The Tyranny of Merit | Michael Sandel, political philosopher, conversation

good evening and welcome everyone to wrath about reflect my name is christoph luty i'm professor of philosophy and dean of the faculty of philosophy theology and religious studies at radwa university naimegan i'll be your moderator tonight we are really really delighted to have professor michael sandell in our midst this evening professor sandel is professor of philosopher political philosophy at harvard university and is without doubt one of the most renowned visible and influential political philosophers of our time thank you so much for joining us tonight you have written it's great to be with you thank you so much you've written numerous books on the most vexing moral and civic uh questions of our time your by now legendary course justice has been viewed by tens of millions of people and your books for example what money can't buy the moral limits of market or justice what's the right thing to do are international best sellers our invitation to join us tonight alas only virtually and not in person has two reasons more immediate reason is of course your latest book the tyranny of merit which has recently come out in dutch prince translation under the title the tyranny von fodenster over the two comes from the democracy the more general reason is that we as routebout university recognize and recognize ourselves in the series of standpoints that you've taken over the years and in ideals that you promote we feel as it were a set of concerns that we as a teaching and research institution and you as an academic and public intellectual share and this is why our magnifice professor han von greeken is here to give you a special welcome please welcome dear michael sandel i feel very fortunate to have you here for this discussion this evening as wrecker of rudbart university it's a special feeling since our university started 98 years ago as part of the catholic emancipation movement at that time catholic felt that through education they could gain a place in the public life in the netherlands which was until that time not so much possible of course nowadays it's not the catholics anymore that need further emancipation at least not in the netherlands but other groups and i'm proud that as rudba university we still attract a lot of students first-generation students from our region which includes a part of germany students whom whose parents have not a college degree and also personally i i feel very attached to that because my parents don't even have a high school diploma because they had to work when they are 14 and 15 to have an income for their families i feel also lucky to be here because i came into the academic life through medical school through a lottery which was possible at that time and and my number was even so good that i could choose the university where i wanted to go which was the local university but actually the university that's the most ivy league-like university we have in the netherlands namely leiden but i choose that university because i could stay home with my parents and keep my living because i had no idea what academic life as a student would be so you can feel maybe that personally but also as university rector i'm very looking forward to an aspiring event where you will discuss with our students and some of our students and some of our teachers on the important topics of your book so thank you for being here and i hope you have a pleasant night as we have thank you thank you very much that means a lot you so much rector von kriegen professor sandell you preferred to engage in discussion and debate rather than give a lecture you will tonight meet the following people matas von zander who is assistant professor of political philosophy here agnes ackermann who is a sociologist and full professor of industrial relations you will also be debating cherelle de leo who is a master student in political science but also a city city councillor of the green party you will meet uh marlin housing who is a lawyer and master student in philosophy also with a career in uh politics and florian van dyse a research master student in political philosophy the procedure tonight will be as follows i will be allowed to start off the interview and then we'll make the the panel join you and after that at the end of tonight there will be room for some questions from you namely the audience you can send in questions via um i think you've seen that on the on the screen right now www.menti.com and there is a code and the code is one five two two seven eight nine four so either you see this on the screen or you can find it on our website okay maybe a good start professor sandal is for those of us in the audience who haven't read the book yet to to ask a general question about the book namely the tyrann of merit so those who've already read the book have noticed the urgency that is behind your your your book so the question with which i would like to start is saying when's this urgency why did it have to be written now and what do you hope to change in the reader who reads this book well thank you thank you very much christoph and i want to thank the rector for those warm and i find inspiring remarks about the university and also about the rector's own path i find that very inspiring and very much in line with the ideals that inspired the book now kristoff you ask what's the source of the urgency i've been thinking about meritocracy in connection with debates about justice for a long time but i began thinking about this book trying to make sense of the events of 2016 the book for brexit in the uk the election of donald trump in the united states it was clear that animating these events and the similar rise of authoritarian populist movements in countries around the world that something was happening and how to make sense of it that was the question that prompted me to write the tyranny of merit and to speak of merit as a tyranny i admit it's paradoxical because we ordinarily think of merit as a good thing even as an ideal if i need surgery i want a well-qualified surgeon to perform it so merit as such is a good thing and yet meritocracy over the last four decades has turned toxic and the book tries to explain why and perhaps we can get into this as our conversation unfolds kristoff well the i think thank you so much for your answer we can start the um the discussion right away i've been allowed to ask you one question and here i go you talked about 2016 and the populism that that we connect with donald trump and brexit and of course when you read your book um from our point of view from our geographical point of view much of it is recognizable it's recognizable for two reasons one is that we've all been watching of course this baffling four year period of donald trump and we've all been following of course brexit and it's equally long four year period that it took to uh to to come to an end or to at least come to a resolution and we also have our own populists here and the a similar kind of anti-meritocratic uh rhetoric at the same time however um there's also a sense when one reads your book where that there's also a sense that this is a particularly american story having lived in the united states myself for seven years i thought at