by Phil Parvin
A second sort of reason why we might think of people as members of groups and not as individuals is if, as we have said, we are taking account of the fact that a particular group has suffered from oppression in the past. Past oppression or discrimination may still have an effect in the present. Even if a group is not currently being discriminated against, it may be the case that past discrimination disadvantages current members of the group.
For example, imagine if black people have been discriminated against in the past, as they were openly and explicitly under segregated schooling in the USA which persisted in many states until the 1960s. Imagine that, for the sake of argument, there is currently no racial discrimination in schooling. It might still follow that this generation is disadvantaged by the past discrimination. If the parents of the current generation of schoolchildren received relatively poor schooling, they may be less able to help the current generation with homework, for example, and this might have a knock-on effect for the achievements of the current generation. Or, parents who had a very negative experience of schooling under segregation might be disinclined to encourage their children to continue with schooling, or might show their children by example that their lives have not been based on school success. If this is the case, it seems that children of the current generation are suffering from the discrimination suffered by their parents, even if that discrimination no longer persists. So, we might think that positive discrimination is justified in order to break the generational cycle of disadvantage. Perhaps we need to provide extra resources to encourage black children to continue with their education if their parents are not doing so, or perhaps we need to make allowances if black children do less well than white children because their parents are less able to help with homework and so on.
Of course, the fact that the parents in our example suffered from discrimination in their schooling does not necessarily mean that they will be less able to help their children with homework, or will be less inclined to encourage their children to continue with their schooling. Individuals can overcome discrimination, and people whose schooling was relatively poor can still achieve extremely high levels of academic and career success. This fact leads some opponents of positive discrimination to argue that it treats people unequally by, ironically, failing to respect those whom it is trying to help. Opponents often argue that positive discrimination is harmful because it implies that individuals only received their job, or place in university, or whatever, because they are members of a particular group. Hence you hear people arguing that women-only shortlists actually harm women because they imply that women are not good enough to be selected as MPs without help, or that positive discrimination for ethnic minorities implies that someone only got a place at university because they are black. If we really want to treat people equally and have true equality of opportunity, such philosophers argue, we must apply the same standards to all and allow women and black people to succeed on their own merits. Positive discrimination and equality, this objection goes, are incompatible.
Equality of opportunity as a meritocracy
Another way of understanding equality of opportunity is as meritocracy. This is the idea that positions of advantage such as jobs should be allocated on the basis of relevant competences and, importantly, that all individuals should have an equal opportunity to develop those competences. Meritocracy thus balances a concern for a fair society (defined as one in which no one is held back by factors over which they had no control) and individual responsibility: if the state implements public policies which genuinely succeed in giving everyone a fair and equal start in life, then any disadvantages will be a result of choices that individuals have made.
Meritocracy thus rewards talent and effort, while removing the barriers to success over which individuals have no control. If people do not succeed in a meritocracy, its advocates argue, it is because they chose not to, or did not try hard enough, rather than because they came from a poor family, or from a low socio-economic position. The point of equality of opportunity understood in terms of meritocracy is to eliminate those arbitrary factors which hold people back and to reward those who work hard and develop their talents.
‘As a nation we are wasting too much of the talents of too many of the people. Our mission […] must be this: to break down the barriers that hold people back, to create real upward mobility, a society that is open and genuinely based on merit and the equal worth of all.’
Tony Blair, The Sunday Times, 7 April 2002
Meritocracy has become very popular across the political spectrum. Its defenders (which include Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and David Cameron) argue that it aids social mobility. All individuals are given the resources they need to transcend the socio-economic conditions into which they were born. In a meritocratic society, you will not be hampered by the kind of generationally or historically entrenched structures of disadvantage that we mentioned earlier (in cases like that of black people’s exclusion from public education, for example). The fact that your parents were poor, for example, or that you were born into a low socio-economic status will not, in a meritocratic society, negatively constrain your life-chances. This is because public policy in such a society will be focused on negating the importance of these factors: a programme of state-funded education, training initiatives, progressive employment rules and similar measures will remove those entrenched and generational forms of disadvantage which can deny the worst-off the opportunities to succeed on a level playing field with those who have been born into more favourable circumstances. Furthermore, as jobs are allocated on the basis of merit rather than the benefits derived from social class and privilege (such as family contacts, friendships and so on), meritocracy requires that everyone spend time and effort developing their skills. This, defenders argue, is good for the individual, and for society.
Spotlight: Inequality and the UK political elite
To date, there have been 52 UK Prime Ministers: 38 of these studied at either Oxford or Cambridge (not including Nick Clegg, who also studied at Cambridge). 51 were men. Of those 51 men, 40 attended private school. Half of those (19) attended the same private school (Eton). Eton’s annual fee for the year 2010–2011 was just under £30,000. The average annual salary in the UK, before tax, that same year was just under £26,000.
