Philosophy of Merit

In recent years, Italian youth emigration has taken on the traits of a structural phenomenon, such that it questions not only economic and employment policies but the very foundation of social justice. Between 2011 and 2024, according to the CNEL report on Italy’s attractiveness, 630,000 young people left the country, with an estimated loss of approximately 159.5 billion euros, corresponding to the costs borne by families for the growth and training of a human capital that finds no recognition in the context that generated it.

Interpreting these data exclusively in terms of compensation or a scarcity of positions would mean grasping only the surface. In Italy, opportunities, in the abstract, are not lacking; what is increasingly perceived as deficient is the possibility of transforming them into effective, readable, and reliable paths. The drive to emigrate thus arises from a fracture that is primarily ethical even before it is economic: the widespread feeling that the criterion of individual value does not truly operate in the processes of access, advancement, and recognition, which are often subordinated to informal or relational logics. Emigration then becomes the symptom of a crisis of confidence in the moral rationality of the social order.

Hence the need to reflect on meritocracy not as a rhetorical formula, but as an ethical and regulative principle, capable of conferring moral legitimacy on the distribution of positions. Every community that aspires to be just must base the allocation of roles on rationally justifiable criteria, such as to make intelligible the link between action, responsibility, and recognition. In this perspective, the reference to merit does not coincide with a simple selective mechanism, but with the form through which a social order attributes value to individual action.

An order that systematically interrupts the link between action and recognition not only denies opportunities but weakens the very moral experience of responsibility, emptying of meaning the idea that individual effort can constitute a rational basis for social judgment. Recognizing the value of what one does means recognizing the subject as the responsible author of their choices and confirming the principle of human action as accountable action.

In common feeling, the possibility of “scaling” society is often assumed as a measure of its justice. The meritocratic logic responds to this expectation not by promising equality of outcomes, but by founding the distribution of positions on ethically sustainable criteria. Its deepest meaning lies in the ability to make understandable and publicly justifiable why certain positions are occupied by some and not by others, removing the social order from the opacity of potential arbitrariness.

At the same time, however, it is not measured by mere empirical success because merit—far from coinciding with the contingent outcome of action or with mere measurable performance, often amplified or reduced by factors independent of the agent—concerns rather the quality of commitment, the competence actually exercised, and the contribution offered to common action. To confuse merit with immediately measurable success would mean reducing it to a purely accidental fact, depriving it of its normative, justificatory, and ethical function, even if it cannot be understood as a morally self-sufficient criterion. Merit, in fact, does not claim to exhaust the moral judgment of the individual, but to make rationally intelligible the link between action, responsibility, and recognition within a cooperative order.

It is in this normative dimension that this principle marks a historical discontinuity with respect to traditional forms of role assignment based on birth, belonging, or status. Where recognition is anchored to factors not chosen, the resulting order is not only unequal but morally fragile, because it subtracts value from action. The reference to merit does not deny the existence of social differences, but deprives them of justificatory value: what legitimizes a position is not what one is by origin, but what one does and the contribution one offers to common action.

Precisely because the recognized value concerns action, it presupposes that access to action is not left to pure chance. An order that systematically ignored starting conditions would not simply fall into tension with egalitarian demands, but would expose itself to the risk of appearing as founded on a principle that is only proclaimed and not effectively operating. Equality of opportunity is therefore not to be understood as an external corrective or an alternative criterion, but as the condition through which the principle itself can be recognized as credible and rationally justifiable. When this condition is perceived as absent or insufficient, it is not the idea of merit that is refuted, but the confidence in its concrete application that results cracked.

For this very reason, a preemptive renunciation of this criterion in the name of the difficulties of its implementation is not admissible. On the contrary, the more the perception spreads that it does not operate, the more the need to reaffirm it through institutional action is imposed on the level of practical reason. The commitment to making it practicable does not constitute a compensatory concession, but the expression of loyalty to the principle itself. Operational difficulties do not justify the suspension of the criterion but make the need for its realization even more pressing.

In this horizon, the trust that is created is not an accessory feeling, but the rational outcome of a just order. Individuals can invest themselves in common action because they know that recognition will depend on transparent and publicly justifiable criteria, such as to make plausible the idea that present commitment can translate into future recognition. A meritocratic order is such only if it allows individuals to rationally project their expectations over time, making the future an open horizon and not an arbitrary variable.

The reference to merit thus belongs to the sphere of practical reason, as it orients the “ought to be” of institutional action. It is not limited to evaluating decisions already made but guides their formation, indicating which methods of attributing positions can be called just, responsible, and shareable. In this sense, it not only legitimizes the present but orients the future of collective action.

Enterprise offers a particularly evident example of this dynamic, but the principle applies to every cooperative field. An organization that ignores the link between value and recognition does not only lose its most capable members but compromises its own ability to learn, innovate, and project itself over time. The dispersion of human capital is then not only an economic cost but the sign of a practical rationality incapable of recognizing value and transforming it into possible development.

Defending a fully meritocratic society means, in the final analysis, supporting an idea of social order in which no position is inherited, no talent is left to chance, and no future is built on arbitrariness. To assume merit as a principle of practical reason means guiding collective action towards a just, responsible order historically oriented towards the recognition of value.

by Emanuela Fancelli, Esq.