The Weird Meritocracy of Liberal Capitalism

It is all too easy for anyone interested in social sciences or ethics to adopt an over-simplilfied and univocal idea of justice, and its concomitant rights, duties, merits, and deserts. As Aristotle notes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ideas of merit are largely dependent upon the types of social structures that people inhabit, or roles which they occupy: “Democrats say it is freedom; oligarchs, wealth; others, good birth; aristocrats, virtue.” (5.3) Aristotle does not appear to be ruling out any one of these conceptions of merit; rather, he is cautioning against reducing justice to any one of them — or exalting any one of them to fill the whole notion of justice.

A healthy society incorporates into its structures and institutions an ideal of justice which accommodates all possible senses of merit, or as many as possible. An unhealthy society, naturally, builds its social structures around a limited and univocal sense of justice. Were Aristotle alive today, he would undoubtedly identify in the social structures of liberal capitalism the spirit, not of democracy, but of oligarchy, where wealth is the principal measure of merit. The virtuous in liberal America, those whom American society sets up as models to be emulated, are none other than the successful, the wealthy, those who make a profit for themselves by a lifetime of making clever investments. In fact, wealth itself…