More Anti Michael Sandel Spleen
The Small Essay I wrote Months Ago I Talked About in My Last Post
Some Thoughts on Merit, Clearing Up Some Discrepancies By Jay Burkett
Recently I had the privilege of reading the enjoyable and enlightening The Aristocracy of Talent, How Meritocracy Made the Modern World, by The Economist writer, Adrian Wooldridge.
Afterward, I watched a Youtube video in which Harvard professor Michael Sandel (author of The Tyranny of Merit: What Became of the Common Good), and Wooldridge debated the case for the value of the merit-based system for allocating opportunity. Sandel made the admittedly strange but provocatively pathetic complaint that the moral case against meritocracy, as he sees it, fundamentally is that it confers on everyone who doesn’t succeed a stigma of moral failure, while attaching “hubris” to everyone who does succeed, dividing us into these two rival camps, the successful and the unsuccessful, and fostering a ruthless toxic kind of competition which Sandel thinks is anathema to the collective interest. And without recourse to Wooldridge’s argument, which is substantive and powerful enough, I would like to criticize Sandel’s position from my own point of view.
I think that Michael Sandel’s argument against a merit-based system for allocating opportunity is confused with what is more of a complaint or a grievance he nurses against an ethics of individual responsibility, or the so-called Protestant work ethic. What Sandel laments is the uniquely American ethics of self-reliance, rooted originally in the Puritan conceptions of deserving and undeserving poverty. There’s no denying that there is something inherently extreme and somewhat harmful, if not retrograde and outdated, about the idea of poverty as sin or moral failure. However, its Protestant underpinnings are not a sufficient argument against an ethics of personal responsibility. Self-reliance is only a prescriptive statement that you should strive to be independent; and we should treat one as independent and morally responsible for one’s own actions, even if one’s circumstances were inevitably a partial influence on one’s welfare; because otherwise, without such an ethics, we would be lacking the primary moral basis for living in a free society, to the extent that personal responsibility is a prerequisite for individual liberty. As Friedrich Hayek eloquently puts it in The Constitution of Liberty, “Though a man’s conviction that all he achieves is due solely to his exertions, skill and intelligence may be largely false, it is apt to have the most beneficial effects on his energy and circumspection. And if the smug pride of the successful is often intolerable and offensive, the belief that success depends wholly on him is probably the pragmatically most effective incentive to successful action; whereas the more a man indulges in the propensity to blame others or circumstances for his failures, the more disgruntled and ineffective he tends to become” (Hayek 145).
I don’t need to explain the difference then between a dogma that says you’re a sinner if you don’t succeed, and an ethics that says we must act as if we were individually responsible for what we do, if we value our freedom; which Sandel mixes up in his critique of merit. The case for merit on the other hand, rather than self-reliance, is somewhat different, although it does certainly tie in with it. For responsibility—as Sandel though inadvertently but correctly identifies —is the moral foundation of meritocracy, undergirding it. We might say responsibility and individual liberty are moral traditions of which meritocracy is an institutional/civil offshoot. But the case for merit and responsibility, respectively is neither exactly the same, nor are they mutually exclusive concepts.
The case for merit is only that a whole society benefits most when individuals are rewarded for marketing their abilities in an open society that rewards and depends on talent and skill. Meritocracy is defined as a system of equal opportunity by which talent is rewarded. To desire meritocracy, in this sense, is to desire that people have the opportunity to get rewarded for their abilities. It does not follow that everyone’s skill is going to get the same reward, or that people should have the same opportunity, or that one person’s merits are, or should be, socially equal to those of another’s. Society is going to assign each of our abilities different values, as it should. To say a merit based system is fair, because it gives us opportunities, is not to argue that merit is a one-size fits all shoe that should fit every person’s foot, without leaving anybody feeling excluded or that their merit isn’t valued enough. Merit is a social construct. Society is going to assign different abilities different values. In some cases, one may feel that their skill ought to matter more than another skill, and you may disagree in general with how society values certain goods and services. But that would only be an argument against what society values, not an argument against merit. The argument for merit is no more than the proposition that the world is open to people getting rewarded in some way for their skills. Skill is what most of us mean colloquially when we talk about merit, and it is an accurate definition, skill, talent, ability, aptitude. And it almost goes without saying, it would be impossible to reward people for their skills, without treating individuals ethically as individually responsible for how they employ their own individual talents. That is where our ethics of personal responsibility undergirds merit.
