy and also support the idea that the meritocracy is just. The underlying principle is that justice empathizes with everyone, not just those with merit, in determining a path forward. To quote the author, > Educational injustice enabled people to preserve their illusions, while inequality of opportunity fostered the myth of human equality. To get a glimpse at true justice, please consider the following thought experiment, which leads to what I call "algorithmic justice." There is a traditional game that children play where there are two children and a cake. The first child cuts the cake, and the second child selects which piece goes to whom. Let us do the same, but more broadly. Take the resources of our society, the raw inputs and the processed goods and the man-hours of labor, and apportion them to each person as seems fair and just, by asking each person to apportion them amongst each other, and going to the iterated minimization of disagreement and regret. This is a game that many political ideologies have attempted, but they have all failed because they chose to take a shortcut and use some sort of heuristic rule for judging people. However, it turns out that people are too unique to be judged as a single collective group fairly by any single metric. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  I don't take the term as serious as the author of the book, nor do I have political ambitions to implement it. I think it was a rug that appealed to fairness. It was pretty ugly, but that is another story. How the author formulates the critique is specifically not how it is understood by adherents from my experience. Not only for justice, imagine access for disabled people in public services like extra ramps or similar facilities which society provides. Do they have "merit" under natural law? Perhaps not. Does that mean adherents want to just ignore them? No, on the contrary. There are different a priori assumptions by people that like meritocracy and its critics. What about social justice? Which metric do you use here to judge people. By frequency of occurrence by immutable characteristics? You can take both terms to mean the exact same thing. Doesn't mean you cannot have two groups endlessly fighting about who is correct about it. It is not a political ideology. Maybe it is now, but that is more reactionary. But normally it would get some laughs if propped up that much. What it certainly never meant is that you somehow need to earn your keep to receive justice and be treated fairly. But I understand the critique if it is conceived this way. edit: We currently need to earn our keep in society for economic survival. I think working towards changing that is preferable.

david38 6y ago

Uhhh no. Meritocracy promotes justice. Better people become judges, not buddies. Meritocracy doesn’t mean “winners take all”. It means the best person for the job gets the job. If the best people for the job have the job, especially in gov by definition justice will prevail because people who know how to address injustice will have the job.

Kednicma 6y ago
By what specific evidence do you suggest that one person is "better" than another, or the "best [person] for the job"? Keep in mind that, historically, such lines of reasoning have not actually been used to seek merit, but to disenfranchise various minorities and underprivileged folk. Humans are broadly similar to each other, and minor athletic differences usually do not matter to job performance, so do we really want to structure our society around such trivialities?
- jpd- 6y ago
  > By what specific evidence do you suggest that one person is "better" than another, or the "best [person] for the job"? Experience and/or accomplishments for the vast majority of jobs. Under what circumstances do you believe it is not possible to select among candidates based on merit?
  - Kednicma 6y ago
    Let's pick one real-world example: Organ transplants. Do we select candidate recipients based on their life experience and/or accomplishments? Nope, we consider [0]: * Blood type * Immune system mismatch * Organ size * Distance donated organ must travel * Urgency of donation The closest we come to considering life experience is in two time-related criteria: Children and adults are different (relates to organ size), and time spent on waitlists is taken into account (relates to urgency). Certainly, a merit-based organ transplant system is possible. In China, there are reports of (involuntary) organ harvesting from political and religious undesirables [2]; these people have been deemed meritless. China continues to work to deploy a single system for measuring merit, the Social Credit System [1]. For hiring and jobs, we might imagine hiring people based on skill sets and job duties; we would consider people based on their ability to carry out the tasks required of the position. Just like with organ transplants, this is a pragmatic approach, rather than one based on celebrity or subtlety. [0] https://unos.org/transplant/frequently-asked-questions/ https://unos.org/transplant/frequently-asked-questions/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Gong_practitioners_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...

xondono 6y ago

I know that this is an appeal to wikipedias authority, but the “Justice” article starts with: > Justice, in its broadest sense is the principle that people receive that which they deserve Which contradicts pretty harshly with your concept of it. In fact, one may pretty much get to the opposite conclusion, Meritocracy is Justice.

Kednicma 6y ago
Let's keep appealing to Wikipedia. In "Myth of meritocracy" [0]: > Rising wealth disparity increasingly undermines faith in the existence of meritocracy, as beliefs in equal opportunity and social equality lose credibility among lower classes who recognize the preexisting reality of limited class mobility as a feature of the neoliberal version of capitalism. At the same time, the elite use their comparatively greater wealth, power, and influence to unequally benefit themselves and ensure their continued upper class status at the expense of lower classes, which further undermines beliefs in the existence of meritocracy. The myth of meritocracy has been identified by scholars as a tool of the elite of a society to uphold and justify the reproduction of existing economic, social, and political hierarchies. In "Equal opportunity" [1]: > Equality of opportunity is often seen as a major aspect of a meritocracy. One view was that equality of opportunity was more focused on what happens before the race begins while meritocracy is more focused on fairness at the competition stage. > There is general agreement that programs to bring about certain types of equality of opportunity can be difficult and that efforts to cause one result often have unintended consequences or cause other problems. > Efforts to achieve equal opportunity along one dimension can exacerbate unfairness in other dimensions. > Another difficulty is that it is hard for a society to bring substantive equality of opportunity to every type of position or industry. > The consensus view is that trying to measure equality of opportunity is difficult whether examining a single hiring decision or looking at groups over time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_opportunity