Ethan Harley Field

Do I have a right to the wealth I have won through my talents and hard work? Where does that leave those who lost? In The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel offers a new narrative of the cultural hegemony seen in the USA and the UK today: the meritocracy. While meritocracy has almost become a cliché as an ideal society, it is actually a relatively modern concept. It is often attributed to Michael Young’s The Rise of Meritocracy (1958), which imagined what society would look like if the meritocratic dream were fully realised. Far from an ideal, Young’s dream is a dystopia wherein a meritocratic elite govern as a ruling class, mandated by their superior intelligence and work ethic. Overall, The Tyranny of Merit is a thought-provoking polemic against the growing tide of individual responsibility for economic position. Sandel is primarily motivated by a strong sense of compassion and what is right, which one cannot help but feel compelled towards. For Sandel, the good can only flourish while I show humility in the lot I have in life. To show empathy for my fellow man is not simply to feel pity for him, but to value his contribution to the well-being of all.

What exactly do you do when you introspect? Do you shift your attention from the world to your ongoing conscious states qua objects of experience, as empiricists say? Or do you exercise your rational capacities to ascribe mental states to yourself, as rationalists say? In this chapter, we explore a middle path between empiricism and rationalism. We propose that introspection involves experiencing or living through your ongoing conscious states in a distinctive manner, namely “introspectively”. We call this view introspective adverbialism. Drawing on insights from C.D. Broad, G.F. Stout and G. Dawes Hicks, we set the stage for introspective adverbialism (Sections 1-2), provide indirect phenomenological support for it (Section 3), and briefly explain what it means for you to experience your conscious states introspectively (Section 4).