Courtesy of Bustle
Most of the analysis of the college admissions scandal that was revealed last week has assumed that “merit” is, in a sense, the culprit—the concept that holds up a rotten system of privilege, hypocrisy, and, apparently, outright illegality. For several decades now, critiques of the idea of “meritocracy” surface whenever there is a discussion of education’s social function as a sorting system, usually because of some scandal involving standardized testing or college admissions procedures.
These conversations about the validity of education-as-sorting are important, if a bit repetitive. Critics doubt whether educational institutions actually can determine something as vague as “merit,” and they worry about the ways that a system that frequently masquerades as objective and egalitarian instead legitimizes existing inequalities. These doubts and worries are expressed persistently, but seldom with much effect. Perhaps that is because these critics tend either to aim their arguments at the way the system functions (or doesn’t) or to proceed directly to the facts of inequality, to the way that wealthy or well-connected families leverage their means to reproduce their privileges. Those are understandable (and appropriate) emphases, but they don’t fully account for the enormous ethical and intellectual pull that this issue of admissions has on people. There is something at stake that feels both much more intimate and also somehow much more cosmic than the prestige of the name on one’s diploma.
I was reading Elizabeth Anderson’s landmark 1999 article “What Is the Point of Equality?” this weekend, and it seemed to speak to these deeper dimensions of the problem.[1] In the article, Anderson surveys a number of works by philosophers who subscribed to some degree to a point of view generally known as luck egalitarianism. Anderson’s response to these works is starkly critical: “If much recent academic work defending equality had been secretly penned by conservatives, could the results be any more embarrassing for egalitarians?” she begins. She dismantles the particulars of luck egalitarianism with astonishing lucidity and verve, and she urges the reader to see that the fundamental mistake these thinkers make is to imagine equality as a process of compensation or indemnification of individuals for their bad luck. A society is equal, in their eyes, when no one suffers for a deficiency that they had no part in bringing about.
Anderson counters that this “recent egalitarian writing has lost sight of the distinctively political aims of egalitarianism.” She continues:
The proper negative aim of egalitarian justice is not to eliminate the impact of brute luck from human affairs, but to end oppression, which by definition is socially imposed. Its proper positive aim is not to ensure that everyone gets what they morally deserve, but to create a community in which people stand in relations of equality to others.
Luck egalitarians, in other words, imagine the quest for equality as a species of insurance adjustment or litigation (appropriately, since many were law professors). The proper goal of equality is first to distinguish uncontrollable misfortunes from foreseeable or preventable adversities, and then to determine how much damage the former actually caused and how best to compensate for that damage.
That compensation, it is important to point out, is supposed to come from the unearned privileges of the truly fortunate—people who won life’s lottery by being born into wealthy families, or perhaps were born beautiful or brilliant. Anderson quotes Richard Arneson, one of the most uncompromising of the luck egalitarians:
The concern of distributive justice is to compensate individuals for misfortune. Some people are blessed with good luck, some are cursed with bad luck, and it is the responsibility of society—all of us regarded collectively—to alter the distribution of goods and evils that arises from the jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it . . . Distributive justice stipulates that the lucky should transfer some or all of their gains due to luck to the unlucky.
“The jumble of lotteries that constitutes human life as we know it” is a nice phrase, but it is also a very particular way of looking at the world, one that is far more dominant, I think, than the philosophy of luck egalitarianism or any of the individual proposals put forward by the philosophers whom Anderson critiques.
Anderson’s critique of luck egalitarianism resonated with me, therefore, and seemed to connect to the present admissions scandal because her definition of equality as the eradication of oppressive relationships between or among people seems so extraordinarily distant from the issues that normally come up in conversations about meritocracy, while those issues that the luck egalitarians ponder seem so close.
Or to turn the point around, the issue of college admissions may be one of the best demonstrations of the intractable contradictions of the luck egalitarian’s worldview, of the belief that life is a set of lotteries, and that properly social goals are geared toward trying to manage the outcomes of those lotteries.
If college admissions bills itself—usually tacitly—as meritocratic, this is the content of that meritocracy: that it is making an attempt to manage the outcomes of life’s lotteries, adjusting for factors that applicants cannot control and assigning credit or discredit for applicants’ performance in areas they clearly can control.
And by those lights, it is not entirely clear that controversial practices like legacy admissions or giving preference to the children of large donors are really so inconsistent with meritocracy. “Luck” works in mysterious ways, after all. One can (sophistically but plausibly) argue that it is no one’s fault that they were born with subpar math skills, so if their parents can counteract that bad fortune with the good fortune of being born with lots of money, is that not a permissible adjustment of life’s lotteries?
Let me be absolutely clear: I am not arguing for the validity of legacy admissions or the morality of donating one’s way into a prestigious school. I am arguing against the proposition that admissions should be a matter of managing life’s lotteries. This worldview—as Anderson argues—is the problem: the presumption that luck (rather than oppression) is the dominant force in social sorting, and that ameliorative activities of any kind ought to be aimed at smoothing out the vagaries of luck.
I don’t at this juncture want to plunge into the question of why this worldview has been so dominant over the past, say, sixty years, but I think it’s a very worthwhile one and an important one for intellectual historians to answer. Certainly, the recent work of many intellectual historians who have traced the growing power of statistical reasoning and even the actual insurance industry in shaping popular understandings of “human life as we know it” are essential here. I’ve already plugged Dan Bouk’s book How Our Days Became Numbered before on this blog, but you can certainly start there, or with Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune or Scott Sandage’s Born Losers or… well, I’ll save it for some other time.
