ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

In Korean society, meritocracy is established as a reward system allocating income and status by individual achievement not by social origins. Yet conflict over its fairness has to be resolved. This paper intends to articulate the principles of justice as its constitutive norms and to lay the groundwork for public deliberation on meritocracy. This paper develops following arguments. 1) Justice should ensure participatory parity in social life. 2) For free and equal social participation, justice should integrate recognition justice and distributive justice. Recognition justice provides the intersubjective condition wherein equal respect for all participants is promoted. Distributive justice provides the objective condition in which social goods are distributed in a way to encourage them to pursue the reasonable life plan. 3) Meritocracy in Korean society is corrosive of two norms of justice. It inflicts harm in that the privileged people make several insults on the underprivileged by saying they have only themselves to blame. It also imposes injury on the underprivileged by allowing luck and arbitrary factors to influence merits. Deliberative democracy is appropriate to collective critique and reformation of meritocracy in accordance with those norms of justice.

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