Deeply embedded in the ideals of justice and fairness is the idea that we ought to get what we deserve. Deservingness is thus an intuitively compelling concept, because we want the world to be intelligible. If the good suffer and the wicked flourish, then the world not only becomes a painful place to live in, it also becomes a place of moral chaos. Even if the world is bountifully unjust, it remains a necessary illusion that people get what they deserve. We need to believe our actions matter if we are to generate the necessary motivation to pursue the things we want.
This is the ideal of meritocracy. At its core, this ideology holds that social and economic differences are justified when they reflect individual effort or talent. It fits well with our neoliberal free-market democracies, which present themselves as open systems of opportunity that reward those who compete successfully. Meritocracy implies that inequality is just and fair. Those who rise deserve to rise; those who fall behind are encouraged to try harder. We must each pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
‘Meritocracy’ itself might be a relatively new word, dating back to Michael Young’s coinage in the 1950s, but long before neoliberalism another, much more ancient, philosophy justified inequality as the well-deserved consequence of individual effort: Confucianism. Examining where Confucianism goes wrong illuminates how we should challenge the powerful ideology of meritocracy.
Confucius (_c_551-_c_479 BCE) lived during the late Zhou dynasty, a time of intense political conflict between rival feudal lords. He was a teacher and minor official who moved between courts offering advice. He believed that the violent disorder of his era stemmed from moral failure that was ultimately preventable. So Confucius’s project was practical: through moral education, individuals could refine themselves and, through that refinement, a well-ordered hierarchy could restore stability.
Confucian political philosophy begins from a premise that appears strikingly egalitarian: the equality of opportunity. For Confucius and his successors, human beings are more or less equal in talent at birth. Everyone possesses the capacity for moral cultivation. Education, self-discipline and ethical refinement remain open paths that anyone can undertake, no matter where they’re from. This shared starting point anchors Confucian humanism: _you can make it if_ _you try_.
His commitment to openness and mobility is born out of a robust conception of moral agency and the power of the human will. Confucians believe that individuals are responsible for what they become. Through sustained efforts such as learning, ritual practice and disciplined self-regulation, people actively shape their character. Individuals therefore stand in a morally significant relation to their outcomes. One’s social position is responsive to agency, despite one’s circumstances.
The Confucian philosopher Mencius (Mengzi) articulated this idea more systematically, which was later called ‘natural equality’: all human beings share the same basic moral capacity. Everyone possesses the potential for goodness. Since everyone has the same equality of opportunity, unequal outcomes and differences in social position follow differences in effort, discipline and development.
A concept that helps us make sense of this, and that lies at the very heart of Confucian thought, is worthiness (_xian_, 賢). _Xian_ captures the difference between those who have cultivated themselves and those who have not. This is a difference in ethical standing, as some individuals have developed compassion, righteous judgment and moral restraint more than others. Indeed, some have developed these virtues to a degree that enables them to bear responsibility for collective life. Moral inequality therefore inevitably exists, even though moral capacity is something that is originally equally shared.
This distinction has political significance because Confucianism holds that economic and political inequality are justified when they mirror moral inequality. Authority, influence and material security should fall to those whose cultivated dispositions allow them to wield power in moral and righteous ways. Inequality thus becomes ethically acceptable, even advisable, when it tracks moral worth.
This is all fair, according to the Confucians, because it rests on a further assumption: that moral cultivation is something not everyone chooses to do. As Confucius says in the _Analects_: ‘there are some sprouts that fail to flower, just as surely as there are some flowers that fail to bear fruit!’ Everyone has the capacity to seek moral education and reshape their character, but only those who actually do so become _xian_ through their own effort.
Furthermore, it is of utmost importance that we distinguish those who are _xian_ from those who are not, such that the worthy ones can be given the authority to govern society. This is the role of the Confucian principle of ‘rectification of names’ (_zhengming_, 正名). Names function as normative roles. To be named or be given the title of a ruler, a minister or a worthy person is to be assigned obligations, expectations and authority befitting those titles. _Zhengming_ translates moral inequality into a coherent social map, ensuring that cultivated capacities align with social positions.
Of course, those who bear greater responsibility require greater resources to fulfil their functions. Political hierarchy then implies economic inequality. Those who are worthy not only need more, they also _deserve_ more. As the Confucian philosopher Xunzi tells us: ‘though one may have as his emolument the whole world, he need not consider it excessive, and though one be only a gatekeeper, receptionist, guard or nightwatchman, he need never think his salary too meagre.’ For Xunzi, inequality is not only inevitable, but fitting. It is the government’s duty to create a hierarchical environment that provides the infrastructure for people to be worthy, and then distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy. Inequality is the necessary precondition for social order.
