Within Reason - #15 — Michael Sandel | The Tyranny of Merit

Episode Date: September 9, 2020

Michael J. Sandel is an American political philosopher, and Professor of Government Theory at Harvard University Law School. His public lectures have been viewed by tens of millions of people around t...he world, including in China, where Sandel was named the "most influential foreign figure of the year". Dr. Sandel talks to Alex about his new book, The Tyranny of Merit, discussing not just whether meritocracy is achievable in practice, but also whether it is even something we should aim for at all, highlighting the wealth of potential damage that meritocracy can affect on a society which embraces it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode of the Cosmic Skeptic podcast is brought to you by you. To support the podcast, please visit patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic. So welcome back, everybody, to the Cosmic Skeptic Podcast. Today, I am joined by Dr. Michael Sandell, who is a professor of government theory at Harvard University Law School. You may have seen his course, Justice, which was the university's first course to be made freely available online and on television, and has been viewed tens of millions of times. I'm pretty sure if you type in Harvard University, it's one of the first videos that came up. I certainly remember watching it myself. And if you're a regular viewer of this channel,
Starting point is 00:01:04 you'll have seen me recommend Dr. Sandell's book, Justice, on numerous occasions. But he's got a new book coming out as well. And that book is called The Tyranny of Merit, What's Become of the Common Good. And that will be available on the 10th of September in the United Kingdom and on 15th of September in the United States. And there's a link in the description right now
Starting point is 00:01:23 if you go and pre-order or purchase that book depending on when you're watching. But Dr. Sandel, thank you for joining me. My pleasure. Good to be with you, Alex. Excellent. So the book, I found interesting. I mean, the very thesis of the book might strike people as strange, to say the least. We live in a world where we're told that merit is a good thing, right? As you say in the book, politicians always talk as though this is the ideal we're striving for.
Starting point is 00:01:49 We want to live in a society whereby people are able to rise as far as their talents will take them, where barriers to success are removed and everybody competes on an equal playing field. That sounds like the political ideal. Now, most people would say that the problem is that we haven't achieved that. But the thesis of your book essentially seems to be that even if we did achieve that, that wouldn't be ideal either. Is that about right? Is that a good summary of what you have to say? It is.
Starting point is 00:02:14 It is. And I suppose you want to know why. Yeah. I mean, bearing in mind, you know, to people listening who maybe didn't even know this book was coming out and I just saw this video come up on their feed, they'll be thinking what the hell? What on earth are you talking about? The tyranny of merit. What's behind that name? Well, what's behind it is that is this, what seems an attractive ideal, just as you say, Alex,
Starting point is 00:02:40 that people should be rewarded based on merit. People should be free to succeed without any obstacles, without being held back due to prejudice or their upbringing. That's certainly true. we should overcome barriers to success for everyone, but suppose we could, suppose we could achieve what we are far from achieving today, a perfectly meritocratic society where a quality of opportunity was fully realized. Would that be a good society? Would that be a just, society. These are the questions I raise in the book, and my answer is no. The ideal is flawed.
Starting point is 00:03:37 It's not just that we fall woefully short of realizing the ideal. Meritocracy has a dark side, and at the heart of the dark side are the attitudes towards success, toward winning and losing that come with meritocracy and that we actually see all around us today in our societies and in our politics in so far as people can rise based on their efforts and talents those who land on top come to believe that their success is their own doing a measure of of their merit and by implication that those who fall short have no one to blame but themselves. This attitude among those who land on top I call meritocratic hubris because the emphasis on striving on exercising our talents
Starting point is 00:04:56 though we want people to do those things up to a point it leads to meritocratic hubris because it it causes the successful to inhale too deeply of their success to forget the luck and good fortune right that them on their way and it leaves them to look down on those less fortunate less credentialed than themselves that's the dark side and we see it unfolding today with devastating political consequences. Sure. I think there are two ways to think about this question, though, right? I mean, there's the question of kind of justice and fairness, which seems to be the heart of what you're saying, which is that people tend to see it as a fair starting point to make sure everybody can allow their talents to rise them to where they are.