the time that i lived there that maybe the greatest lie about the meritocratic promise from rags to riches was not so much college admission but much more the kind of education you got at elementary school and high school and i'm thinking now of the fact that if you're from a continental european country you find completely unforgivable namely that schools are being paid through property tax so if you happen to be from a poor district a kid per year might only be get five thousand dollars worth of education if you're from a particularly rich um district you might have as much as forty thousand dollars invested in you per year so the the the playing field seems to be skewed from the very very beginning um now when you speak about trump and brexit one thing's yes the same thing is true for the youth for england i mean that is a particularly uneven educational system although for different reasons so if i can turn this into a question the question would be and that's a typical question from a kind of citizen of a social democratic welfare state of the the type that you find in scandinavia and in some parts of of western europe might it not be the case that the anger you describe at the educated elites is strongest in those countries where the school system is at its most skewed and that you can avoid the takeover of these resentments by investing in good schools for everyone from the very beginning i'm certain i'm certainly in favor of investing in good schools from the beginning and you're certainly right kristoff that the system of school finance primary and secondary school finance in the united states is particularly backward and unprogressive because of the the way in which poor schools are underfunded so there is no question that this is a problem it's a source of injustice and it deepens inequality and it makes social mobility more difficult from all of these points of view it's a bad system now and i can see how it would seem especially shocking looking from a social democratic welfare state which is more generous more developed than that that prevails in the united states so i agree with the premise of your question i i would i'm not sure i would agree entirely to the suggestion and perhaps you didn't intend this kristoff as a suggestion that the social democratic welfare states of europe are exempt from the tyranny of merit because i think one of the striking features and there may be some specially acute american aspects of this problem but what's striking looking across democratic societies including ones with strong social democratic welfare states is how the mainstream political parties have lost a great deal of confidence and support among voters and how the the intellectual and ideological and political agenda and vision especially if central left parties seems to have faltered seems to have lost its capacity to inspire and i think this is connected to the growing uh dependence of especially center-left political parties in europe and in the u.s in britain on the these have become the parties of the professional classes of the credentialed classes of the well-educated university educated classes and increasingly these parties have alienated and lost the support of working people and especially those without a university degree and this i think connects the backlash against elites the populist backlash that we see in political parties in in france and in germany you know better than i do about the political scene in the netherlands connects it to the sources of support that trump was able to exploit and that we see anti-immigrant and anti-european parties in in europe and in britain exploit and this i think has to do partly with dark things xenophobia strident nationalism and in some cases with trump for example outright racism but there's also another important aspect to the source of this backlash populist backlash against elites and this has to do with the sense among many people that elites credentialed elites looked down on them looked down with disdain in recent decades kristoff the divide between winners and losers has been deepening in all of our societies poisoning our politics pulling us apart this has partly to do with widening inequalities but it's not only that it has also to do it seems to me with changing attitudes towards success that have come with it those who've landed on top during this age of globalization of market-driven globalization those who've landed on top have come to believe that their success is their own doing the measure of their merit and that by implication those who struggle those left behind must deserve their fate as well and these attitudes towards success i call it meritocratic hubris the hubris among the winners the sense of demoralization even humiliation among those who lose out this reflects a certain meritocratic ideal the idea that if chances were equal the winners would deserve their winnings and i think this way of thinking about success has compounded the effect of the widening inequalities not only in the u.s and britain but also it seems to me but you in this distinguished panel will tell me if i'm wrong in many european democracies as well we have created in recent decades societies of winners and losers and this is at the heart of what i call kristoff the tyranny of merit well thank you so much for your eloquent reply i would so much like to go through with my questions but i'm not allowed to because i'm only the moderator in fact who will take over is cherelle de leo yes hi thank you so much for being here and also for writing your book i found it immensely thought provoking especially because it takes a notion that we take for granted and it turns it on its head namely that the fact that your talent or your education basically merits you a certain type of income um it's a it's an issue that's taken for granted in political theory but it's an issue that's also taken for granted in well real life basically and i found it really um really inspiring to to see you translate the one into the other basically into a discussion that i can also have with my mom who doesn't have a college degree either but when i was reading your book you argue against using merits or education or basically any form of talent or luck as a moral basis for the redistribution of income and wealth and um i'm not gonna say i was left a bit disappointed but i was hungry for for basically your answer to the question um whether there is a moral basis for the allocation or the redistribution of goods or income so i wondered if you could maybe elaborate on that a little bit more yes in fact to clarify what could be a possible misunderstanding for which i take full responsibility if this is how you read it cheryl the the main thrust of my criticism of meritocracy is that it leads the winners to believe their success is their own doing it cultivates the image uh that we the successful are self-made and self-sufficient and therefore that they owe little if anything to those who struggle because those who struggle have no one to blame but themselves and part of what makes this a kind of tyranny is that meritocracy is corrosive of the common good it's corrosive of any sense of mutual responsibility for our fellow citizens and that includes the responsibility of those who have