#The tyranny of merit free#
Bernard Williams famously came up with the idea, partly as a way to question the reality of free will.
The concept of “moral luck” is very profound (and disturbing) in philosophy. The book is a long diatribe against the notion of merit, highlighting over and over again the greater role that luck plays in outcomes: “Meritocratic hubris reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way.” Sandel insists that this is not just about college admissions. The richer a student’s family, the higher the score he or she is likely to receive.” Before you protest about how much effort you put into studying for the SAT, Sandel is quick to tell you that “… in practice, however, SAT scores closely track family income. At the end of the day, you get admitted because your parents have more money than the parents of those who did not. But they probably did pay for ballet lessons, SAT tutors, hockey equipment, and so on, and ultimately, that made you a stronger candidate in the college admissions race. If you enter through the front door, your parents did not pay millions of dollars to build a library in their name and get you admitted by some Ivy League school. When you go to college through the front door, you play it clean: you get admitted on your own merits, and life is great.īut in the recently published The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?, renowned philosopher Michael Sandel argues that even front-door entry is morally problematic. This is illegal, and that is why Singer is behind bars. William Singer, the mastermind behind the college admissions scam, came up with a side-door strategy: your parents pay a much smaller amount and bribe coaches, standardized test proctors, and admissions officers.
This procedure is not illegal, although many people perceive it as deeply unfair. You enter through the back door when your parents donate huge sums of money to the institution. The 2019 college admissions scandal made it clear that, in American colleges and universities, students have three options for entry: the back door, the side door, and the front door.