Starting point is 00:05:45 But your point is that it's not really fair in the sense you don't get to choose how talented you are. You don't get to choose which teachers you have, which genetics you have and things like this. And that's the moral question. But there's also a practical question, which is to say, even if we admit that it's unfair, would it not be better to have a society that runs practically smoothly in which people who do have talents, which just do so happen to be favored by society, are rewarded so that we live in a society whereby we live in a meritocracy that's not based on the idea that this is the fairest way to run things, but that this is the way to maximize productivity and make sure that the things people want are being produced with fair rewards. Because if we take away this idea that people do deserve to be at the top, even if they don't, without that kind of reward to motivate them to get there, I feel like we might live in a world where people are less likely to want to produce those kind of things that people want. Right.
Starting point is 00:06:41 Well, let's start with the second. Incentives, rewards for producing the stuff that people want. Right. The incentive argument, which you're quite right to distinguish from the. argument about justice which we can come to in a moment it seems to me that from a moral point of view even the second practical incentive argument is open to question because the moral importance of providing a scheme of incentives that causes more people to get the stuff they want is essentially an argument that draws implicitly on the importance of consumer welfare.
Starting point is 00:07:30 It is a kind of utilitarian argument. Often, this argument underlies claims about GDP if we don't provide the right system of incentives and rewards. We won't increase the size of the economic pie. We won't grow the economy. We won't maximize GDP. But those arguments are really stand-ins for an underlying idea that a good society consists in maximizing the satisfaction of consumer preferences, whatever they are, regardless of their content, regardless of how worthy or unworthy, how a base or not. or noble those preferences may be let me give you a concrete example and so i i question even
Starting point is 00:08:23 that on the on the practical and the incentive argument even before we get back to the argument about yeah yeah you see what i mean and in in the book i give some examples for example one of the wealthiest uh people in the world certainly one of the wealthiest americans is a man named Sheldon Edelson who made his fortune with some very successful casinos around the world. Right. And so if we're concerned with rewarding people, incentive effects, answering to consumer preferences, he answers to the very strong consumer preference for playing slot machines
Starting point is 00:09:08 and going to the roulette wheel and so on. compare his rewards to those of a schoolteacher or a nurse or a caregiver. Tens of thousands of times greater, the casino magnate. But is it really the case that his contribution to the economy or to the common good far exceeds that of the school teacher or the nurse or the caregiver? Most people would agree that it doesn't. Well, maybe I should put it to you, Alex. Would you say that it does?
Starting point is 00:09:44 From the standpoint, the point of the example is this, it isn't enough simply to defend meritocracy, even on practical grounds, incentive grounds, by saying it's a way of rewarding people lavishly for producing the stuff or the services people want is a way to increase consumer welfare. because we have to ask about the quality and character of the consumer preferences that are being satisfied because we can't really evaluate the moral worth of various contributions to the economy of the common good simply by adding up consumer welfare without judging it, without assessing the quality or the moral importance or the human significance of the preferences being satisfied. So, that would be my reply on the incentive side. If you really want to talk about merit as warranting incentives and a system of reward and so on, then we have to ask, what really is meritorious?
Starting point is 00:10:56 What really is the valuable contribution to the common good? We have to do that hard moral work, engage in that moral argument, which admittedly will be controversial. We can't outsource that moral judgment to the moral. markets. Now, we can come back to the justice argument, but let's first see whether you'd like to say something about this incentive argument for trying to align people's merit with their pay. Yeah. The question that kind of springs to mind for me, and as you say, it's important to keep the question separate, but on a practical level, there seems to be a criticism of something
Starting point is 00:11:35 in practice rather than principle. That is to say, if human beings did value the right thing as it were, or value them economically, let's say, then the practical argument would hold. We could say, if it were the case that society recognized the relative importances of different jobs as they should be, then maybe it actually would be a good idea to reward merit, and that that would then work practically to bring about a good society. Well, it would work not only practically, but then it would no longer be a merely practical argument. Sure. And this is, of course, this is of course a moral case. But I'm interested because you say there, you seem to be saying something to the effect of, I might be