flourished in the global economy to share their wealth and good fortune with those who have struggled who have struggled in large part because of the configuration of the economy and so the redistribution of the winnings or rather the sharing of the winnings with everyone with the entire society is precisely a part of the politics of the common good that i am arguing for and i think the only the only way we can begin to argue for this more generous conception of the common good and the responsibility of the of the winners to share their winnings with those who haven't flourished in the new economy the only way to make the case for that kind of redistribution is to build up resources of solidarity and of shared citizenship and of mutual responsibility that are obstructed in so far as we are in the grip of the self-image that it's all our own doing so it is precisely and here's where i want to clear up any possible misunderstanding it's precisely to open us to this sense of shared responsibility that i argue against the idea that success is one is is the doing of the successful and that they therefore deserve the material rewards that flow their way in a market economy so this is providing the moral basis for a greater sense of solidarity and which i think we need if we're to begin to rebuild the social bonds that have come unraveled during the last four decades cheryl does that address the worry that you had kind of um no it does and i think that uh like arguing for the common good and solidarity that that's very important in your book you address basically um tax and income disparities and stuff like that um but your problem analysis focuses much more on rhetoric on the use of language and how are we going to like like fixing numbers or redistributional issues that's well not easy either politically at least but it's it's something that can easily be fixed i think but like changing uh the language we use uh the way we talk about people with with lower income who are down on their luck basically is there um how are we going to change that because it's very easy to say well let's be more um let's focus more on the common good but then how are we going to do that if the people that merit from this system don't have any real incentive to do so well the first i do think there is a connection and you may disagree with this but it seems to me there's an unnecessary connection in politics between political discourse political argument the moral foundations reflected in the terms of public discourse on the one hand and the actual policies that are feasible that can on the other because we need a certain way of conceiving our common life and our shared citizenship if we're even to to begin to reconfigure the economy in a way that honors our commonality now one of the concrete ways i think we need to shift our public discourse to point to actual changes in policy and in the design of the economy is to focus less on what i call the rhetoric of rising during the last three four decades mainstream politicians across the political spectrum center right and center left alike have addressed the widening inequality of globalization not by dealing with it directly by reconfiguring the economy but instead by making an offer to those who suffered from the inequality who suffered from wage stagnation and job loss by by offering them the following if you want to compete and win in the global economy go to university get a degree what you earn will depend on what you learn you can make it if you try all of the emphasis was in dealing with inequality and wage stagnation by telling workers go better yourself get a degree now i'm all in favor of expanding access to higher education that's a good thing for its own sake but it's a mistake to assume or to frame a whole political project around the idea that the way to respond to inequality and wage stagnation is to tell workers they're not well educated enough and they as individuals should try to better themselves so the shift i argue for in the book is from arming people for meritocratic competition toward focusing more on the dignity of work on renewing the dignity of work on making life better for everyone regardless of how well credentialed they are and i discuss a range of policies that could do this including greater investment in those forms of learning that most people depend on to prepare themselves for the world of work including vocational and technical training that's just one example but the broader the broader theme is to recognize that work is not only a way of making a living not only a way of gaining access to purchasing power it's also a way of contributing to the common good and winning recognition for having done so part of what i think is so deeply frustrating to many working people that's galling even to many working people is the sense of being looked down on the sense that the work they do is not honored or recognized or esteemed by the wider society that should be our political project and by our political project i mean of those parties who would offer a way of speaking to the sense of grievance to the legitimate sense of grievance by working people that a society of winners and losers where the winners are defined largely by their credentials have left them a great many people uh behind so it's a matter it's a matter of philosophical framing it's a matter of political rhetoric but it's also a matter of shifting the focus of of the response by by politics by the political system by the national community to the condition of inequality the society of winners and losers the loss of social esteem by great many workers that have fueled understandably the discontent that we see in democratic societies everywhere cherelle i hope that addresses the the kind of question you had in mind well it better had because cherelle is out of words and i give the word to marlene housing yes well thank you thank you um well um the last words you spoke about democracies that is actually what i found in the book the most interesting connection uh uh that you make you know all the flaws of meritocracy and their consequences on democracy and um i found that well uh uh actually very very uh interesting but also a bit alarming and um giving me a sense of well the urgency that christoph talked about in the beginning our urgency towards the future towards the future of our democracies and i have a question that actually came from me reading your acknowledgements in the back of your book after reading the book um where you tell us that you have discussed your book or themes in your book with many people being colleague ivy league professors your harvard students some renowned academic institutes worldwide and i was um after reading that to be honest i felt a bit uneasy uh especially uh just you know writing or reading your book and the theme where uh where we where you talk about the winners and the losers and it seemed that in consulting uh uh people uh when you wrote the book you kind of uh were in the group of the winners and i was kind of thinking well um did you did you talk or consult also the losers this is not my term of course but um so and i should say nor mine i should say no no of course i understand it's it's it's the way well maybe society perceives or me people