Some sociologists argue that we have a deep intuitive sense that virtue should be rewarded and vice punished. There are two explanations for this. The first contends that our idea of justice as merit/desert is sociobiological. In other words, justice by merit has been reinforced and selected as a socially useful behavior through evolution. For example, organisms that did not adhere to meritocratic principles tended to have shorter social histories, being outcompeted by those who did.
A second explanation claims that humans love merit because of an innate, morally transcendent urge for “cosmic justice, which requires that the good should prosper in proportion to their virtue and the vicious suffer in proportion to their vice. This urge is closely tied to our cry for an omniscient and omnipotent Judge, which doles out said justice.
Taken together, both the scientific and the spiritual explanations of our value of merit make a strong argument in favor of. However, is it possible that other forces are at play which make this value so seemingly natural?
If we look closely, we can see that those who strongly favor merit are those who hold some degree of power. It need not rest on wealth but rather cultural/political dominance, although the former often go hand in hand.
Why does the value of merit benefit those in power?
Because it is a shorthand justification for their status. Even the Bible seems to agree that we can judge people by their fruits. That is, we conclude that those who have, must have done something to deserve it, and those who have not, haven’t. However, the inferential nature of post hoc assessments flaws or at least muddles this line of reasoning.
It is deeply suspicious to quantify something conceptual, such as effort, with something tangible, such as dollar bills. Otherwise, we should be able to transform every earnest thought, endeavor or feeling into immediate physical rewards all of the time, anywhere, and in any way we can think of.
However, since this is not the case we must conclude that something gets lost in translation. Like universal ethical egoists, those in power would always have us believe that they earned their position through genuine hard work or superiority of skill. This they do in order to keep those with less power from gaining more power so they can maintain their largely unearned status.
How, though? They do it by confusing us by what looks like genuine work when in fact they are embellishments at best and staged props at worst. They do not want those with less power to realize why they truly have less power, and why they never seem to be gaining more of it despite trying.
Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, argues that the self-made man is a Hollywood myth which is propagated much like religion as opium for the masses (2008, p. 18). It is there to keep people struggling towards empty promises and brittle self-esteem, while those who hold power can relax without being plagued by cognitive dissonance.
Figures such as Bill Gates or famous athletes often don’t get where they are by sheer, rugged individualism alone but because the environment they were born into cultivated the right ingredients. These can be social connections, learning experiences or the physical access to infrastructures for them to grow into the people they now are. Yes, there was effort on their part, but it is almost never (as we’d like to believe) proportional to the height they have reached.
Similarly, we can argue that those who live at the bottom of society have not done anything nearly vicious enough in proportion to their misery. This would explain why many adopted children from third world countries growing up with adoptive parents who have means and resources to provide them with educational opportunities and to expose them to certain sociocultural influences fare better, at least economically speaking, than had they grown up with their biological parents.
Did these children merit their improvement in life chances? What made them different from the boy or girl next to them who were not chosen by the foreign adoptive parents to be taken home from the orphanage? Perhaps they were especially cute? Then we could say their merit was dependent on their good looks. But that doesn’t require any effort, only genes.
So we could argue that attractive people deserve success while ugly people don’t. In real life, it is indeed often the case that attractive people are favored over the less attractive; in job interviews, dating adds, and our overall perception of someone’s personal goodness. Again, the point is, attractiveness is not something we earn through effort but rather a trait we are born with. This renders the argument that attractive people deserve to succeed moot.
It makes sense that a trait such as attractiveness does not count as “honest effort” in pursuit of a proportionate reward. But then skill certainly should. Those in power would have us believe that the honest acquisition and practice of a skill will get us anywhere, if only we work hard. However, this assumes that the playing field is equal, and that learning and opportunity are equally accessible to all. Again, this is not the case.
In conclusion, it’s not merely enough to be born intelligent, to learn as much as we can or to practice the right skill. It is not even the social connections or right opportunities alone that give us our big break. It is ultimately a case of whether we were already born into a privileged status that is most likely to decide whether we will achieve the amount of success many of us strive for.
This indicates that merit may not be a useful explanation but a way of justifying or pacifying us into a kind of rat-race complacency. Sounds contradictory at first, but that’s exactly what it is.
Life and success more closely resemble Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory than an evolutionary or spiritual gravitation towards justice, symmetry and proportion. It doesn’t mean value of merit is always beside the point, but rather that we have to look at it in context.
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