Starting point is 00:12:17 misunderstanding you, but something like if people valued what they should value, if people valued what really was in their best interest or something like that, I mean, couldn't the libertarian, I suppose, say something like, well, look, the evidence that people do actually value this stuff is that they're paying for it, right? For you to say something like, well, if you valued this other thing, if you valued what you really should, value. It's like, isn't it in the interest of the person to decide for themselves what's valuable? If they want to pay more money for a casino, then that's what's more valuable to them. And a good society isn't just one that has good education or whatever it may be, but it is one
Starting point is 00:12:53 in which people are free to act in their own interest. And therefore, if they want to spend more money at the casino than they do on the education system, then that's their prerogative. So you could hold a libertarian view that says people, should be free to go to casinos instead of going to, or for that matter, to dog fights or to gladiatorial contests in the Coliseum and just let the market reflect what people want. But at a certain point, the system of rewards in the society will, the question is, what is the status of the market rewards that result from, free choice. My argument in this book is not that we should prevent people going to casinos,
Starting point is 00:13:44 but that once casino magnates make billions and school teachers, caregivers, physicians make less, we shouldn't bless that result by saying it reflects their respective merit. We shouldn't assume that this that the rewards that resolved reflect anything to do with moral dessert right's the argument because remember we're discussing the issue of merit and moral dessert not of permission to engage in certain activities right see this might be a confusion that that people make it's kind of like saying it yes people can pay for what they like but we shouldn't we shouldn't interpret the fact that a casino is making more than the school to mean that it's therefore worth more, morally speaking, that it's therefore got a higher
Starting point is 00:14:36 worth or should have a higher worth for society. But I mean, I think it's worth kind of dwelling on the moral point, on the point of principle underlying this, which essentially, as I kind of brushed over a moment ago, is this idea that it's this kind of anti-libertarian essence of saying that yes, people can kind of act in accordance with their talents and we should remove barriers to allow them to do so, but you don't get to choose who you are. You don't get to choose whether you are kind of predisposed to being good with children and therefore making a good teacher, or if you're really quick with maths and therefore very good at banking and make a lot of money that way.
Starting point is 00:15:12 So morally speaking, it's unfair to reward people for talents that they didn't choose to have themselves. Is that a fair analysis? Well, I would put it slightly differently just to make sure that there's no misinterpret. understanding here. So we've dealt with the question of what you had called the practical argument about incentives, and we found that even that argument depends on a further assumption about the moral worth of the preferences being satisfied. So even that seemingly practical argument presupposes a certain moral judgment about what counts as a valuable social
Starting point is 00:15:56 contribution. But now if we move back to what you referred to as the argument from justice or fairness, there is a further, a further moral objection to meritocracy, understood as the idea that those who make a lot of money morally deserve it. And that's the argument that I think you were just now describing, which is that if there are no barriers, to success. Then those who will rise will be those with the greatest talents or the talents in most demand in their society and those who strive to develop and cultivate those talents. And just as you say, it's a mistake to think that having the talents, the society happens
Starting point is 00:16:54 to love or prize or reward, that's not my doing. That's my good luck. Ron James is a great basketball player. He's enormously gifted. And of course, he works very hard as well. Yeah. But if he had lived in Renaissance Italy when they didn't much care about basketball, but were more interested in fresco painters, he wouldn't have been, one of the top earners, unless it turns out he also has great talent for painting frescoes. So the fact that he lives in a society that happens to prize the talents he has in great abundance being a brilliant basketball player, that's not his doing. So it's a mistake to think that as a matter of justice, he must be,
Starting point is 00:17:53 given tens of millions of dollars because he works hard at playing basketball. That's luck that there is this fit between his talents and what the society cares about. That's luck. And so it can't be said that the tens of millions he makes is all his own doing. He morally deserves it and it would be wrong to tax it away, for example. So that's the argument about But, well, John Rawls refers to the moral arbitrariness, the contingency of talents. Yes. Not only having this or that talent, but even more importantly, living in a society that happens to prize the talents that you or I happen to have. So that's a source of moral arbitrariness, moral contingency that undercuts the meritocratic conviction that people who are free to exercise.
Starting point is 00:18:53 their efforts and talents without obstacle morally deserve the material rewards that the market bestows on them. Right. So that's the argument from justice. So it's not just that it's impractical to reward people so heavily for hard work or something like that, but that they genuinely don't deserve it, to put it bluntly. They don't deserve the rewards that we're giving them, even if they do work hard. even if they do kind of put themselves out on the line because they didn't get to choose to have a disposition to do that.