perceive themselves i don't know but let's stick to the terms so i was wondering first of all did you talk to or consult in writing this book the losers and maybe an even broader or more general uh thought uh when we talk about the future of democracy we will you yourself just talked about political parties representation but maybe even in political philosophy like you yourself and all of us here there is hardly any representation of well let's say again the losers of society and um to me that feels like a problem because well different standpoints uh um are needed i think we i mean we see that in the philosophy of science also to get a broader idea of the problem and also of the analysis and the solution so i feel we have a focus on standpoints of gender of ethnical racial backgrounds of religion but it seems that social class isn't something that we um i don't know that we even consider to be an important standpoint in political philosophy right now we are and we are thankful for it but we are discussing uh with you a harvard professor and we read and uh discuss all the theories of you and your colleagues so what are your thoughts on that is there a blank spot in all of our worlds right now well i think the issue of representation which you've identified is of central importance to this challenge and the first place we should look uh and you said you found the analysis alarming and it is alarming first place we should look to understand what's the the crisis democracy is facing in our societies is that institutions of representative government um as well as institutions of higher education i discuss both in the book as you know and we've done we've been more attentive though perhaps still not attentive enough to broadening access and representation to institutions of higher education and institutions of representative government along lines of race and gender and ethnicity then we have with regard to class representation and one of the most striking questions of representation uh and i've been unaware of this until i was doing the research for the book is if we look at the membership of parliaments of legislatures in democracies around the world during this period of four decades roughly speaking the age of merit and of market-driven globalization or neoliberal globalization those without a college education have become virtually absent from parliaments and legislatures in our societies virtually absent if you look at the representation of people without a university degree or from a working class background in parliaments and legislatures in the major western democracies today the percentages are tiny so small is the percentage of those without a university degree in the parliaments of western europe and britain and the united states that it is approaching the levels or put it in other ways so great is the dominance of those with a university degree in these places in these parliament that it's approaching the the degree of representation that existed back in the days of the late 19th century when there was a property qualification for voting and then when universal suffrage came in there was a substantial increase in the 20th century in representation of working people and those without university credentials in parliaments but by the 1990s 90s and 2000s it's it's in terms of representation almost as if we're back in the days before universal suffrage and we take this for granted what's striking what's alarming to borrow your term marlene is there's very little debate about this this is especially striking if we recognize which those of us who spend our time in the company of the credential can forget most people in our societies do not have a four-year or a three-year university degree the majority do not in the united states nearly two-thirds do not have a four-year university degree and in most western european countries i don't know the exact perhaps you will know the exact figure in the netherlands the majority of people do not have a university degree and yet almost almost all representatives elected to parliaments do and this i think requires attention it's not been this issue has not been at the forefront of the populist complaint against elites but it's a symbol of how despite our emphasis on broadening access and diversity with regard to race and gender and ethnicity all of which are very important we have not done the same for class or educational background and so perhaps it's no surprise that the sense of disempowerment and alienation and exclusion has begun to run so deep that many working people resent mainstream parties dominated by credential day leads and are letting it be known often in dangerous ways fueling undesirable dangerous alarming right-wing populist political parties and movements so i think any attempt to deal with the tyranny of merit has to has to be more alive than we have been to the educational and class background of representative institutions not only in government but also and perhaps will come to this in higher education right because well i i think we recognize your uh your plead uh very much so right now in holland there are uh elections and i wrote an article that i think less than one percent of the people that are probably being elected uh have do not have a higher degree so i mean this is a very true point also in our society but i was kind of uh trying to look at ourselves like the political philosophers or political philosophy in general um okay if we look at the french philosopher pierre rosavalon he states that a democracy consists of institutions administration contra democracy but also he feels a a very important part is the thinking part of democracy and the thinking part of democracy is mainly what we are doing right now and what is your profession also and i was also wondering of course we should do something about representation in parliament and political parties institutions and so on but how do you see we can well say open up our own world our own political philosopher's world to an extent where we also incorporate the thinking power of people without an education do you see how we can do that professor sandel can you keep the answer short because we have a whole cue here of other questions thank you okay well this is a very important question i'll try to address it briefly i very much agree that the thinking part of democracy and i don't know if you were quoting pierre osama law on that but i love that phrase is an important part of creating a democratic culture in the book i address this directly by suggesting that we've made a mistake especially thinking about the teaching of moral and political philosophy and civic education we've made a mistake to concentrate this activity in the citadel of higher education and then conduct a meritocratic tournament to see who will gain access to it and as you remember from the from the end of the book what i argue for is going beyond even a fair equality of opportunity toward what i call a broad democratic equality of condition and one of the central aspects of that project is a broad diffusion of learning and of education including of moral and political philosophy and civic education beyond the walls or the gates of academia where we would have access to teaching and learning and discussion especially