Sometimes a person has abilities and interests which enable him or her to fill a given job, position, or office - hereafter, I shall use only “job” - better than other available persons. In what sense do such abilities and interests constitute a basis for claiming the more capable person merits the job? Does the fact that someone possesses special abilities and interests which are needed for the superior performance of a job of considerable social importance and prestige allow that person a legitimate claim to greater rewards for the job? I shall explore some of the issues associated with these questions by analyzing the notion of a meritocracy, a social order built around a particular notion of merit. I hope that examination of such a hypothetical social order will allow me to assess the broader implications of this particular notion of merit for a theory of distributive justice.

I am not concerned with certain classical meritocracies, that is, with certain views of aristocracy according to which social class was thought to imply differences in merit or ability with positions and rewards conferred accordingly. Rather, I take as my model variants of the type of meritocracy portrayed by Michael Young who, in his now classic satire or fantasy, The Rise of the Meritocracy, anticipated many features of a social ideal adopted by more recent writers. Young imagines a worldwide society in the twenty-first century in which all assignments of jobs and rewards are based on merit.