I. INTRODUCTION
The concept of merit, and its political-economic expression in meritocracy, occupies a central position in contemporary philosophical and public debate, yet it has also run, often implicitly, through the history of Western thought. Aristotle observed that justice in distributions “ought to accord with a certain merit,” while also noting that different regimes identify merit differently: democrats with freedom, oligarchs with wealth, aristocrats with virtue (Aristotle Reference by and Collins2011, p. 95). Even today, however, the theoretical contours of merit remain difficult to define, despite important conceptual clarifications (Olsaretti Reference Olsaretti2004; Brigati Reference Brigati2015; Clavero García Reference García and Sergio2023). Two distinct but related questions are therefore at stake: first, what merit actually is; and, second, whether and to what extent it can be justly recognized and rewarded within social life.
In recent years, numerous studies (Bovens and Wille Reference Bovens and Wille2017; Duru-Bellat Reference Duru-Bellat2019; Littler Reference Littler2018; Markovits Reference Markovits2019), and especially Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit (2020), have renewed attention to the meaning and legitimacy of merit, often calling into question its capacity to ground fair distributive criteria. In contemporary neoliberal discourse, appeals to merit frequently perform an ideological function, indirectly legitimizing growing economic and social inequalities (MacNamee and Miller Reference MacNamee and Miller2009; Piketty Reference Piketty2020; Bruni and Santori Reference Bruni and Santori2022). This occurs precisely at a historical moment in which the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has reached unprecedented levels (Alfani Reference Alfani2023). Yet, if merit is often invoked rhetorically or ideologically, this does not remove the need to clarify its conceptual structure. On the contrary, it makes historical inquiry into alternative and more articulated conceptions of merit all the more necessary.
In this context, it is worth reconsidering the proposal of the nature of merit of Melchiorre Gioia (1767–1829), especially in light of the renewed interest in the Italian philosophical tradition (Gallo Reference Gallo2024; Buchheim and Noller Reference Buchheim and Noller2015; Copenhaver and Copenhaver Reference Copenhaver and Copenhaver2012) and in those trajectories within it that originally intertwine ethics and economics (Stapelbroek Reference Stapelbroek2008; Bruni and Zamagni Reference Bruni and Zamagni2023; Milbank and Pabst Reference Milbank and Pabst2016; Dal Degan Reference Dal Degan2018). Although Gioia remains little known to the anglophone readership, his Del merito e delle ricompense (hereinafter as On Merit and Rewards), published in two volumes in 1818–19 and critically re-edited only in Reference Gioia, Degan, Giuliani and Pagliai2022, offers what is still the most extensive and systematic philosophical treatment of merit in the Italian tradition, and one of the most ambitious in modern Europe. Recent scholarship has begun to devote renewed attention to Gioia (Mandolesi Reference Mandolesi2020; Terracciano Reference Terracciano2025, pp. 149–162; Santori Reference Santori and Sardoč2024), but his reflection has not yet been adequately integrated into the broader history of economic and philosophical thought, or sufficiently explored for the way it illuminates enduring tensions between effort, utility, gratuitousness, and social recognition. Gioia himself acknowledges the difficulty of defining merit, yet he does not refrain from elaborating a configuration of it as broadly acceptable as possible. He argues that a just society must strive to recognize and reward merit without ignoring the distortions and uncertainties that such recognition inevitably involves.