about civic questions within the civil within civil society in unions in the workplace in community colleges in vocational and technical training centers this broad diffusion of democratic learning i think is this essential to creating a culture in a diffusion a democratic equality of condition and in terms of experiments that i've done and they're only experiments in this direction they include using a technology to open access to my harvard classroom to create free public access online to my entire justice course for whomever wants to watch it engage with it anywhere in the world and also to go further and try to create global platforms for public discussion whether using the internet or using radio and television traditional media to bring the kinds of debates that political philosophers deal with into contact with the world and citizens who care about these questions whether they be credentialed or not and a large part of my activity has been in developing especially using technology platforms to do experiments to see how we might make this possible so it's it's a subject it's a project that i care deeply about okay let's find out whether the question by professor agnes ackermann goes in the same direction and i would like to ask everyone involved in harvard adenai megan to keep questions and answers short because otherwise we run out of time okay thank you i'll try first of all it's a great pleasure for me to engage in a conversation with you on your book and most importantly on its message as a sociologist i'm inspired and interested most of all between on the divide between those with a college degree and those without a college degree and although your analysis is predominantly a normative analysis i would like to focus on the empirical analysis of it so the empirical message claim you make i would summarize as follows the over-appreciation of merit in terms of education or effort leads to feelings of superiority in those who were able to obtain a degree in higher education giving the ones who did not the idea that they are looked down on leading to resentment eventually leading to a preferences for what we would call populist parties and i would like to shine some light some empirical light on two elements of this hypothesis the first one people without a college degree feel humiliated and look down second this leads them to turn to populist political parties my research team and i collected data on exactly those sentiments you described in your book we asked them whether they felt detached from society or excluded whether they had the feeling that others didn't appreciate the value of what they did whether they feel felt looked down on and whether they felt invisible in society we related these feelings to their educational attainment and their political preferences we do find support for your empirical claim yes those not having a college degree or a degree in higher education feel looked down on and yes these feelings correlate with a higher preference for populist political parties also in the netherlands however we also found another important factor and that is people's employment contract which is also correlated which also correlates with these sentiments these feelings of being feeling humiliated this means two things first and it they did it does relate regardless their educational attainment so this means two things first of all of the people without a college degree in particular those in unsecured labor suffer these feelings of being looked down upon or feeling left out and detached from society second also people with a degree in higher education feel humiliated and looked down upon if they work in unsecured labor employment these findings raise two questions in me first can your analysis help to interpret or explain this finding is this just another consequence of feature of meroxy or something else and second more practical question would reorganizing the labor market institutions such as employment protection legislation not be an easier or even maybe a sufficient solution to the problem than changing the perceived relation between the elite and the working class which cannot be enforced and would take at least one generation if not more well it's fascinating your the studies that you've done and i would like to read them uh i'd be fascinated to read them and perhaps afterwards you you can share with me some of the references or i will look them up this is fascinating to me including the last part you mentioned about insecure labor which is going to matter more and more in the gig economy where more and more workers are working at jobs that are not under a regular employment contract as to your question about how i would interpret this and whether it's in line with my general account i think it is through the notion of the dignity of work which i argue has been eroded and that the erosion of the dignity of work i think has been a big part of the the grievances and sense of disempowerment and it's easy to see the connection between insecure labor contracts and people feeling uh that their work is not dignified or appreciated or honored or respected so developing the normative framework of the dignity of work i think would be very much consistent with your findings about insecure labor being an independent factor in explaining people's sense of social exclusion whether fixing that through regulation of the employ of employment contracts would be a sufficient response to the sense among many working people or non-college educated workers their sense of exclusion and disempowerment i i think it would be an important step but i don't think it would be sufficient a very important step and very worthwhile but i would not see it as a separate measure from calling into question the relation between well-credentialed elites and the and and the working class the reason is first even to get those uh regulatory reforms of the labor contract i think we have to [Music] call into question the sharp divide between credentialed elites who feel entitled and who look down upon working people without a university degree because where it's going to be difficult to build this political support even to to establish regulatory response to insecure labor without making people aware of that divide in the important to imports of overcoming it then the reason i think it's an important step but not a sufficient step is that we have to reward work properly both in financial terms but also i think in terms of honor and esteem and dignity and this requires changing regulations but also changing attitudes and i agree with you that changing attitudes is a longer term project than a more difficult one so i would say let's go for both let's institute such regulatory reforms of the labor of labor that we can and i would say also strengthen unions to give workers voice which is also an important part of dignity but in the course of doing that we need to rethink the attitudes and we need to try to repair the gulf of esteem between the credentialed elites and large numbers of working class men and women i must alas assume that you're entirely swayed by the perfect answer thank you the good thing is that you'll be in contact afterwards i give the floor to florian van der say yes uh thank you so much for uh your