Christine Abigail L Tan writes:

Deeply embedded in the ideals of justice and fairness is the idea that we ought to get what we deserve. Deservingness is thus an intuitively compelling concept, because we want the world to be intelligible. If the good suffer and the wicked flourish, then the world not only becomes a painful place to live in, it also becomes a place of moral chaos. Even if the world is bountifully unjust, it remains a necessary illusion that people get what they deserve. We need to believe our actions matter if we are to generate the necessary motivation to pursue the things we want.

This is the ideal of meritocracy. At its core, this ideology holds that social and economic differences are justified when they reflect individual effort or talent. It fits well with our neoliberal free-market democracies, which present themselves as open systems of opportunity that reward those who compete successfully. Meritocracy implies that inequality is just and fair. Those who rise deserve to rise; those who fall behind are encouraged to try harder. We must each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

‘Meritocracy’ itself might be a relatively new word, dating back to Michael Young’s coinage in the 1950s, but long before neoliberalism another, much more ancient, philosophy justified inequality as the well-deserved consequence of individual effort: Confucianism. Examining where Confucianism goes wrong illuminates how we should challenge the powerful ideology of meritocracy. [Continue reading…]