HARVARD TODAY, Episode 2
Professor Michael Sandel, on Merit
Harvard, like many other Ivy League schools, is in trouble. The public sees its political bias, its advocacy of unfair policies, the fact that Harvard like so many other elite schools has followed a “woke” philosophy that increasingly favors feelings over facts and compassion over dispassionate debate—not to mention the collective disdain expressed for traditional American values. To understand this national treasure, it might be helpful to look at a few of the things that Harvard people are saying.
Professor Michael Sandel, on Merit
March 2024
“TED” star and Harvard Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel, named “most influential foreign figure of the year” in China, is against selection by merit.[1] In his 2020 book, “The Tyranny of Merit” (ToM) he complains, based no doubt on his experience at Harvard, that someone who believes he has been selected on merit will show “meritocratic hubris.” Whether the meritorious will be less or more hubristic than children of the aristocracy, or of the dominant political or religious class, or any child of privilege; whether this arrogance grows more from the institutional setting in which the meritorious find themselves than from selection itself, we do not know. These options go unexplored. Sandel admits that most “agree…that admission should be based on merit.” Nevertheless, he is sure that merit is bad. This contradiction doesn’t trouble him, because his overarching theme is not merit but justice.
The injustic of merit-based judgment was the theme for Sandel’s recent question-and-answer-style address to a distinguished audience, which included many past and present Rhodes scholars, in Oxford University’s elegant Sheldonian theater[2].
Sandel has an expansive view of justice, writing about the “genetic lottery,” the injustice of being born clever, or not, pretty, or not and so on—which is a fundamental epistemological error: “nature” is neither just nor unjust, nature just is. Justice only applies to situations that involve a human agent. Actions may be just or unjust but facts, of biology or circumstance—or a lottery— are lucky or unlucky. Having bad genes is unfortunate, it is not unjust. To confuse the two is not a small error.
Sandel’s Sheldonian talk centered on 19th century liberal British philosopher John Stuart Mill’s ideas about voting in a democracy. In Mill’s day, the vote in Britain was restricted to male property owners. Mill thought this wrong. He was for universal voting, women as well as men, the poor as well as property owners. But he went further, in a direction that Sandel clearly thinks unjust, proposing what he called plural voting. Mill assumed, correctly, that people are not equally competent in their judgments. Surely the influence of a voter on an election outcome should reflect the voter’s wisdom, which Mill roughly equated to education, although he also acknowledged that business people and membership in “the liberal professions,” should also qualify.[3] Mill thought that voters “educated” in these senses, should get multiple votes, one for a laborer, “two or more” for someone more qualified, and so on[4].
Speaking with authority, albeit perhaps a bit condescendingly, Sandel begins by saying:
To think through the question of meritocracy requires us to think through a fundamental question of Justice who deserves what and why? How should the good things in life, how should income and wealth but also power and opportunity, honor recognition and social esteem, how should they be distributed?
This is a curious way to present the issue, although it perhaps comes naturally to members of an elite. Power and opportunity are not commodities, they are not “distributed,” there is no distributor: they are simply outcomes of a given political/economic system. But this framing is typical of Sandel’s approach. He seems to be uninterested in the practical workings of the issues that he discusses; he rarely considers the economic, sociological, political and religious factors that affect the place of individuals in society and tends to treat all outcomes as subject to judicial review.
In an extraordinary digression, Sandel takes two votes from the audience, as follows (1) Do you think degree holders should get extra votes? Answer, majority: No. (2) And then, do you think it right that most members of a legislature have degrees? Similar response: No. These two questions seemed to be equated, by the audience and the speaker. Yet, the first option represents a granted privilege, the second an earned vote majority. One is earned, the other unearned, where is the equivalence between the two? Yet “no” to the first question persuaded his audience, highly educated but apparently also easily duped, into answering “no” to the second. How would his audience have responded if the questions had been posed in reverse order? And why were they posed at all?
Democracy is not a single thing. There are many forms of democracy. How well does a particular form of democracy work in enabling the largest number of people to flourish (the “common good” as Sandel calls it)? How stable is any proposed form of democracy? Would it favor tyranny of the majority, for example? Or, conversely, would it devolve into an oligarchy: government by a wealthy minority? Would some form of autocracy be better? Sandel reduced the whole merit problem to one of fairness, irrespective of its practical outcome and implicitly denying the existence of human differences.[5]
John Stuart Mill’s long book[6] explores this complex issue in great detail. But Sandel picks a single straw from this scholarly haystack, presenting as the whole just one aspect of Mill’s thoughts on democracy. Sandel manipulates his audience into viewing the issue as a binary: Is John Stuart Mill is a friend of democracy or not? In so doing he conflates just and unjust with lucky and unlucky — unfairness due to a human agent with misfortune of birth — and (at least in this talk), ignores the factors other than justice involved in a functioning democracy. If this kind of entertaining manipulativeness is equated to education at Harvard, if Sandel’s popularity — “viewed by tens of millions of people around the world” as his Harvard webpage declares— is regarded as a contribution to scholarship, then Harvard has indeed lost its way.
[1] https://scholar.harvard.edu/sandel/home https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Merit-Whats-Become-Common/dp/0374289980. China is of course very much merit based, see https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173047/the-china-model
[3] Of course classroom “education” is no guarantee of wisdom, there's no fool like an over-educated fool, as George Orwell famously commented “Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.”
[4] Sandel mentions up to seventeen in his talk, but Mill seems to go no further than “two or more votes.”
[5] Indeed, Sandel seems skeptical of the very idea of real human cognitive difference, writing in ToM about “native intelligence, if such a thing exists”. As a denial of reality this doesn’t equal “men can be women” but it comes close.
[6] John Stuart Mill (1861) Considerations on Representative Government https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5669/5669-h/5669-h.htm#link2HCH0010