Notes
[1] Earlier this year, Anderson was profiled in the New Yorker.
6 Thoughts on this Post
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Just a couple of brief observations (none of which have anything to do with the ‘admissions scandal’) as the topic is enormously complex and some of the best minds in moral and political philosophy have engaged in ongoing debates (meaning the specific arguments have changed over time) about the merits (or lack thereof) of the respective views on “relational equality” and “luck egalitarianism.” While Andy clearly favors Anderson’s views here (not long ago I posted a piece sympathetic to those views, while endeavoring to supplement them with conventional luck egalitarian arguments and proposals), the characterization of arguments of those who disagree with her is mistaken.
First, the following is at best misleading but I think inaccurate:
“Luck egalitarians, in other words, imagine the quest for equality as a species of insurance adjustment or litigation (appropriately, since many were law professors). The proper goal of equality is first to distinguish uncontrollable misfortunes from foreseeable or preventable adversities, and then to determine how much damage the former actually caused and how best to compensate for that damage.”
This gets close to the arguments of one luck egalitarian in particular, Ronald Dworkin, but it is far from doing justice to the arguments of others like Richard Arneson, John Roemer, and the lamentably late G.A. (‘Gerry’) Cohen. Furthermore, the parenthetical reference in the description of the putative model of these luck egalitarians “as a species of insurance adjustment or litigation (appropriately, since many were law professors)” is mistaken, as the foremost exponents of luck egalitarians, most notably Cohen, Arneson, and Kok-Chor Tan, are moral and political philosophers (yet another, John Roemer, is an economist), even if they sometimes hold (or held) appointments in academic departments with a jurisprudential orientation. Only Dworkin and Eric Rakowski have primarily legal backgrounds, although in both cases they’re known as “philosophers of law” and thus not your typical law professor (the latter has a couple of degrees in philosophy and is, appropriately, also affiliated with UC Berkeley’s Philosophy Department).
I happened to find G.A. Cohen’s arguments against relational egalitarians like Anderson (and Rawls—at least the earliest version thereof—for that matter) persuasive* but that is neither here nor there with regard to the gist of my comment. In any case, we might keep in mind something written by Arneson in his very helpful (online) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on “Egalitarianism:”
“Relational equality advocates usually advance their equality ideal as a rival to other understandings of equality including luck egalitarianism. But these disparate equality ideals need not be opposed. For example, one could (1) affirm relational equality and hold that in a just society people should relate as free and equal and also (2) affirm luck egalitarianism and hold that people should be equal in their condition (according to their holdings and attainments of resources, capabilities, or welfare or according to some other measure) except that people’s being less well off than others is acceptable if the worse off could have avoided this fate by reasonable voluntary choice. One could uphold both ideals even if they sometimes conflict. One could also mix and match elements of these different equality ideals.”
* If one is sufficiently provoked by this remark please see, for example, Cohen’s Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard University Press, 2008) and the posthumously published volume edited by Michael Otsuka, On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice and Other Essays in Political Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2011).
Just a quick thought:
When tens of thousands of students apply to the most “selective” schools each year and the admittance rates at those places are in the five or six percent range (as is the case with at least several of them), the process itself is close to a lottery, or a roll of the dice, for the majority of applicants (notwithstanding the schools’ claims to the contrary). So, far from “managing the outcomes of life’s lotteries,” the admissions process at the most selective institutions is, for most applicants, something very close to a de facto lottery. Or at least one could make a quite plausible argument to that effect.
Patrick and Louis,
Thanks for these comments!
Patrick,
I appreciate the gist of your correction, but I’m not sure our differences amount to an issue of one or the other of us being “mistaken.” Instead, I think a lot depends on which luck egalitarians one chooses to emphasize. I do think of Dworkin and Nagel, especially, as well as Rakowski as the more significant figures–in this, I am following (as I’m sure you recognize) Anderson’s own lead. I do not think that it is as unimportant as you indicate that each of these men had appointments in law schools; instead, I see it as having had a powerful influence on the way they approached traditional ethical problems.
Louis,
I absolutely agree that admissions to the more “selective” schools is itself a lottery. Each of them likes to report on how many valedictorians or students with a perfect SAT score they reject each year–to me, that indicates at least some acknowledgment that they have so many qualified applicants that admission decisions are not settled simply by rank-ordering those applicants. Some luck or at least contingency is necessarily involved. So perhaps it is more accurate to say that the image these schools project is that admission to them is a kind of lottery of lotteries, but I think the more general point still remains: so far as these schools represent themselves as egalitarian institutions (and not as instruments for reinforcing existing stratifications), the definition of equality that they promote is much closer to luck egalitarianism than to Anderson’s democratic equality.
Andy,
Yes, I take your point. (I haven’t read Anderson’s work and am not sure whether I will — a matter of time and priorities, etc. — but maybe I’ll read the New Yorker profile; anyway, thanks for linking it, and for the post.)
Thanks for this Andy, so much good stuff to chew on here.
Ditto Robin on thanks for this post. I hadn’t given much thought to “luck egalitarians,” or their relationship to meritocracy, before this post. – TL