interesting book and this opportunity to ask you um some questions that occurred to me when reading it that stayed with me and there were two most of all and the first one has to do with the topic that we just talked about so basically the the ideal of meritocracy can be summarized with the statement that you get what you deserve and you point out that there are two sides to disbelief or this ideal first there is the exaltation of human agency it is your effort that determines where you end up and second there is uh the moral dimension that the rewards be stowed upon you as a function of where you've ended up are in agreement with what you morally deserve and you address both of these problems both in the in the form of critique and you attempt to [Music] find ways of countering them practically so in the in the second to last chapter of your book you addressed most of all the exultation of human agency when you introduce or when you say that against this idea we should introduce chance or fortune for example you say we could introduce a lottery of the qualified into the college admissions process of the most selective colleges and in the last chapter of the book you talk about the erosion of the dignity of work and about the need for contributive justice for the redistribution of both recognition of the moral contribution of certain types of work and as a means of accomplishing that the redistribution of wealth and i was wondering i had the feeling that when you take the last project of contributive justice very seriously the two aims might clash that this last project might reintroduce the notion of getting what you deserve and i was wondering whether you agreed and how you how you think about this great it's a brilliant question and beautifully put thank you for that it's really terrific and subtle uh uh you're right there is both a a criticism of well the allure of meritocracy is that we can make it if we try we are self-made and self-sufficient this idea of human agency that you mentioned florian and that but then contributive justice which addresses this question of the dignity of work seems to reinstate a kind of alignment between the contributions we make and the honor we receive and isn't that reintroducing a kind of appreciation of merit or contribution it's it's really really an astute and subtle question let me see if i can respond to it i would respond to it by focusing on how you characterized the ideal of human agency that underlies the kind of heady appealing inspiring a promise that i can live in a world we can live in a world where the winners deserve their winnings because they've done it themselves it's our doing what i'm challenging in challenging this idea is not the promise of human agency as such but i'm challenging construing human agency or human freedom in individualistic terms it's indiv it's an individualistic and overly individualistic idea of agency that i'm challenging can make it if you try that's an individualistic promise i am self-made and self-sufficient my success is my own doing the way i want to lean against this is not to extinguish agency not to say we are just drifting uh and that all of life and all of our fate exceeds human control what i want to say is we exercise freedom not only as self-making individuals but as members of a political community engaged in a project and that project involves contributing and answering the needs of others and receiving recognition this is the second point about dignity of work and receiving recognition for the contributions we make our contributions are reflected back to us and this is a source of integrating me with the community as a whole and when a scheme of contributive justice is intact we have a society of mutual recognition and mutual dependence so the idea that we are mutually dependent is at odds with the first idea of individual agency my success is my own doing and so on reflection what that image of self-making misses is not only the role of luck in life but also the sense in which i am indebted for my success we are indebted for our success and to begin to reflect on the sources of our of our debt as well as the sources of our luck in good fortune we our attention is redirected toward the economy and the society as a scheme of mutual contribution and recognition and it's this ultimately that tempers or constrains florian this individualistic notion of agency that is embodied in the meritocratic ideal and in the winners and losers and in the forgetting of luck and indebtedness so i i would not extinguish agency i would have us reconstruct it as a kind of collective understanding of agency we are we can be participants in shaping our fate provided we do it together in community with fellow citizens whom we understand as equals and whom we recognize through a scheme of mutual recognition that's how that's how i would address the tension that you very astutely identified it's an individualistic notion of agency that i think is the heart of the problem and that's why the the scheme of contribution and recognition addresses it rather than undermines it do you see what i'm proposing florian yes yes i do yes and for fear that he will ask another astute question i'm swinging quickly to my subtle colleague from the philosophy department uh mathias van der zande thank you thank you very much thank you professor sundell i would like to get back to some of the issues that were already raised by shell in the beginning of this conversation mainly about the the difference between say [Music] discursive change change in public discourse on the one hand and um uh institutional change on the other and i think that's particularly important because as you've already stressed a couple of times this tyranny of meritocracy of course affects the legitimacy of our democratic institutions and procedures as well so it has very strong democratic implications um and it struck me as as some others have also already suggested that most of the proposals that you develop in your book seem to be intended to affect the public discourse but if we really want to change something about the legitimacy of our democratic institutions and how it is perceived then arguably we may also need to some need to do something about the structural form of these institutions and procedures um now what struck me also when i read your book is that you make a case for lottery specifically in the context of education but how i read it perhaps i misread it how i read it your book is that the educational system and the the high comp uh the high rate of competition there is at least in part a symptom or a symbol for a much more widespread meritocratic discourse so only one aspect of what we may call meritocracy yet when you talk about solutions you only apply the solution of the lottery to the educational system and it struck me because there is also a contemporary philosophical debate on certification so the use of lottery in our democratic institutions as well some philosophers argue now it's quite a popular debate at the moment argue that we should replace at least some of our representative institutions and make assemble them on the basis not of elections but on the basis of sortition of lottery and basically let a random selection of citizens we can involve a