This article argues that Gioia offers a historically original and conceptually substantial account of merit, one that cannot be reduced either to simple utilitarianism or to later meritocratic rhetoric. Gioia understands merit as a relational phenomenon structured by the interplay of effort (overcome difficulty), utility (produced utility), intention (disinterested purpose), and social convenience. On this basis, I advance three connected claims. First, Gioia’s account results from a selective reworking of Benthamite utilitarianism through themes characteristic of the Italian civil economy tradition. Second, its most distinctive feature lies in the role assigned to gratuitousness within the very definition of merit, while also introducing a significant tension between disinterested motivation and socially recognized utility. This tension, in turn, brings into sharper focus a more general difficulty that runs through his account as a whole: Merit is intrinsically hard to identify and assess in practice, as Gioia himself repeatedly acknowledges. Third, Gioia’s framework also makes it difficult to separate merit from virtue, and, more fundamentally, suggests that attempts to dispense with merit altogether remain difficult to sustain. If so, then giving up the debate on merit would not simply mean renouncing one distributive criterion among others; it would also risk weakening the ethical texture of social life. Gioia’s significance, therefore, lies less in the specific institutional solutions he envisages than in a guiding insight: Questions concerning the meaning of merit and the conditions of its applicability are best kept open to critical social and theoretical scrutiny, despite all the conceptual and practical difficulties involved.
Methodologically, this article is primarily a contribution to the history of economic and philosophical thought, situated at the intersection of intellectual history and the history of moral ideas. Its aim is not to retrieve Gioia as a ready-made normative solution for present debates but rather to reconstruct the originality, coherence, and limits of his account. For this reason, modern and contemporary authors are employed not as external standards by which Gioia is to be judged but as heuristic points of comparison that help illuminate dimensions of his theory that might otherwise remain less visible.
The analysis focuses primarily on the theoretical dimension of merit—that is, on the notion of merit itself—while also necessarily addressing its pragmatic dimension, namely, the problem of its applicability within the social context. In this interplay between theory and practice, the discussion unfolds in two parts.
In the first part (section II), I begin by presenting Gioia’s historical context and intellectual trajectory, in order to situate his reflection within the broader horizon of Italian political economy and moral philosophy. I then reconstruct the framework and principal claims of On Merit and Rewards, showing how Gioia reworks utilitarian categories in a socially and relationally broader direction, outlining the four components of merit he identifies—overcome difficulty, produced utility, disinterested purpose, and social convenience—and concluding by emphasizing the relational character of merit, together with modesty as one of its most significant symptoms.
In the second part (section III), I use a limited set of modern and contemporary comparisons to clarify more sharply both the force and the tensions of Gioia’s account. I argue that, although Gioia does not directly theorize personal responsibility, he shows notable sensitivity to the question of future merit. I then examine his distinctions between talent, effort, and achievement. I clarify in what sense Gioia’s notion of gratuitousness is original, and I show that it entails a constitutive tension between disinterested motivation and socially recognized utility. Finally, I argue that one of the most significant implications of Gioia’s account lies in the inseparable relation between merit and virtue, and that this helps explain why the question of merit should remain an object of ongoing public and theoretical reflection rather than be either dogmatically applied or prematurely dismissed.
II. GIOIA AND HIS ON MERIT AND REWARDS
Biographical and Intellectual Context
Gioia is a prominent figure in Italian culture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His intellectual trajectory is intertwined with the turbulent history of Europe, from the French Revolution to the Restoration, passing through the Napoleonic era. Orphaned at a young age, Gioia was entrusted by his paternal uncle to the prestigious Collegio Alberoni in Piacenza, a focal point of the so-called Catholic Enlightenment (Lehner Reference Lehner2016). There, he studied philosophy and theology, which led him toward an ecclesiastical career, albeit only for a brief period of four years. In 1797 he abandoned the clerical habit after his first arrest, formally due to the celebration of weekday masses for profit but in reality connected to his growing patriotism. Gioia indeed dreamed of a united, republican, and democratic Italy, in harmony with the early ideals of the Risorgimento.