Meritocracy is thus an alternative solution to the entrenched forms of disadvantage addressed by positive discrimination. However, opponents have raised a number of concerns.
1 It forces people to develop certain kinds of skills at the expense of others
2 It is epistemologically incoherent and, consequently, politically dangerous
3 It wrongly assumes that people deserve the fruits of their talents.
Iris Marion Young’s idea of the ‘myth of merit’ is discussed in a separate section. Here we will look at each of the above objections to meritocracy in turn.
‘I have been sadly disappointed by my 1958 book, The Rise of the Meritocracy. I coined a word which has gone into general circulation, especially in the United States, and most recently found a prominent place in the speeches of Mr Blair.
The book was a satire meant to be a warning (which needless to say has not been heeded) against what might happen to Britain between 1958 and the imagined final revolt against the meritocracy in 2033. Much that was predicted has already come about. It is highly unlikely the prime minister has read the book, but he has caught on to the word without realizing the dangers of what he is advocating.’
Michael Young, ‘Down with Meritocracy’, The Guardian, Friday, 29 June 2001
IT FORCES PEOPLE TO DEVELOP CERTAIN KINDS OF SKILLS AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS
Equality of opportunity as meritocracy encourages people to develop their skills unequally. It will be more efficient for an individual to develop only those skills which she is best at, or only those skills which are required for and recognized in the job market. This means that some skills (especially those not highly valued by a capitalist economy) might go undevelop
ed, and individuals may not develop a wide range of skills. In particular, there may be some skills which are valuable to society but which the job market gives individuals little incentive to develop, such as empathy or kindness (see, for example, Barry 2005).
IT IS EPISTEMOLOGICALLY INCOHERENT AND, CONSEQUENTLY, POLITICALLY DANGEROUS
A government committed to establishing a meritocracy is concerned to establish a level playing field among all members of society by sweeping away those arbitrary and unfair sources of disadvantage which hold people back in their pursuit of success. But how do we know, with certainty, when this level playing field has been achieved? How are we to know when we have established a meritocracy? How many years need to have gone by before we can say with certainty that the current generation of black children are free from the debilitating effects of segregation in public schooling? And what needs to have happened during those years? How can we state with certainty that society is no longer sexist or homophobic?
Philosophically, it is not clear that a precise answer to these questions is possible. Politically, it is just as unlikely that any stable consensus will prevail, given the often intense disagreement that exists regarding these matters among those on the Right, Left and Centre of the political spectrum. Many libertarians, for example, would describe themselves as defenders of meritocracy and would base their defence of the free market on exactly this principle. Only the free market, they might say, frees people up from state oppression and gives them the freedom and the space that they need to be all that they can be. A free market economy rewards talent, ambition and hard work, and punishes laziness. Everyone has an ‘equal opportunity’ to succeed in the sense that everyone is given the freedom to do whatever they want with the skills that they have, and to develop new skills if they wish. Such a view was championed by neoliberals like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and is at the heart of the ‘American Dream’: the idea that even the poorest in society can nevertheless achieve great things if they work hard and develop their talents.
Egalitarians and others from the political Left, on the other hand, argue that such a view is naive and creates (rather than resolves) inequality. For them, the level playing field is not established by the free market. Rather, it is established by intervention in free markets aimed at removing those obstacles which stand in the way of individual achievement.
The fact is that it is very difficult to measure the extent to which particular social and economic policies have succeeded in removing sources of unfair disadvantage, especially when the forms of disadvantage that we are dealing with have been entrenched and strengthened over generations. Yet meritocracy requires that we are able to do so with a high degree of certainty. After all, we need to know at what point (from what date) we can confidently assert that someone’s failure to succeed was their own fault rather than the fault of structural disadvantage. We need to know when we can stop blaming the system, and start blaming the individual. The concern among opponents of meritocracy, then, is that the principle of meritocracy is epistemologically compromised: it requires us to know something that it is not possible to know and, hence, that it does not provide us with sufficient guidance as to what should be done to resolve inequalities.
IT WRONGLY ASSUMES THAT PEOPLE DESERVE THE FRUITS OF THEIR TALENTS
Meritocracy is based on desert: if you work hard and develop your talents then you deserve to have your hard work and talent rewarded. The driving idea behind this view is that you do not deserve to be penalized for things that you cannot do anything about, and which are purely a matter of luck (like the kind of family you were born into, how much money your parents had, etc.), but that you do deserve to be rewarded for things that are in your control, and that you yourself have chosen to do (like develop your talents, study hard at school, take evening classes, etc.).