This structure was laid out more than two millennia ago, yet it is not difficult to see how it continues to resonate in contemporary appeals to self-improvement and the value of hard work. The vocabulary might shift from virtue to productivity and from cultivation to performance, but the moral grammar is still strikingly similar. Inequality appears deserved because it presents itself as the cumulative result of individual effort within an open system.
The Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi accepted none of this. Writing roughly a century after Confucius but living in the same hostile and politically fractious world, Zhuangzi adopted a remarkably different stance towards disorder. Little is known about his life, but an anecdote from the 17th chapter of his great work that bears his own name tells us something of the kind of man he was. In the story, Zhuangzi is offered a high office, but he declines. When envoys from the king arrive to recruit him, Zhuangzi points to a sacred turtle shell kept in the royal temple and asks whether the turtle would rather be honoured after death or be alive, dragging its tail through the mud. The envoys reply that the turtle would rather be alive than honoured. ‘Then go away,’ Zhuangzi says. ‘I too will drag my tail in the mud.’ It is better to remain alive and unranked than to be elevated within a system that exploits vitality as though it’s currency for abstract prestige.
Where Confucianism sees a moral map of the world in which cultivated worth lines up with social authority, Zhuangzi sees a far more fragile and contingent reality. His target is not simply unfairness within the system, but the very idea that moral worth can serve as a stable foundation for hierarchy.
Zhuangzi stages his critique as theatre. In one of his most striking parables, he imagines a confrontation between Confucius, the emblem of moral cultivation, and Robber Zhi, a notorious bandit leading a violent gang: the best sort of person facing the worst sort of person. Confucius approaches Zhi, who at that moment happens to be munching on a human liver. Nevertheless, Confucius hopes to reform the wayward cannibal. He speaks the language of virtue, propriety and righteousness, urging Zhi to abandon his criminal life and become a morally cultivated person, becoming _xian_.
A system that ranks people by virtue necessarily creates incentives for self-exploitation
Then Zhuangzi scrambles this moral geometry. Zhi does not appear confused or morally uneducated. He responds with sharp intelligence, turning Confucius’s moral language back on itself. ‘You arbitrarily decide what is right and what is wrong,’ he says, ‘thereby leading astray the princes throughout the kingdom, and making its learned scholars not occupy their thoughts with their proper business.’ He goes on to mock the idea that virtue gives anyone a special claim to rule or to judge others. He accuses Confucius and the rulers he serves of doing on a grand scale what he does at a smaller scale: taking from others. The only difference is that, in Confucius’s case, he does so in the name of lofty ideals.
He treats these ideals as a kind of theft: a way of capturing the world through names, standards and rankings, then using that capture to legitimise authority. Zhuangzi’s literary goal was thus to make the bandit and the sage into mirror images. The difference is merely in technique and social structure rather than an ontological given. Zhi and Confucius are both thieves: one of goods, the other of names.
Through such theatrics Zhuangzi developed a systematic critique of Confucianism’s moral justification of inequality, and the most essential part of that critique is his insistence that _moral striving alienates us from life_. For Zhuangzi, the drive to become _xian_ invites a person to live for an abstraction, whether it be for reputation, moral purity or a sagely ideal of pursuing ‘the good’. This leads one to treat their own life as raw material for that abstract identity. One’s material body becomes an instrument for something immaterial.
In the Robber’s monologue, he lists celebrated Confucian exemplars: Bo Yi and Shu Qi, who starved themselves rather than serve an unjust ruler; Bi Gan, who remonstrated with King Zhou so forcefully that his heart was cut out; Wu Zixu, whose loyalty to his state, warning his King of a threat, ended with his corpse thrown into a river. These people are praised in Confucianism as exemplars of virtue, yet Zhuangzi treats them as tragic figures ‘trapped in the net of reputation and names’, who met their grisly ends precisely because of their inflexible pursuit of virtue.
What makes these figures disturbing is that they were consumed by their convictions. A system that ranks people by virtue necessarily creates incentives for self-exploitation. Once virtue becomes something that can be measured, ranked and exchanged for authority, it turns human life into a resource to be spent. In other words, Confucian _xian_ turns cultivation into moral capital, and moral capital demands extraction from the self. Indeed, one can see this kind of self-extraction in our modern neoliberal ‘hustle culture’ even more clearly, where it is trendy to ‘rise and grind’ and forego basic necessities.