Starting point is 00:19:30 This appears to have some wide, wide moral implications. For instance, you talk about the kind of dark side of meritocracy and where the tyranny really comes in, which is that if we have this idea of meritocracy and the nice political soundbite that if you work hard, you can get all these successes that you deserve, the corollary of that is that if you're a failure, that it's all your fault as well, that you deserve this too. argument would be that I suppose you don't. But aren't we essentially just undermining in its entirety the concept of desert and the concept of punishment as well? Because the same thing can apply to somebody who commits a crime, who's a kind of societal failure in that sense,
Starting point is 00:20:12 who is predisposed to violence and anger and does things that generally speaking people would have a retributive response to. They say, well, this person deserves to be thrown in jail. This person doesn't deserve all the rights of a free society, doesn't this kind of view that you're promoting here commit us to saying, well, actually, no, they don't deserve any of those things. They are just as deserving of being thrown in jail as you or I are. It just so happens that we happen to have been born predisposed to talk about philosophy rather than to go and rob a store, something like that. And that seems like a radical implication of this view. Well, there are, of course, various reasons for criminal punishment, various justifications, broadly speaking, retributive arguments, which do have to do with dessert, just as you say, and other non-retributive reasons, mainly to do with disincentives, going back to the incentive argument that we discussed earlier about the account.
Starting point is 00:21:15 economy, or incapacitating a particularly dangerous violent offender from committing future violent acts. But those are not retributive arguments. So let's focus on that, which does cut very close to the issue of merit, the idea that people in the case of criminal punishment deserve the punishment. If we go back to the earlier part of our discussion about economic rewards, I think there is a parallel here. It's important to remember that there are two issues.
Starting point is 00:21:59 In the case of economic, do we deserve our economic rewards? Do we have some moral claim, privileged moral claim to the talents that enabled us to win those rewards and to what extent did we win them because our society happens for no very good reason to value basketball rather than fresco painting that gets back to judging the worth of the consumer preferences yeah now in case of the criminal law um you could rightly ask as you just now have asked, Alex, what about the fact that people commit criminal acts may have been brought up in very hard circumstances and so on, may not have had a good upbringing, may have not have learned right from wrong, how to control their impulses, may have desperate poverty
Starting point is 00:23:01 and so on. That's the issue about the moral arbitrariness or the contingency. And so, the So there, but let's go back to the principle, the argument, if we lived in a society where chances were truly equal, then the disadvantages that underlie a great deal of criminal activity would be, would have been addressed if we're imagining as our thought experiment, as the thought experiment we began with, requires, that we did achieve truly equal opportunity, equal life chances. So much of that would be dealt with. But there would still be a role for desert in criminal punishment if what counted as a crime was not a matter of arbitrary taste, like the desire to play a slot machine, but was a matter of
Starting point is 00:24:12 fundamental questions about what it is to respect our fellow human beings. So in the case of criminal punishment, as in the case of economic rewards, we need to work out, morally reflect on whether answering the consumer preference answers something worthwhile in the case of the economy, whether the criminal law punishes truly vicious behavior, that which is a vice, or whether we're actually punishing things that on reflection, we should not be punishing, as some would say for, you know, with mandatory drug laws and various things. So we need to have the same kind of debate in order to decide if criminal punishment is aligned with merit or merely reflecting contingent preferences that could be otherwise.
Starting point is 00:25:21 And if the answer is yes, then there may still be a role for retributive justice. but only once we work out what fundamental human goods need to be protected by the criminal law. I find that fascinating. I can't help but seeing an inconsistency here, though, in the view that there can be room for retributive justice at all, because let's say that we kind of create this quixotic society in which people, in which the laws are designed as we wish that they should be, that they properly respect human, human dignity or whatever the phrasing you used was, the problem still remains that those people who are just of a disposition that they don't
Starting point is 00:26:08 care about that, that they, we could pick something that we can all agree is awful. We can take something like just murder, just completely randomized murder or something like that, there will still be people who will commit crimes like that, purely just because they are malicious people, let's say, they are just sadists who like to watch other people suffer, but the same argument would apply, I think, in any case, in which we might look at someone and say they deserve punishment, to say they didn't choose that disposition, they didn't choose to be a sadist, they didn't choose to be someone who doesn't respond to the threat of law enforcement and imprisonment, who isn't afraid of spending a life behind bars or something
Starting point is 00:26:47 like that. They didn't choose any of that. And so how can there be any room for retributive justice? How can there be any room to say you deserve this when every single factor that goes in to creating a criminal or someone who does something bad even is out of their control? If what you're describing as certain malicious or vicious dispositions are nothing to do with disadvantaged upbringings the lack of family the lack of access to education yeah it is conceivable that even if we manage to overcome all of these hard circumstances that typically um can be found in the background of people who engage in heinous criminal acts in that special case and I think this has I don't think this is the case for most criminal activity.
