Abstract
The meritocratic principle of educational justice maintains that it is unfair that individuals with similar ability who invest equal effort, have unequal educational prospects. In this paper I argue that the conception of ability that meritocracy assumes, namely as an innate trait, is critically flawed. Absent a coherent conception of ability, meritocracy loses its ability to morally evaluate educational practices and policies, rendering it an unworkable principle of educational justice. Replacing innate ability with an alternative conception of ability is, therefore, crucial for meritocratic educational justice. I propose incorporating an alternative conception of ability into meritocracy—as the ″current limits of student ability″. The account of meritocracy that follows entails that unequal educational prospects are fair only when they result from the constraints of individual potential (or from differential effort). I argue that this potential-based account of meritocracy, though demanding, is a plausible and attractive account of educational justice.
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Notes
There are various possible accounts of the nature of this possibility. For example, ability could be understood as the lack of constraint on performing the action, or as the propensity to perform it, and more (Scheffler 1985).
In addition to performative abilities, schools also inculcate in students other traits such as confidence, social skills and social and cultural capital, that are also often unevenly distributed along social class. Inequality in these skills is impossible to defend on the basis of cognitive ability. On the other hand, they may also be the complicated result of social and native ability, so the analysis performed could apply to them too. Exploring this in detail, however, exceeds the scope of this paper.
Studies would create ethical challenges since controlling for different factors that affect ability would require “selectively breeding humans and placing them in controlled environments for experimental purposes” (Marley-Payne 2020: 151). Alternatives to such designed experiments typically involve twin studies, however these too can be criticized, questioning whether they can indeed teach us much from twins to the population as a whole (id), as well as whether these studies are able to control for all possible factors that might have affected the development of ability. For problems with twin studies, see also Feldman et al. (2000).
This is one of the objections that lead Fishkin to argue in favor of abandoning the idea of equal opportunity altogether and adopting opportunity pluralism instead.
Mara Sapon-Shevin (1994: 184–185) argues that potential is unlimited. However I understand her argument as an objection to the use of people’s limitations as a basis for treating them in a specific way, which is a position I endorse, as will be described in detail below. The discourse of limitations of potential has been criticized by others too. See for example, Books 1998.
Scheffler (1985: 46–47) offers three possible ways to characterize this possibility: potential as capacity to become; potential as propensity to become; and potential as capability to become. Robb (2021) proposes an approach she calls talent dispositionalism according to which talent entails the disposition to develop an excellent ability.
Given the difficulty to discern a student’s ability, and to disentangle the natural and environmental factors that influence it, traditional meritocracy might also adopt the precautionary duty. If so, teachers might be under a duty to keep trying to improve student abilities even when they think that the student has reached their highest ability. While adopting the precautionary principle would be a step in the right direction for traditional meritocracy, it cannot redeem it completely. In addition to the fact that student ability, as conceptualized by traditional meritocracy, is simply incoherent (as argued above), the practical implication of adding a precautionary duty to traditional meritocracy still falls short of the duties that potential-based meritocracy requires. Traditional meritocracy, recall, does not require realizing potential, as long as inequality is caused by ability, therefore there would likely still remain a significant gap between students’ abilities as demonstrated in school, and their potential. As a result, traditional meritocracy still falls short of potential-based meritocracy.
I thank an anonymous referee for presenting this objection.
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This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation Grant No. 848/19.
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Harel Ben Shahar, T. Redefining Ability, Saving Educational Meritocracy. J Ethics 27, 263–283 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09426-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-023-09426-9