One might object that Zhuangzi had an extremely pessimistic view of the meritocratic ideal in Confucianism, which fundamentally deals with morals and values, instead of material wealth. After all, social change requires sacrifice. However, in this system, sacrifice does not function as a response to injustice (even when individual actors understand themselves that way), but as a way of accumulating moral standing. What is being purchased with one’s sacrifice is not the possibility of a better world, but a higher place for yourself or your own family.
For this to work, virtue has to be something that can be measured and ranked. Only then can lives be sorted according to those who deserve more and those who deserve less. The Confucian meritocratic ideal therefore rests on the assumption that values have a stable and reliable measure. Zhuangzi did not think this was true.
For him, _any_ measurement of value, including the Confucian one, is ultimately flawed because reality is not something we can neatly map onto good and bad. To insist on doing so is, as the Robber puts it, a ‘monopolising’ of values. In reality, moral distinctions arise within concrete situations. What looks like an act of compassion toward one person can simultaneously harm others; what counts as righteousness in one context can become cruelty in another. ‘From where I see it,’ Zhuangzi writes, ‘all the sproutings of humankindness and responsible conduct, and all the trails of right and wrong, are hopelessly tangled and confused. How could I know how to distinguish and demonstrate any conclusions about them?’
Luck, circumstance and privilege do far more to determine who ends up in power than moral cultivation
This does not mean that nothing is right and therefore anything goes. Rather, it holds that the evaluations we make never detach themselves from the circumstances that produce them. There is no neutral vantage point from which ‘virtue itself’ can be weighed. Furthermore, Zhuangzi insists that even in idealised situations where values can be straightforward, the idea that hierarchies and institutions can reflect that moral map is a profound misunderstanding of how power actually works. Elsewhere in the Robber Zhi chapter, he notes how ‘a small thief gets arrested; a great thief becomes a ruler.’
We see this play out very often. In 1983, a man from Alabama named Alvin Kennard stole $50.75 from a bakery. He was given a life sentence and released in 2019. Meanwhile, the culprits of the 2008 financial crisis destroyed an estimated $50 trillion in global wealth and drove nearly 10 million American families from their homes. Only one mid-level banker went to prison (for 30 months) for mismarking securities. This is how power tips the scales of accountability. In Zhuangzi’s terms, the great thief is simply the thief with enough power that his taking sets the rules for everyone else.
Now, as in Zhuangzi’s time, luck, circumstance and privilege do far more to determine who ends up in power than moral cultivation ever could. In the _Zhuangzi_, Confucius also offers to rehabilitate the Robber’s reputation and frame him as a conqueror rather than a menace to society_._ The point is that, for Zhuangzi, once someone has prevailed, their position is often retroactively framed as deserved. Their dominance becomes evidence of their virtue, and their victory becomes proof of their worth.
Whereas Confucianism treats _worth_ as something that can be recognised before authority is assigned, Zhuangzi suggests just the opposite: that authority determines who gets counted as _worthy_. Power, therefore, often does not reflect virtue, but instead has the ability to produce the appearance of virtue. This is how hierarchy manufactures its own moral narrative. Those who rule come to be called righteous.
The very capacities that make agency possible are unevenly distributed before any cultivation can even begin
This idea is echoed in the modern concepts of ‘hegemony’ as developed by the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, and what the anthropologist David Graeber calls the ‘false coin of our own dreams’. The point is that power works not only by commanding bodies but by determining what counts as valuable, and presenting it as natural or inevitable when in reality it is shaped by contingent social arrangements and power relations.
The attraction of this ideological commitment to the meritocratic ideal is not only moral but psychological. Once we have poured years of work into becoming better, questioning the framework that evaluates us becomes costly. To doubt that effort pays off is to risk admitting that much of what we have invested may never yield returns. It is far easier to believe that we will be the exception than to confront the possibility that the system itself depends on many people never succeeding. Its staying power lies not merely in convenience for elites, but in its capacity to organise hope. It offers a narrative in which suffering is temporary, sacrifice is rational, and the future will vindicate the present.