Starting point is 00:27:50 But in that special case, because that's the only one that tests the philosophical question that we're discussing, then the question is, are there some human beings who, despite growing up under favorable circumstances, just are that way, just are evil, malicious, vicious, violent people, well, I suppose then the answer would be, if there are such people, then they are disposed to violate fundamental human dignity and human goods, then those people are worthy of punishment. But notice, the conditions that we've built in to describe such people will out. the vast majority but hypothetically if are still such people vicious people by nature I suppose
Starting point is 00:28:48 we would say even who had favorable upbringings and so on then are they worthy of punishment do they merit punishment for the crimes they commit out of sheer evil then I would be inclined to say yes I'm not sure that's inconsistent because this is a very The very fact that we had to build up these assumptions so carefully. Yeah, yeah. It has that the scope for retributive justice now is not extinguished. I agree with you. But it's pretty narrow and far removed from the standard run of cases.
Starting point is 00:29:29 But the analogy here, philosophically, the analogy with the case of economic rewards and who deserves what. the analogy I think holds you'll tell me if you think I'm wrong about this the analogy there is if we had truly equal chances and if we deliberated about what social contributions really were worthy looking after people's health rather than catering to their desire to play casinos then the people who contributed most to a society of that kind that prized education and health and so on, rather than playing slot machines, then I would say that the greatest rewards and honor, because we're talking here about honor, social recognition, not only money, but the greatest reward should flow
Starting point is 00:30:26 to the people who make those most valuable contributions to the common good. So I think it's parallel here, isn't it, Alice? I'm quite surprised that you say that, actually, because throughout the book, I kind of get the impression that you've got a criticism of meritocracy in principle rather than just in practice. But what I'm kind of hearing you saying here is, of course, taking the criminal case, as you say, we've already gotten rid of the vast majority of criminals as they exist in real life, because most crime is sociologically open question, as you say, but it seems at least to be tied to social factors that can be fixed. But you said that if we were to control for those and make sure that everybody was just on the level playing field and we were in this perfect society, that if somebody was just genuinely evil by nature, that they do deserve punishment. But to me, that is, that still, that still goes against this principle by saying something like, I'm punishing you for your nature, which you couldn't control.
Starting point is 00:31:24 You didn't control your nature. You didn't pick whatever it is that makes you evil by nature, your genetics or whatever it may be. you didn't control that, but I'm going to punish it. I'm going to punish you for it anyway. And not only am I going to punish you on practical grounds, but I think you actually deserve it, that to me seems like anathema to justice and fairness. And the corollary would be that on that equal playing field in a society that's got kind of perfectly controlled conditions, those people who were genuinely just hardworking, who were genuinely just the, had the skills that we do like to see in society who are excellent teachers and these. kind of things do deserve the rewards that we would give them in that society. And so what you would have is a society in which people are doing things which are rewarded that people like and accept the rewards for that and we think they deserve those rewards and people who are bad are accepting punishments that we think they deserve as well. That to me seems like by definition a meritocracy.
Starting point is 00:32:24 Okay. Well, fair enough. because merit understood in this morally elaborated, deliberated way is being rewarded. Yes, you're right about that. Sure. But notice how far, so this would be a kind of, I suppose, Aristotelian meritocracy detached from the de facto judgments that markets make. Yeah, that's quite right.
Starting point is 00:32:59 Money people make. So my case, and you've kind of pushed me to articulate this more clearly, my case is against the standard meritocracy that animates public policy and public debate and political argument. Right. and has in recent decades where the people are thought to be meritorious and worthy of reward in virtue of contributions to the society where the measure of the contribution is the money is the money stows rather than what we actually should be valuing yes yes so I mean I think we can
Starting point is 00:33:50 definitely both agree on that, but I think we quickly kind of brushed over there something which is, which is crucially important, which is that in this society, this kind of, as you say, Aristotelian ideal version of meritocracy, you seem to imply that that would actually be a good or justifiable thing, but remember I said that we've got a person here who is by nature evil through no fault of their own and we think they deserve punishment for something that's out of their control. Is that something you would just bite the bullet on and say, and say it's just the kind of fact about what makes a bad person and human nature? Are you able to say that somebody deserves to be punished for something that they have absolutely no control over?
