Merited Criticism

George Scialabba, in his January article “What Were We Thinking?” suggests at one point that anyone who thinks the idea of “merit” has any rational grounding is not sufficiently familiar with the latest revelations from “modern genetics, neurobiology, and psychiatry.” But this is simply not true. There is a long and rich academic debate about the relationship between our physical biological selves as revealed by the various scientific disciplines and our felt subjective experience. I suspect that most people of religious faith are not willing to relinquish the subjective in human experience as a source of profound truth.

The author also implies that simple introspection reveals the bankruptcy of any sense of personal “merit.” But this is not true either. My own intuition is that there is a significant ontological difference between talent and nurture on the one hand and personal diligence on the other. Talent and nurture are entirely a matter of “luck” and therefore perhaps “morally arbitrary.” But diligence is of a different ontological category. It seems to me simple common sense that people deserve some degree of credit or recognition for the work they put into developing whatever abilities they have been given. The sin of pride is a risk here, but not a necessary outcome. I also acknowledge that the luck of circumstance plays a huge role and that all production broadly understood is social. It is impossible to objectively disentangle all this and quantify what any individual deserves for their efforts, but to completely discard any sense of personal merit is also to discard any sense of individual agency and personal responsibility. And that strikes me as profoundly misguided. Perhaps my intuitions are wrong, but I don’t think they are so blatantly and obviously wrong as the author implies.

Alan Windle
Philadelphia, Pa.

George Scialabba replies:

The meaning of a word depends on its function in what philosophers call a “language game”: the history of its uses; the purposes, expectations, and presuppositions of speakers; the context of the conversation or text. When we say, “It’s no merit of his that he got the job. It’s his father’s company” or “Not the least of her merits is her extraordinary tact,” we are playing the language game of discussing job qualifications. We don’t normally care how someone came by those qualifications—whether they deserve full credit for them, or any credit for them—because who gets which job is of limited importance, philosophically speaking; all that matters is that the job go to whoever will do it best. In this limited context, “personal merit” is an unobjectionable expression.

When we say, “People deserve whatever they are paid in a minimally regulated market society,” we are playing a different language game, of far greater importance. In the latter case, given the vast inequalities and enormous suffering resulting from that principle, we are naturally less willing to give the notions on which it rests—“desert” and “merit”—a free pass. The everyday, unproblematic sense of “merit”—excellence, worthiness, virtue—has long been used to trump another everyday intuition: that the coexistence of widespread poverty and fantastic wealth is morally unacceptable. Free-market philosophers say they are awfully sorry about the suffering of the poor, but it would be unjust to do anything about it, because the rich deserve their riches.

I tried to show in “What Were We Thinking?” that they don’t. First, because the social nature of production, and the fact that causation is an infinite regress, mean that it is impossible to identify precisely, or even approximately, anyone’s contribution to the social product. And second, because everything we use to produce anything, including our character and aptitudes, talents and virtues, is inherited or taught.

As Alan Windle points out, these contentions are not uncontroversial. The controversy is very old but still very much alive. I can’t rehearse that controversy in detail, but I would note that his (and kindred philosophers’) language—“our felt subjective experience,” “my own intuition,” “it seems to me simple common sense”—suggests a certain softness in their reasoning.

My kindred philosophers on this subject are Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris.