Justitia and Justitium

I have been asked to write on "Justice in Meritocratic Environments." The idea of meritocracy may have many virtues, but clarity is not one of them. The lack of clarity may relate to the fact, as I shall presently argue, that the concept of "merit" is deeply contingent on our views of a good society. Indeed, the notion of merit is fundamentally derivative, and thus cannot but be qualified and contingent. There is some elementary tension between (1) the inclination to see merit in fixed and absolute terms, and (2) the ultimately instrumental character of merit--its dependence on the concept of "the good" in the relevant society.

This basic contrast is made more intense by the tendency, in practice, to characterize "merit" in inflexible forms reflecting values and priorities of the past, often in sharp conflict with conceptions that would be needed for seeing merit in the context of contemporary objectives and concerns. Some of the major difficulties with "meritocracy" arise, I would argue, from this internal conflict within the concept of "merit" itself.

When I received the invitation to write on justice in meritocracies, I was reminded of an amusing letter I had received a couple of years earlier from W. V. O. Quine (addressed jointly to John Rawls and me, dated December 17, 1992):

I got thinking about the word justice, alongside solstice. Clearly, the latter, solstitium, is sol + a reduced stit from stat-, thus "solar standstill"; so I wondered about justitium: originally a legal standstill? I checked in Meillet, and he bore me out. Odd! It meant a court vacation.
  Checking further, I found that justitia is unrelated to justitium. Justitia is just(um)+ -itia, thus "justness," quite as it should be, whereas justitium is jus + stitium.

I shall argue that meritocracy, and more generally the practice of rewarding merit, is essentially underdefined, and we cannot be sure about its content--and thus about the claims regarding its "justice"--until some further specifications are made (concerning, in particular, the objectives to be pursued, in terms of which merit is to be, ultimately, judged). The merit of actions--and (derivatively) that of persons performing actions--cannot be judged independent of the way we understand the nature of a good (or an acceptable) society. There is, thus, something of justitium or "standstill" in our understanding of merit, which involves at least a temporary "stay" (if not quite a "court vacation"). Indeed, examining the nature of this "standstill," which is ethically and politically illuminating, may be a better way of understanding the place of meritocracy in modern society than seeing it as a part of some categorical justitia that demands our compliance.

Merits and Theories of Justice

The general idea of merit must be conditional on what we consider good activities (or to see it in more deontological terms, right actions). The promotion of goodness, or compliance with rightness, would have much to commend it, and in this basic sense the encouragement of merit would have a clear rationale. But given the contingent nature of what we take to be good or right, there would inevitably be alternative views regarding (1) the precise content of merit, and (2) its exact force vis-à-vis other normative concerns in terms of which the success of a society may be judged. This problem would be present even without the difficulties raised by rigid and inflexible conceptions of what is to be seen as "merit" (an issue to which I shall turn later on).

This is not to deny that any particular comprehensive theory of justice will contain within its specifications the relevant parameters in terms of which the content and force of merit-based rewards can be judged. For example, John Rawls's (1958; 1971) classic theory of "justice as fairness," which has been overwhelmingly the most influential proposal in contemporary political philosophy, does provide enough structure and specification to allow us immediately to judge the demands of merits and meritocracy.¹ Yet the Rawlsian substantive theory of justice involves a particular compromise between conflicting concerns: formalized in his "two principles of justice," including the priority of liberty and the significance of efficiency and equity in the achievement and distribution of individual advantages. Many who have been much influenced by Rawls (including this author) are more at peace with the importance of these general concerns than they are with the specific compromise arrived at in Rawlsian theory.

There are, in particular, (1) different ways of recognizing the prior importance of liberty, (2) distinct "spaces" in which efficiency and equity can be judged, and (3) dissimilar ways of balancing the two types of concerns.² It is indeed hard to expect a reasoned unanimity on the exact lines of any particular compromise between these concerns, given the depth of these demands. Further, it is not obvious that even in an imagined "original position" (with primordial equality) a consensus of reasoning would emerge to settle this issue adequately.³

The absence of a general agreement on a precise resolution (or on an exact formula) that balances the forces of the discordant concerns against each other does not, however, make it useless to analyze the role of meritocracy or to examine the nature of its conflict with the demands of other aspects of justice. Since I have argued in favor of "incomplete" theories of justice elsewhere (particularly in Sen 1970 and 1992), I am less uneasy with a "standstill" than a more determined or a more resourceful theorist of justice (or of welfare economics) would be.