Starting point is 00:34:30 Okay, well, this goes to the question of effort, which you've been emphasizing. And there does seem to be a moral intuition that supports the idea that what makes someone truly deserving or meritorious, whether of reward or of punishment, is their striving, their effort. And that's not what I want to say, even in this idealized understanding of merit. The Aristotelian, call it that, idea of merit, is not to do with effort. or even mainly choosing or striving because you said a moment ago someone works hard to become a doctor or a nurse or a teacher what makes the contribution of the doctor or the nurse or the teacher valuable is not that they worked hard at it but that the activity
Starting point is 00:35:42 itself, given fundamental human needs and human goods, is worthy of social recognition and reward. So here's the way of testing, testing it. If there were a teacher, think of your best teacher. If, if, suppose, take your two greatest, most influential teachers, Alex. Yeah. And let's assume that one of them was a virtuoso. could walk into the classroom without working terribly hard, but just was gifted at teaching and did it brilliantly. And the other teacher had to spend hours and hours of preparation for every hour in the classroom. Now, would you say that the one who worked harder was more meritorious, worthy of greater reward, recognition, admiration. Or would you say, well, it all
Starting point is 00:36:49 depends on how good the teacher was, how inspiring, how illuminating, how effective. Or you could think about a great musician. Suppose you hear two great violin performances. And you learn that in the one case, the violinist practiced but just had a gift, didn't have to practice that much to produce this stunning sound, whereas the other one practiced 12 hours a day for ever since childhood. Where would the greater merit lie? I mean, what would be your, so you're emphasizing effort. Well, I suggest it's that effort misses the point, though I agree with you. We often assimilated to merit and desert. It isn't effort, mainly, that confers merit or worth.
Starting point is 00:37:42 It's the actual contribution, the brilliance of the sound, in the case of the musical performance. Yeah, well, I think potentially we can tease apart two questions here, right? Because if you take the two teachers, I could say something like, clearly their value to society, their value to me, their merit, as it were, is the same, sure, regardless of the effort they put in. But the person who deserves more praise, perhaps, intuitively, seems to be the person who put the work in. It seems weird to reward somebody who just kind of waltzes in and does the job. Now, you might say it makes sense on a practical level. You might say that, practically speaking, we want to make sure they do the job because they're good at it.
Starting point is 00:38:20 And so we'll reward them as much as we want. But on the moral question... Let's stick with the moral. On the moral question, surely they don't deserve the same amount of praise and reward. reward for their craft, just by virtue of the fact that they didn't work as hard. All right. Well, let me test this by tweaking this example. Imagine the two teachers or the two violinists. And the virtuoso teacher or violinist practices less and plays a bit better, teaches a bit better than the stripper. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:38:56 so the striver the one who's work ethic you greatly admire it's like who do you want as your teacher right well not only who do you want as your teacher because then you'll tell me Alex well that's back to the practical incentive thing I want to push you on the moral judgment whom do you admire more suppose and let me sharpen it suppose that that striving hardworking violinist or teacher isn't much good, really. They're okay, but not terrific. Yeah. And then you have the virtuoso violinist or teacher who works far less hard.
Starting point is 00:39:36 Now, I'm not asking you here a question about incentive, the practical issue. It's about the ethics. Who do you admire more? Who do you admire more? Yeah. Yeah. And is it that you only, or that we only admire the effort, or do we also admire the gift? I think we definitely value both, but I think our admirations, my intuition says that our admiration should go towards those who put in the effort, even if...
Starting point is 00:40:06 And why do you think so? I agree. Many people have this intuition. Why do you think so? It's hard to pin it down. I remember once asking my own parents. I remember asking them when I was younger, I said, would you rather I was getting straight A's and didn't put any work in,
Starting point is 00:40:23 but just got straight A's? I was just a talented student. Or would you be more proud of me if I got B's, but you knew I was working as absolutely hard as I could to do everything I could? And my parents kind of, they were like, well, I think I'd be more proud of you, as long as you, they gave the kind of typical parent-aunts, well, work as hard as you can, do the best that you can, that kind of thing. But I think, like, it makes sense to say that actually you would be more proud of somebody who's putting in the effort that you want them to put
Starting point is 00:40:51 in, rather than someone who just waltzes on in and kind of scores the A's or whatever. It seems to be like a, like, even if you can, you can say simultaneously, I would, I'd rather my kid get the straight A's because it's going to give them a better life. It's more valuable to society. more valuable to me even, but that I'd be more proud of my kid for working harder and therefore I think they deserve success as more even if they don't, even if it's kind of not practical to give them that success. Okay. Well, I mean, you've put the issue here and the question is whether your parents were right. You gave you a fully convincing answer and the question is what will you tell your kids? But think of one other example from the world of sport. Hussein bold.
