My own take on the issue of meritocracy and reward has been influenced by the arguments of the Canadian/British philosopher Ted Honderich, who has been a notable defender of determinism and has argued that the full acceptance of determinism has important implications for our views concerning morality and political philosophy, especially on issues like criminal justice and the justification of economic inequalities.
Thus, Honderich in his little book on the free will problem *How Free Are You?* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) summed up what he views as the political implications of determinism in the following couple paragraphs:
What is true of punishment is true to a greater or lesser
extent with these other institutions or practices. Here,
in the place of theories of punishment, there are
political and social philosophies. Some of them have
within them elements having to do with desert. At any rate,
they have within them elements which have to do with the
actions of individuals taken as owed to Free Will. The
truth of determinism requires at least an ammendment
of these philosophies. It also requires that we change
our social institutions and practices in so far as they
owe to our image of origination. The response of
affirmation will also be a political response.
Is the Left Wing in politics less given to ideas of individual
desert and more given to ideas of individual need?
Is it then less given to attitudess and policies which have
something of the assumption of Free Will in them?
So you may suppose. If that is so, should one part of
the response of affirmation be a move to the Left in
politics? I leave you with that bracing question.
Jim F.
-- andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
Joanna, and may Tayssir, your take on this involved a deeply liberal (not radical) sense that somehow any deviations from equality of reward, including respect and honor, ought to be independent of any qualities that are outside the individual's control. They show a lack of the tragic sense of life that the Greeks, for one had. Desert of honor and reward or the reverse is often a matter of luck. Those mute inglorious Miltons who never had a chance may be entitled to our outrage that they never had a chance because the system, or life, is unfair, but Milton's accomplishment doesn't deserve less admiration and awe just because he did have a chance, or even because he was very privileged and got to go to University, learn Latin and Greek, or indeed to write, and have the leisure to write and the daughters to help him do so in his blindness. But whether you get to do something great (or terrible) is generally largely a matter of chance.
There's lucky John Donne, on whom you wrote a dissertation because his work was great as his talents; if he'd died of the plague, successfully gone into politics, spent all of his energy thinking about how to fuck rather than how to write about it, been born a peasant and never learned to write, we'd be out a poet and some great poetry and he would be entitled to human respect that everyone is as a human, but not to laurels for accomplishment.
We all had ancestors, and most of us are, people with hypothetical talent, most of unrealized. Are we entitled to less respect for our lack of accomplishment than the lucky few who take what hey have, often unfairly, and make something of it? Bet yer bootie. Does that mean that the nameless unnumbered basses are worthless human beings who ought to be crushed, ignored, exploited, and used for the benefit of the great? That's obscene.
I'm not making overall judgments, Donne was a better and more worthy overall person because he was great poet. That's stupid. Some geniuses are lousy people. We've talked about Marx, Newton was far worse. But the realized talents of Donne, Marx, Newton, deserve out honor, no? And while their reward may be the doing of what they did and the respect of those able able to appreciate it, they deserve that respect, even though what they did is largely a matter of luck over which they had no control, a gift of the gods. The gifts of the gods are to be revered and not lightly last away.
--- Tayssir John Gabbour <tayssir.john at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On 8/23/07, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> > Every achievement rests on teachers, friends,
> family, predecessors, etc.
> > It is the basest lie to give the person who by
> force of circumstance was
> > able to capitlalize on all that, all the
> recognition.
>
> In the books he's often weirded out by the celebrity
> he has, and the
> horrible expectations to live up to his myth.
>
> He's surrounded by people who buy into glory and
> fame. Sometimes in an
> extreme manner, but also in little ways. For
> example, teachers are
> happy to cheat in contests in order to gain an edge
> for their schools.
> And the students are divided into houses, where
> they're played off
> each other by arbitrarily assigned "points" which
> they feel peer
> pressure to win for their house.
>
>
> > > What offends the sensibility of equality (of
> outcome) is the idea
> > >or possibility that some people are better than a
> whole lot of
> > >others at things that matter greatly (in a
> particular scheme) and
> > >that a whole lot are good at nothing much (of
> value by that same
> > >scheme) at all.
>
> Well, Harry Potter and his friends are portrayed as
> heroic. I think
> Potter in particular is depicted as a
> one-in-a-million kinda guy, with
> an unusual sense of fairness.
>
> Then again, he's also portrayed in a fairly
> featureless and logical
> way, with typical faults and whatnot, and maybe the
> intention is to
> make the readers feel like they're being praised by
> proxy, since they
> likely empathize with his reasoning. Dunno.
>
>
> That said, I happen to agree with your sentiments
> about breathlessly
> celebrating "greatness." It's not out of some deep
> leftie reason or
> anything. Just... people need to get a life. ;)
>
> I mean, there are people who've strongly influenced
> me and I
> consciously try not to gush about. It's a human
> thing. But I also
> could talk your head off about zombies, and make
> dumb puns all day --
> other things I should be more discreet about.
>
>
> Tayssir
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