La tensión entre mérito e igualdadel mérito como factor de exclusión

Abstract

The appeal to desert or merit in normative opposition to equality policies like affirmative actions or proposals like Basic Income as well as, in general terms, to distributive justice and egalitarian claims, it reveals today an explicitly antiigalitarian use of desert, but also, it shows the old notion of merit as angular stone of a diffuse, structural discrimination and key piece of the rhetoric of inequality of status serving to a domineering identity. The concept of desert in law, justice, moral and political philosophy as well as its diffuse (undeserved) discrimination is analysed historically in this Thesis dealing equality with merit/ desert and focusing its historical apology and genealogy in justice values in order to see the different desert bases and how the main notion of individual desert becomes a key of the system of beliefs, values and models of behaviour, which across its coercive - normative power, describes but also it expires, regulates but also models forms of inequality trough an invisible ideology. In order to study the relationship between Equality/Desert and the different attitudes towards them, the Thesis begins with two different historical periods (those when Equality becomes a political value): Ancient Greek society, (Pericles and the democratic theory); and Modernity (Rousseau, Locke, Kant and the Bills of Rights) to see how when individual intelligence or effort are on the basis of the rational opposition to endogamy or hierarchical forms, appears a new type of meritocratic stratification appealing efficiency and productivity, valuing so highly a particular individual desert basis that limit the wide individual development. Social mobility in European societies; merits in totalitarian regimes; Bourdieu point of view in attention to how systems of education reproduce cultural dominance of the ruling class (drawing on the theories of Marx, Weber and Durkheim); how economic rewards are distributed today; and an up to dated view of occupational success in ways unrelated to cognitive ability are analysed in third part of this work. Finally, last chapters focus the relationship equality/ desert; merit against social needs in basic income opposition.