Tammy Harel Ben Shahar

According to the effort principle, those who expend much effort deserve to earn more than those who expend little. While accepted by some philosophers and popular outside academic philosophy, the effort principle, that rewards the industrious ants rather than the idle grasshoppers, has been criticized for being unfair and impractical. This paper develops a novel argument against this principle. It targets the claim, implied by advocates of the effort principle, that it can be derived from a more fundamental desert principle, one that identifies moral responsibility, economic contribution, or compensation as the fundamental desert bases for income. We argue that the effort principle cannot be derived from any such principle. Thus, even if one endorses these principles, one need not accept the effort principle. Furthermore, we show how intuitions that seem to support the effort principle can be vindicated without it. We conclude by endorsing skepticism about the effort principle and by gesturing at an alternative possible role that the notion of effort can play in a theory of distributive justice.

The meritocratic principle of educational justice maintains that it is unfair that individuals with similar ability who invest equal effort, have unequal educational prospects. In this paper I argue that the conception of ability that meritocracy assumes, namely as an innate trait, is critically flawed. Absent a coherent conception of ability, meritocracy loses its ability to morally evaluate educational practices and policies, rendering it an unworkable principle of educational justice. Replacing innate ability with an alternative conception of ability is, therefore, crucial for meritocratic educational justice. I propose incorporating an alternative conception of ability into meritocracy—as the ″current limits of student ability″. The account of meritocracy that follows entails that unequal educational prospects are fair only when they result from the constraints of individual potential (or from differential effort). I argue that this potential-based account of meritocracy, though demanding, is a plausible and attractive account of educational justice.