That being said, considering as it is more the ethics of self-reliance and its harsh overtones with its historical affiliation with the doctrine of original sin that Sandel disagrees with, I’m just going to go out on a limb and hypothesize that what Sandel specifically dislikes is what the academic left is fond of calling neoliberalism, with its intimations of deservingness since the Reagan-Thatcher era of privatization; “neoliberalism,” whose apparent moral deficit leftist academia has long been in the habit of disparaging, for lack of a better case against free markets, as an unequal and impersonal system of unbridled free enterprise, whose human cost, they like to argue, is vastly out of proportion to the wealth market society creates (i.e. soaring inequality). Left wing academics say that market society, with its ethics of personal responsibility (linked to market liberalization, financial deregulation, i.e. union disempowerment) is immoral, unjust and cruel. And I say this because in just about every leftist critique of neoliberalism I have ever heard, I have seen them make the fallacious identification of American self-reliance with historical puritan doctrinaire deservingness, and then they graft the idea that personal responsibility is zealous cruelty as a smear, onto any defense in favor of neoliberalism: which for them boils conveniently down to a dogmatic ideology of the “fetishization” of “unfettered” “self-regulating” global markets, whose uncontrolled financial speculation and multinational corporations kill domestic manufacturing, “uproot” people, destroy families, “devastate” the environment, “exploit” indigenous labor, “hollow out” local communities, etc., etc. We’ve all heard this a million times.
But more intriguingly, in his argument with Wooldridge, Sandel perhaps in another anticapitalist attempt to debunk merit but this time with its own medicine, he references Hayek, pointing out that “even Hayek” claimed there was no “moral” case for merit. But indeed, this is the most significant argument for merit, in my opinion (also Hayek’s). Because the fact that merit, similar to the market, is neutral to moral claims, makes it the most efficient and most egalitarian allocator of equal opportunity: because it doesn’t discriminate between individuals, for moral reasons. I think to the extent that Sandel argues that the moral case against merit, is 1, that its not moral, and 2, that it’s unequal, even though he doesn’t say what alternative he proposes, he is nevertheless suggesting at least that we ought to replace merit with a fairer, more equable system of allocating opportunity that is to say, a mechanism of distributive justice.
If that is what he is suggesting, then this arguably Marxist case against merit, would involve trying to create a more equable distribution through an inegalitarian non neutral means, because to replace merit with morality through distributive justice, would involve making the system partial, instituting one subjective morality or another to decide opportunity for all. And that is hardly a case against a merit based system. That is only a recipe for a “fairer” but discriminatory state-sponsored administrative inequality. Since merit is so closely aligned with skill, and since the left since Donald Trump have enjoyed blaming the overvaluation of skill on the decline of manufacturing jobs supposedly leading to his rise, the disturbing thing about Sandel’s revolt against merit is his implicit absolutely backwards desire to make our society’s valuation of skilled labor more inclusive—by destabilizing the ethics of responsibility that undergirds our system that rewards skill. And why? For what reason? Because this makes the unskilled feel bad, or overlooked? Would what he is suggesting that we lessen or outright replace our commitment to skill be really doing better for the “common good?” It’s hard to see how chucking our quite brilliant system of rewarding skill and brains would be better for the mythical “common good.” On the contrary as Wooldridge argues, we actually don’t have enough meritocracy (i.e. legacy admissions, affirmative action, barring Asian students from college at Sandel’s own Harvard University).
In defense of meritocracy in refutation of his two point criticism of it and neoliberalism, I will provide my own two point criticism of Sandel: 1. Michael Sandel has no insight into the pitfalls of efforts at distributive justice, unless Maoist China, Cuba and the Soviet union, etc., don’t count as examples disavowing it. But even more importantly for the current moment, 2. His criticism for its radicalism is dangerous to the merit-based system, because of its connection to the market—which has not just made us wealthy but ensured that individuals’ abilities are rewarded not by what a “fair” system from above arbitrarily commands, but what equal people in a market setting agree upon—and the market is fundamental to constitutional democracy, because it allows the constituents of a free society to set their own prices, which is to say our own standards, for what we value. To argue that merit is unfair, amounts only to flaunting one’s ignorance that individuals shouldn’t be free to choose what their own values are.