Merit as Moral: Justifying Applications of Power

This chapter demonstrates the role merit plays as an ideal construct that lends moral force to the familiar yet unjust methods of production of academic knowledge. Merit is believed to promote something good, and makes actions that promote it right, even if Aristotle and other authors warn that such decisions must gain force and acceptance in the mind of the individual rather than result from a collective decision about the value of an idea or expression of it. We show how merit, much like natural law, functions as a legitimating framework for exclusion once it is invoked. Our narrative draws to a climax in the discussion of Nature in philosophic argumentation, in which we share Mill’s concern of Nature as a moralizer. Even if nature and merit are conceptually plausible and even helpful ideas in some sense, the use as a moralizing force implies a dominant perspective as to what these subjective ideas are. Merit has taken on this kind of cleansing role for academia, it absolves humanity from the things it cannot control which is to draw a false equivalency between the concepts, their nature, and their reliance on humanity to give them power.