"If equality of result is to be the main object of social policy - and it is the heart of the populist reaction against meritocracy - it will demand an entirely new political agenda for the social systems of advanced industrial countries. But no such political demand can ultimately succeed - unless it imposed itself by brute force - without being rooted in some powerful ethical system, and for this reason the concept of equality of result has become the Archimedean point of a major new effort to provide a philosophical foundation - a conception of justice as fairness - for a communal society.
In the nature of human consciousness, a scheme of moral equity is the necessary basis for any social order; for legitimacy to exist, power must be justified. In the end, it is moral ideas - the conception of what is desirable - that shapes history through human aspirations. Western liberal society was "designed" by Locke, Smith, and Bentham on the premise of individual freedoms and the satisfaction of private utilities; these were the axioms whose consequences were to be realized through the market and later through the democratic political system. But that doctrine is crumbling, and the political system is now being geared to the realization not of individual ends but of group and communal needs. Socialism has had political appeal for a century now not so much because of its moral depiction of what the future society would be like, but because of material disparities within disadvantaged classes, the hatred of bourgeoisie society by many intellectuals, and the eschatological vision of a "cunning" of history. But the normative ethic was only implicit; it was never spelt out and justified. The claim for equality of result is a socialist ethic (as equality of opportunity is the liberal ethic), and as a moral basis for society it can finally succeed in obtaining men's allegiance not by material reward but by philosophical justification."
Daniel Bell (1974)
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