Starting point is 00:41:36 fastest runner in the world. He wins the gold medal at the sprint. And his training partner, whose name I don't remember, training partner and friend, he wins the silver. He's also a very gifted runner. But Hussein Bolt has said of his friend and partner, he trains much harder than me. Now, you wouldn't say, I suspect, that in virtue of that, the training partner of Hussein Bolt deserves the gold medal. Or would you? Or would you? Well, I think that that's, I think if the Olympics were designed to recognize effort, I think that's a question of kind of what the Olympics recognized. I think the Olympics is recognizing, I guess you'd call it, athletic excellence, regardless of how you got it, as long as you're not doping, I suppose.
Starting point is 00:42:35 Right. But then there's a question there, isn't there? I mean, why not? You know, if someone doesn't get to choose their genes, if we say it's unfair that somebody can dope themselves and win a race more easily, why is it any fairer that somebody can pick a fast mate, have a kid with them, and then that kid goes and gets the gold medal because they've got good genes?
Starting point is 00:42:53 I mean, why is that any better than injecting yourself with steroids or whatever it may be? You discuss a similar kind of analogous question when it comes to admissions to university. If it's unfair for people to buy their way into the back door of a university, why is it fair to buy their way through the front door, through tuition and things? And these are the kind of questions that arise. And I'm conscious of the fact that we're kind of running out of time here. But I'm intrigued. Kind of based on everything we've said, the short version of the answer,
Starting point is 00:43:23 I mean, what do you say to your student? When your student comes to you and says, you know, Professor, I'm interested, who do you value more as a student? Who do you think is more deserving of their place at Harvard, let's say? The student who's performing a little under the average, but is absolutely working as hard as they possibly can, or the person who's absolutely flying through it with no effort whatsoever. Who do you think is the better student, in your view,
Starting point is 00:43:50 based on everything we've said here? Well, the better student, if by, it depends what, the purpose or the telos of the university. Okay, maybe allow me to make the question. Well, let's just stick with this for the moment because it connects with the Olympic days. Okay. And the questions you were asking. My argument and my philosophical view about this,
Starting point is 00:44:17 and it comes out in this book on the tyranny of merit, is that we can't answer these questions about how we should. should allocate honors, recognition, gold medals, admissions to elite universities without first engaging in a kind of moral deliberation about the telos or the purpose of the social practice at stake, whether it's sport in the case of the Olympics or whether it's the purpose, the kilos of universities in deciding which students to admit. And only once we have that debate or engage in that moral deliberation about the good appropriate to universities or the Olympic Games
Starting point is 00:45:16 or, to take our broader example, the economy or the good society, we can't decide how to allocate honors and rewards material and otherwise without implicitly taking a view about what is the good of this association and if we're talking about an economy which is really the setting for for my book about the tyranny of merit looking at our present circumstance looking at the economy and society how we allocate honors and material rewards and recognition. We can't do that simply by saying, let's see who contributes most to GDP. Let's use the market as a mechanism to figure that out, because that begs the very question that morally speaking we need to ask about the character of a good society, or the good of a university or the good of the musical performance or the good of the Olympic Games. So this goes back right to the first question you were pressing on me, Alex. I would not sharply distinguish
Starting point is 00:46:34 between the question about whether we own our talents, morally deserve the benefits that flow from the exercise of our talents. Clearly, we agree that's a matter, a debate about justice and morality. But I would not say that the question, the so-called practical question about what contributions do we want to call forth? I would not say that's merely practical and not moral because that's the question. It requires us to reflect on the good of the society or the economy because unless we have that debate, we can't know what counts as a contribution. Quite right. Yeah. You have to assume that kind of moral baseline in order to have the practical discussion. But I mean, the beauty of philosophy is that we can use thought experiments to move ourselves purely into the realm of morality. And so I'm thinking, you know, let's say you've got a you've got a room where these two kids are raised up until whatever age it is that you go to university. And they both have the same tutor and they're both reading the same books and they've both got the access to exactly the same materials. And one of them is just genetically, whatever it may be, by nature, whatever metric it is, they are just on it.