number of criteria of course gender etc but let a random selection of citizens make major decisions in legislative or policy uh debates so my question to you would be um couldn't we if we want to if we agree with your analysis if we share your analysis on the um of the the damage that this meritocracy does to our democratic institutions and its legitimacy couldn't we propose to expand this idea of lottery to the to to our democratic institutions as a whole and not only articulate an alternative political or public discourse but also more radically change the way our democratic democratic institutions are set up yes yeah yeah it's it's a great question and the short answer is i think it's worth exploring and i think that uh some versions of sortition could be compatible with and a possible response to the the tyranny of merit with the following qualification it's important not to see a lottery system or a system of sortition for represent for for government as an alternative to the current system understood as a system where we have the best people who are elected and therefore govern because a big part of the problem currently with representative government is that the people who are governing are not the most meritorious even though they may be the most credentialed i would distinguish between the two i think one of the main [Music] defects in the system of representative government that we have now is first is highly unrepresentative in ways we discussed earlier especially with regard to class and educational background but also that at least in my country it's dominated by money it's a kind there's a kind of oligarchic capture of democratic and representative institutions so i would ideally like to radically reduce the role and influence of money in the election of representatives and part of the appeal of sortition is it would be a way of overcoming and really leaping beyond a a system where money matters where money matters more than it should and also where credentials especially technocratic credentials matter more than they should so for those reasons it might be i i would be open to exploring various ways of bringing sore tissue to bear at least in some elements of representative government but i don't want to give up entirely on representation in democracy i would rather criticize the role of money and oligarchic capture and try to remove those corrupting influences and i would rather draw attention to the credentialist prejudice and also i would say the technocratic civic formation of those who dominate representative institutions i would rather put it another way i would rather give working people a greater voice in democracy if we could do that effectively then then give up on representative democracy but if we can't or as a way of breaking through the the combined credentialist technocratic oligarchic tendencies of representative democracy as a way of breaking through those obstructions i think it might be worth considering at least elements of sortition of lottery i would add one more thing it need not only be with regard to representative institutions or parliaments or legislatures various forms of national public service could also be a way of creating more class mixing than we currently have in civic life and this too i think could begin to reverse the tendency of those who are well credentialed and who are affluent to live separate lives and have separate interests and outlooks from those without the without such credentials yes yes well i i mean another i i mean i agree of course another problem my idea was rather unfortunately this is oh you i thought you were inviting me to no thank you the the the very sad thing is if you had come to knight megan as we very much hope you will very soon you would have had dinner with us beforehand we would now have two and a half thousand people in the city's concert hall we would have passed around microphones there would have been microphones and drink afterwards so all of us could have asked more questions and the audience would also have asks ask lots of questions now since we are in the pandemic age i got virtually hundreds and hundreds of messages here and you will understand that the questions i'm going to ask from the audience are a perfect mixture of merit and chance some questions are understandable so that's a merit and others just happen to lie under my eye so i will um cluster some of them and ask them to you one cluster of questions we got had to do with political systems um there is a there was a question saying isn't meritocracy just the basic way in which you run capitalist societies and then someone else says well if that is so what about china hasn't china become an even um no more contested rat race between people is that not even more meritocratic and someone else says what about cuba would you prefer that so i these are the let's say three political questions about systems on which my eye happened to fall well let me try to address them collectively under the general heading of the relation between meritocracy and capitalism it certainly seems to be the case that the the tyranny of merit as i call it the the the growing divide between winners and losers has come about during the same period of time roughly the last four decades and in tandem with the embrace by mainstream parties in western democracies of a neo-liberal version of capitalism and it's come together with the kind of market faith faith had began in the reagan thatcher era but that continued when center-left parties succeeded reagan and thatcher bill clinton in the u.s tony blair in britain gerhard schroeder in germany who moderated but consolidated the meritocratic faith sorry the the the market faith first first and foremost the market faith the idea that market mechanisms are the primary instruments for defining and achieving the public good but closely connected to the market faith was the meritocratic project and the meritocratic project had the effect of reinforcing and entrenching rather than challenging the inequalities that resulted from the era of neoliberal globalization because it was the meritocratic project that said the winners deserve their winnings and if you want to become a winner get a university degree it was the meritocratic project that addressed the deepening inequalities brought about by neoliberal globalization by saying you can make it if you try and that said those who land on top deserve to be there because they've worked harder they've acquired the credentials that the the new economy the global technological economy require so i think there is a close connection between the version of capitalism that has played out in recent decades the widening inequalities and the meritocratic political project which has responded to those inequalities by not by undoing them but by finding offering a rationalization for them now to be sure it's a rationalization that presupposes that everyone has an equal start and we know that the project of giving everyone an equal start is unrealized but so i think that meritocracy and capitalism are not the same but in the past four decades the version of capitalism that has predominated and the version of the meritocratic project that has defined our politics have gone together and i think we need to question