Meritocracy is premised on idea that when everyone is given equal opportunities to succeed, successes and failures are not results of morally arbitrary factors (family backgrounds, class, race, gender, etc.) anymore, but are reflections of individual merit, where merit is typically understood as comprised of talent and hard work.

While this meritocratic thinking is prevalent in today’ society, it has also received many suspicions and criticisms. One very powerful critique has been to question the very distinction between those morally arbitrary factors and merit, essentially asking whether or not and to what extent “merit” is our doing. The crucial argument here is that what is considered “merit” entails lots of things that are beyond the control of the agent, namely, “luck”. Below is a video that I found clearly illustrates this sort of critique.