Yet moral evaluation and its social and political mappability always presupposes a subject who could have done otherwise. For meritocracy to function and for inequality to appear deserved, people must be imagined as the authors of their own success and failure. However, the very capacities that make agency possible (such as education, health, time, stability, personal networks) are unevenly distributed before any cultivation can even begin. These conditions shape what effort and excellence look like, which means that ‘virtue’ can only ever be defined by those who have already succeeded.
Ultimately, Zhuangzi questions the idea that the individual could have done otherwise.
For him, action does not originate in an isolated will. It arises through circumstances. Character forms through relationships, habits, language, institutions, needs, fears and opportunities. What might look like individual agency is always co-produced. Zhuangzi’s concept for this is _ziran_ (自然). It is often translated as ‘naturalness’, but better understood as the ‘so-of-itself’. Events and actions arise from the situation, and not from a sovereign self who imposes their will on the world. The self does not stand outside its conditions, but is a node within them. To act is to be moved as much as to move.
_The Daoist Immortal Liezi Flying on a Cloud_ (16th century) by Kano Yukinobu, Japan. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York
In the first chapter of the _Zhuangzi_, we are introduced to the mythical philosopher Liezi, who is able to ride the wind. He glides effortlessly through the air, appearing to move with complete freedom. Yet Zhuangzi points out that Liezi still depends on something: the wind. His motion, however graceful, remains conditional. The image offers a parable of human achievement. What looks like self-propelled success is always carried by social, material and historical currents that have no individual author. The meritocratic subject mistakes a favourable wind for personal flight.
Zhuangzi then contrasts Liezi with the person who rides ‘upon what is true, both to heaven and to earth … atop the back-and-forth of the six atmospheric breaths’ (ie, all things everywhere). This figure does not depend on any single wind because they no longer imagine themselves as a separate rider. Instead of depending on just one or few fixed conditions, they depend on _everything_ and converge completely with everything. Their action flows with the whole field of conditions, with control and ownership mostly disappearing.
This figure embodies a distinctively Daoist ideal of agency. Where individuals of the meritocratic framework understand themselves as one who accumulates achievement through effort and thereby earns reward, the Daoist sage relinquishes ownership of action altogether. They do not see success as something authored by the self, nor failure as something that properly belongs to it. What happens happens through the convergence of conditions. Agency is instead responsiveness rather than imposition.
Without a self that can fully own its outcomes, social and political inequality loses its moral engine
To say ‘I deserve this’ is to say: _I authored the action that produced it_. Zhuangzi’s world gives every such claim an invisible plural. Effort arises through upbringing, pedagogy, institutional pathways, emotional and material support, health, luck and the ordinary labour of others that makes any striving possible. ‘Merit’ is in large part a social product. The ways in which our characters and personalities are shaped are themselves a social product.
Understanding agency in this manner, therefore, makes the idea of ‘equality of opportunity’ questionable, because opportunity is never really a neutral starting line. Such ‘equality’ is always already a field of conditions that shapes the very capacities by which people strive. Moral agency can never be cleanly separated out and credited or blamed. As such, moral inequality loses its footing, because differences in cultivation express differences in circumstance as much as differences in will. Without a self that can fully own its outcomes, social and political inequality loses its moral engine.
Zhuangzi’s critique therefore targets the very grammar that makes inequality look deserved. A society can say ‘those who rise deserve to rise’ only after it has imagined a self that authors itself in isolation and then owns the result as personal property. Yet for Zhuangzi, selves are porous, responsive and entangled, moving with the grain of their situations rather than standing above them. In a world of _ziran_, no one is a self-made success. And if no one is self-made, then inequality has no foundation.
Ultimately, Zhuangzi unsettles the hope that inequality can be justified. That hope runs deep. It promises that effort matters, that sacrifice will be recognised, and that one’s position in the world reflects something meaningful about who one is. It asks people to keep striving, to keep improving, to keep investing in themselves, even when the rewards remain out of reach, forever deferred.
Zhuangzi invites us to resist this story, because a better world is possible. What would such a world look like? For starters, our worth would not be defined by our achievements, whether economic or moral. Such a world would be oriented by _ziran,_ and instead of sorting individuals according to the amount of flourishing they’ve achieved, we would attend to the conditions that make flourishing possible. Institutional support and care, as well as the removal of structural disadvantages, would be primary concerns. Ultimately, abandoning our modern obsession with desert would pave the way for a more dynamic understanding of human beings, one that recognises we are nodes in a vast network of conditions that co-produce who we are and what we do. We would be rid of the cruel fantasy that a person’s place in the world is a reliable valuation of their worth as a human being.