both in my earlier book i i wrote about the moral limits of markets and in the tyranny of merit i tried to take on the attitudes towards success that in effect rationalized the inequalities that came about by the era the age of market faith that's how i see the connection between the two thank you so much i i do hope that the people in the audience who ask these questions are satisfied unfortunately you can't ask any follow following up follow-up questions like like ask here i'm going to ask two more questions professor sander one is from a theologian who said well how are you going to go about persuading people to live and work for the common good i he adds or she adds as a theologian i know how to explain that but how do we do that in a secular age one of the striking features of the meritocratic project as i've called it is that it adapts for a secular age an age-old theological question and there are striking echoes between our secular version of [Music] and meritocracy theological origins of the debate as it was about salvation is salvation something we earn by doing good works and by being faithful followers of god and god's commandments and the religious rights and increasing the glory of god is salvation something we earn a matter of our merit or is salvation a gift of god's grace an unearned gift and this debate going back at least to augustine and pelagius and then martin luther who was reasserting the augustinian picture of salvation being entirely an unearned gift of grace luther in the protestant reformation in many ways was mounting a powerful critique of as he thought of meritocracy the idea that salvation was a matter of merit something we could earn he was arguing for grace well when the puritans came to america the the the puritans came to america and developed the protestant work ethic pretty soon work became a sought work and earthly success became a sign of salvation not yet a source but in time hard work and worldly success came to be seen as a source not merely a sign of salvation the shift from grace to merit now in many ways the dialectic of merit and grace in regard to salvation is played out today in a seemingly secular age with regard to worldly success and material rewards to what extent are they a matter of luck and good fortune to what extent are material rewards something we have earned and therefore deserve so there is a striking echo in our debate in a seemingly secular age about earning and deserving about gift and grace that recapitulate the the the ancient theological debates um so what do we learn from that about how to persuade people in a secular age to reconsider the tyranny of merit how do we redeploy notions of gift and grace i suppose that's the project i think in a way we have to find a way we talked earlier about luck the role of luck in life we talked earlier about indebtedness this is a moral vocabulary that connects with and i think we should connect with the older notion of gift and grace and fortune in order to remind the successful that well to remind the successful not to inhale too deeply of their own success not to forget the luck and good fortune and sense of indebtedness and gift that help us on our way that's not a recipe for persuasion perhaps but it's a direction and a direction that casts a look back to the theological origins of the debate that gave shape surprisingly as it may seem to the sec secular debates we have about who deserves what today thank you we have to finish but i've been asked or encouraged to finish with a snappy question and here is the snappy question which asks for a snappy answer suppose it was going to be president sandel and or president biden to take over what would have been three of the measures taken the first hundred days well i like for the first one i would go for the uh relief package he just passed 1.9 trillion dollars which finally help provide real help from the community it's a kind of redistribution to go back to the very to one of the very first questions this evening for um poor people and working class people who have suffered most during the pandemic and so i think that would that would be i would endorse that as a good start and i spit for my second two measures well here are two first in order to demonstrate a renewed emphasis on the dignity of work and on contributive justice i would tax earnings from labor uh i would no longer tax earnings from labor at a higher rate than earnings from capital gains and dividends than interest not only because that would have the effect of redistributing income from the rich to the poor and those in the middle but because it would be a way of signifying a renewed appreciation for the dignity of work and then i think i would um well i would add two other if i can add two other one would be add one um investments in vocational and technical training as a way of expressing support for those who don't get a university degree but who make valuable contributions to the common good through the work they do and finally i would consider a program of of uh universal national service to draw people out of their bubbles their isolated uh segregated modes of existing so that young people at it at some point in their lives whether or not they went to university would encounter young people from all walks of life from different ethnic and racial and cultural and also different class backgrounds in the course of contributing some meaningful service to the country we very much hope that you words have been heard also back home um thank you so much indeed for spending uh these last this last hour and a half with us this has been a a great pleasure and we do hope that we can soon welcome you here in our city so the moment has come for me to thank everyone here present cherelle de leo florian van der zee marlene housing here you are agnes the great folks of rajput reflects cheetah temples and of course above all you yourself professor michael sandell we are very very grateful that you've been with us i hope thank you for having greatly enjoyed it christoph thank you well do come back really in person thank you so much and now to the audience i hope you've all enjoyed this evening with radbout reflects if you thought that this was an interesting event and you haven't subscribed yet to the newsletter please do so or follow us on social media and should you want to support us with more than just a thumbs up which you can also do we're always delighted to accept donations so you have a button on your screen to do that as you can imagine with all the staff here present ratbart reflects is an organization that deserves sponsoring we'll be back on thursday with our next live stream at 12 30 we will discuss the results of the dutch elections and the implications for the country and who will do so and that will be sociologists take a sip sipmar political scientist andrei saslova and historian color from barlin now thank you so much for watching i hope you had a good time enjoy the rest of the evening bye

Channel: Radboud Reflects

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Keywords: Radboud, Reflects, University, RR, Universiteit, Nijmegen, RU

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Length: 82min 32sec (4952 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021