Recent Work on Meritocracy
Recent Work on Meritocracy
复制标题
关于精英管理的最新研究
DOI：
10.1093/analys/anac091
复制
发表时间：
2023
期刊：
影响因子：
1.6
通讯作者：
Sachs-Cobbe B
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Sachs-Cobbe B
“精英政治”这个词是由迈克尔·杨在1958年在他的书《精英政治的兴起》（Young [1958] 2017]）中创造的，从此以后，在这个标题下的哲学讨论就经常出现。然而，在过去的五年里，西方哲学家中突然爆发了一股反精英主义的学术浪潮，其中包括迈克尔·桑德尔（Michael Sandel）和丹尼尔·马科维奇（Daniel Markovits）分别撰写的两部关于这一主题的专著，以及伊丽莎白·安德森（Elizabeth Anderson）的一篇文章。首先，英国脱欧和唐纳德·特朗普当选总统，让左倾思想家怀疑英国和美国的基本制度存在严重问题。一个运转良好的社会怎么可能让人们愿意投票给唐纳德·特朗普这样的人，他似乎对根据自己的美好愿景重塑美国和将整个事情夷为平地之间漠不关心？接下来是诊断阶段，这些思考者确定出了什么问题以及为什么。他们说，问题在于，工人阶级和苦苦挣扎的中产阶级成员对移民、少数民族成员、受过高等教育的人和富人的怨恨越来越大。至于“为什么”的问题，答案是，在美国和英国，分配财富和特权的机构是按精英制度组织的。当然，如果这些机构在道德上是站得住脚的，那么英国退欧和特朗普可能只是需要管理的问题。但桑德尔、马科维奇和安德森认为，这些制度除了会产生怨恨外，还不公平。在第2节中，我开始关注他们的著作，概述了反对这些机构在真实的世界中运作的道德案例，特别是在美国和英国（我的重点始终是美国/英国背景下的公共政策道德;我感兴趣的是，鉴于所提出的反对意见以及经济和社会发展，这些社会在道德上是否应该维持其精英制度。心理压力（1）。接下来的两个部分旨在澄清美国社会组织的哪些方面
The word ‘meritocracy’was coined by Michael Young in 1958 in his book The Rise of the Meritocracy (Young [1958] 2017]), and philosophical discussions under that heading have appeared regularly ever since. In the last five years, however, there has been a sudden burst of anti-meritocratic scholarship among western philosophers, including two monographs on the topic, by Michael Sandel and Daniel Markovits respectively, and an article by Elizabeth Anderson.Why now? To start with, Brexit and the election of Donald Trump to the Presidency have caused left-leaning thinkers to suspect that there is something seriously wrong with the basic institutions of the UK and USA. How could a society that is working reasonably well make people want to vote for someone like Donald Trump, who seems indifferent between remoulding America according to his own vision of the good and just burning the whole thing to the ground? Next comes the diagnosis stage, where these thinkers identify what’s going wrong and why. What’s going wrong, they say, is that there is a growing resentment, on the part of members of the working class and the struggling middle class, towards immigrants, members of racial minority groups, the highly educated and the wealthy. As to the ‘why’question, the answer is that the institutions that distribute wealth and privilege in the USA and UK are organized meritocratically. Of course, if those institutions were morally defensible then perhaps Brexit and Trump would merely be problems to be managed. But Sandel, Markovits and Anderson consider those institutions to be unfair in addition to resentment-generating. Focussing on their writings, I begin, in § 2, by presenting an overview of the moral case against such institutions as they function in the real world, and in the USA and UK in particular (my focus throughout is the morality of public policy in the American/British context; I am interested in whether these societies morally ought to maintain their meritocratic institutions in light of the objections raised and the economic and psychological constraints they face 1). The next two sections are targeted at clarifying just what aspects, precisely, of social organization in the USA