the very capacities that make agency possible

Nice little essay on Daoist ethics: … 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. Christine Abigail L Tan https://aeon.co/essays/zhuangzi-and-the-case-against-meritocracy “No notes”, as the kids say. (Do the kids still say that?)