Back to the future: Old values for a new (more equal) world

Inequality has become a defining feature of our time and concerns are growing that artificial intelligence, human-enhancement and global ecological breakdown could cause levels to spiral upwards. Although public disapproval of current inequalities is widespread, studies also show that people don’t desire equality, but prefer ‘fair’, still significant inequalities. Here, I argue these preferences are rooted in ideals of meritocracy and intuitive notions of free will; values that’ll become increasingly tenuous in a future of human enhancement, where they could legitimise mass inequalities. Maintaining an illusion of free will is often argued to be needed to disincentivise immoral behaviour, but it also creates a vicious feedback: It provides social legitimacy to substantial inequalities, which exacerbate precisely those immoral behaviours that the illusion is intended to mitigate. However, meritocratic values, and their foundational notion of individual agency, are neither natural nor inevitable – they’re mediated by social practices. To see what egalitarian practices may look like, I review the rich anthropology literature on egalitarian societies. This highlights an irony, in that the meritocratic ideals proposed by contemporary politicians as a remedy to entrenched inequalities are the same values seen as the origin of inequality in existing egalitarian societies around the world.