Starting point is 00:47:53 They just, it just goes into their head and it's fine. The other kid, they don't get it, but they work their absolute socks off, and they work as hard as they can, and they rise to exactly the same SAT school. They're bang on each other when it comes to like their academic attainment. Who is more deserving of a place at Harvard, in your view? Or is it the same? Well, it depends on sorting out the purposes of, the university, and I would say the purposes are in part to encourage, cultivate, honor, promote,
Starting point is 00:48:26 and reward scholarly excellence and gifts, scholarly and scientific excellence and gifts. And that would argue for giving priority and admissions to the gifted student, assuming that they cultivate those gifts up to a certain level. But I also think one of the purposes of a university is a civic purpose, and that is to cultivate leadership for a pluralist society to equip students and citizens and leaders to be able to develop good character, including good civic character, to be able to reason together on the basis of mutual respect about the common good, even where we disagree. I think that civic mission of higher education is also important. So would strong study habits and work habits be a part of the character that leads to that may be in part? I wouldn't fixate on effort and work ethic alone, though. I would evaluate more broadly the qualities of character that are likely to enable the civic mission of the university to be advanced.
Starting point is 00:49:48 and to flourish. So effort would be part of it, but I wouldn't overdo effort, Alex. I think we valorize, sometimes we confuse merit with effort or striving, whether for moral reasons or practical reasons. I think we overdo that. And I think actually identifying what, why we care about merit, why we care about rewarding or honoring or recognizing very contributions can help us step back from an excessive preoccupation with effort as the measure of merit or of the value of our social contribution, whether it's in a university setting or in society more broadly. Does that make sense? It's a reassuring thing to hear. I mean, the next time I'm slacking behind for one of my tutors at Oxford and they tell me off for it, I can
Starting point is 00:50:46 tell them, I'll just say, well, you know, Harvard's Michael Sandel tells me, efforts overrated. You don't know what you're talking about. It's quite reassuring. I'm not sure how well that would go down with them, though. Well, if you offer them, if I explain it well, yeah. Deep insight, regardless of whether that insight came to you in a flash, if you were walking across the quad, or whether you had slavishly to spend hours and hours scratching your head reading the works of collected works of David Hume, I think your tutor might be brought around to appreciating the brilliance of your insight, independent of how much perspiration was required to achieve it. Well, one can hope, although some tutors do seem to value that sweat more than they do
Starting point is 00:51:32 what's actually ends up on the page. Then now you're in a position to set them right, or at least to challenge them. At least to challenge them, yeah, because I think, you know, there are a lot of question still up in the air here. And I think it's clear from what we've been saying that we seem to have some clashes of intuitions. I think my listeners will be particularly interested because I've expressed in the past quite strongly an anti-free will philosophy, the idea that free will doesn't exist. And I think the questions raised by that about justice and punishment and desert and these kind of things are totally relevant in the same way to this discussion about merit. So I think they'll find it interesting. But there's a lot of
Starting point is 00:52:08 But there's on the opposite side, it seems. Yeah. If you're an anti-free will proponent, then how do you square that with your fierce moral intuition on behalf of effort is the source of merit? Yeah. Well, I think that's the difficult question for free will, but it's why I'm surprised. I thought we'd agree more. I thought that we would both kind of agree that actually, even in a perfect society,
Starting point is 00:52:34 where someone's just a bad person, that they don't deserve their punishment. And I thought we'd agree more on that point. It's interesting how we didn't. But to people listening, especially talking in the end there about things like admissions policies and the ethics of that, as well as in the book, quite a broad discussion of topics like populism and Brexit in the United Kingdom. There was a popular quote by Michael Gove, one of our government ministers who said that people were fed up of experts that got a lot of quite a lot of press attention. All of these kinds of questions are discussed in the book as well. So I just wanted to kind of press to the listeners that this is kind of scratching the surface.
Starting point is 00:53:09 And I think I have a tendency to press on particular questions maybe more deeply than I should do for want of breadth. But there's a lot more to this topic than what we've discussed today. And the rest can all be found in the book. But unless there's anything else particularly pressing that you want to say, I think that's a great place to end our conversation. Alex, I've really enjoyed our conversation. That's great. Well, as always, to my listeners, I remind you that everything I do is supported by you on Patreon. So if you want to support content like this, do follow the link in the description.
Starting point is 00:53:42 I'll go to patreon.com forward slash cosmic skeptic to support the podcast. But as always, I have been Alex O'Connor. And today on the podcast, I've been in discussion with Dr. Michael Sandell. Thank you.

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