But this, too, is problematic. We might concede, for example, that effort is in the control of the individual, and that, therefore, an individual who works hard deserves greater rewards than someone who is lazy and does not work at all. However, the question of talent is less clear-cut. Several philosophers have pointed out that, just as it is pure luck to be born into a rich or poor family, so it is sheer luck to be born clever or stupid, good at maths or bad at maths, good at sport or bad at sport. Of course, people can affect their skills – with practice, most people can improve at most things. But people start with different levels of talent, and may have natural limits on their ability to develop their talents as well. Even practice will not make everyone equally good at maths or sport. But, if natural endowments are just a matter of luck, how can individuals deserve them, or deserve to profit from them?
This kind of argument has led some contemporary political philosophers to advance a theory known as ‘luck egalitarianism’. According to this theory, equality of opportunity means that people should have equal chances of success regardless of their natural endowments, as well as regardless of their race, sex, social class and so on. We discuss this view in Part Two.
Case study: Iris Marion Young and the ‘Myth of Merit’
In her book Justice and the Politics of Difference (1990), Iris Marion Young offers a far-reaching critique of the idea of meritocracy. Her central claim is that there are no objective standards of merit that can be used to measure people’s relative desert. As a result, judgements of merit are simply subjective judgements which often reflect the prejudiced interests and goals of dominant groups. The idea of merit should therefore not be used as a basis for allocating jobs in society, for four reasons.
1 Most jobs and skills are too complex to be easily observed and measured. It may be possible to measure how many products an assembly-line factory worker can process per hour, but it is much more difficult to measure how good a teacher is, or how efficient a secretary is. Most jobs require a complex mix of skills which cannot easily be measured, and so the individuals who do those jobs cannot easily be compared.
2 It is often not possible to measure the contribution of any particular individual. If a shop meets its sales targets, how can we tell what extent of sales are down to the sales skills of each individual assistant, and how many are down to other factors such as advertising and competitive prices? Again, this problem makes it difficult to measure an individual’s merit.
3 Most jobs entail a considerable amount of discretion, in that they can be performed in a number of different ways. A doctor, for example, might be exceedingly technically competent and knowledgeable about disease but very poor at communicating with patients and making them feel at ease. It is not clear how we would compare that sort of doctor with another who has an excellent bedside manner and is well-liked by patients, but who is marginally less technically expert. Communication and technical competence are both part of being a doctor, and different doctors will excel in different aspects of the job.
4 Those who are supposedly evaluating an individual’s merit will often not be familiar with their work. This is clearly the case when an individual goes for interview for a new job – the interviewers must rely on the applicants’ CV, references and interview skills, and may not get a full picture of the relative merits of the candidates. Even within an organization, Young suggests that decisions about pay and promotion are often made by those without direct experience of the employee’s work, and are therefore not perfectly accurate.
Consequently, Young argues, the idea of merit actually strengthens entrenched inequalities and hierarchies rather than negating them.
Conclusion
Equality of opportunity is widely supported. However, it is philosophically ambiguous and politically controversial. The commitment to establishing a level playing field among all members of society can be interpreted very differently. Depending on what one thinks one needs in order to have an ‘equal opportunity’ to succeed, equality of opportunity can be invoked to justify anything from very extensive state intervention to completely free markets. It can be used to justify positive discrimination and
to criticize it.
Nevertheless, the central insight – that all individuals should be enabled to live lives that they believe are worthwhile, and to succeed on an equal playing field with others, without having their efforts (and their future success) thwarted by arbitrary factors over which they had no control – remains a core commitment of the majority of Anglo-American political philosophers, and egalitarians more generally. Indeed, the majority of those philosophers, politicians and others who describe themselves as being committed to equality hold to some notion of equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. This is not universally true, of course, as we will see in Part Two. In particular, the idea of equality of opportunity has formed a key component of the kind of liberal egalitarianism defended by thinkers like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, whose work continues to shape the discipline of political philosophy.
Key ideas
Desert: The idea (supported by meritocrats and others) that people deserve to benefit from their talents and their hard work.
Meritocracy: A conception of equality of opportunity premised on the idea that jobs and positions should be allocated on the basis of talent and effort, once the state has removed unfair barriers to success.
Non-discrimination: A conception of equality of opportunity which emphasizes the need to exclude irrelevant characteristics (such as race, sex, sexuality, disability, etc.) from decisions concerning the appropriate allocation of jobs and positions in a society.
Positive discrimination / affirmative action: The idea that certain historically disadvantaged groups should be favoured for certain positions or jobs in order that this historical disadvantage be ended.