Between 1796 and 1799, upon Napoleon’s arrival in Italy, Gioia was a militant intellectual. Together with Ugo Foscolo he founded and directed Il Monitore Italiano, advocating political positions that brought him into conflict with both the Austrians and the French, compounded by the impetuous traits of his character. In 1799 he suffered a second arrest by the Austrians, who held him for over a year. Yet his prestige allowed him to assume significant positions in the Cisalpine Republic, first as official historiographer (1801 to 1803) and then as director of the Statistics Office (1807) of the newly established Kingdom of Italy. These roles were far from marginal: Historiography served for Gioia as a methodological training ground, habituating him to ground political and moral reflection on concrete data, prefiguring the empirical attention of his major works. Statistics became a tool to perform “a kind of anatomy of society” (Gioia Reference Gioia1809, p. 34) in a comparative and quantitative perspective, aimed at guiding public decisions. This vocation for the measurability of moral and economic facts also constitutes the “foundation” (Gioia [1826] Reference Gioia1839, p. 674) of his reflections on merit and rewards, where philosophical reasoning draws upon a broad documentary base to identify statistically significant regularities.
With the fall of Napoleon and the establishment of the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, the restoration temporarily closed political hopes for a united Italy. For Gioia, a difficult period began, also marked by a third arrest in 1820 for suspected participation in the Carboneria, an accusation that placed him alongside figures such as Silvio Pellico. At the same time, during these years, his most significant contributions were produced, including Nuovo prospetto delle scienze economiche (1815–17), Dell’ingiuria, dei danni, del soddisfacimento (1821), Filosofia della statistica ([1826] 1839), and On Merit and Rewards ([1818–19] 2022). In this sense, Gioia can certainly be considered one of the forerunners of social statistics, even though he did not know Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874), who is traditionally regarded as the founder of the field and whose work became prominent only several decades after Gioia’s.
On a theoretical level, Gioia occupies a frontier position. His reflection emerges within the scope of the Italian Enlightenment, which, from Giambattista Vico and Ludovico Antonio Muratori, extends to Antonio Genovesi, Gaetano Filangieri, Cesare Beccaria, Giacinto Dragonetti, and Antonio Rosmini. Most of these authors, despite differences in approach and intensity, develop key concepts such as “public happiness” and elaborate the idea that human exchange has its origin in “mutual assistance” rather than in pure individual self-interest (Bruni and Zamagni Reference Bruni and Zamagni2023, ch. 2). At the same time, this heritage intersects notably with British and French studies: Anthony Ashley-Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nicolas de Condorcet, and Denis Diderot are constant interlocutors for Gioia. However, he does not merely absorb their theses but critically reworks them, as evidenced by his growing skepticism toward Smithian trust in the “invisible hand.” For Gioia, the State must intervene more decisively in the market, not as an oppressive power but as an incentive to individual initiative and a guarantee of social equilibrium. Concepts such as liberty, happiness, law, and property, although indebted to Locke and Bentham, take on a more relational orientation: Happiness does not reside in mere individual consumption but includes the ethical fabric of the community, that is, the quality of social relationships that sustain the production and exchange of goods. On Merit and Rewards reflects this intertwining of sources and can be seen as an interdisciplinary study, integrating philosophy, cultural anthropology, and economics. The historical context in which Gioia worked gave rise to the idea that social positions should not be determined by hereditary privileges, rents, or monopolies but rather require a sort of meritosophy, capable of cultivating the best aspects of human freedom and directing them toward the common good.
Framework and Key Features
Utility, Reciprocity, and Common Benefit
Within this framework, the treatise’s approach appears firmly rooted in utilitarianism, transmitted above all by Beccaria and Bentham. Gioia adopts its theoretical structure but expands it through the contributions of the Italian civil tradition, particularly those of Dragonetti. His Delle virtù e de’ premi (On virtue and rewards) ([1767] Reference Dragonetti and Clerici2018) was conceived as a response to Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (1764), within the context of the modern debate on utilitarianism and public happiness, marked by the delicate balance between the common good and private interest. Gioia’s is thus a broad form of utilitarianism. Underlying this account is the conviction that what is not useful cannot count as meritorious and, more radically, cannot fully qualify as good or true in any socially relevant sense. As Gioia states: “All acts and non-acts on which the word useful cannot be applied remain excluded from the class of the deserving, however difficult they may be. Useful, good, advantage are synonymous terms indicating an increase of pleasure or a decrease of pain, whether physical, moral, or intellectual, or some combination thereof” ([1818–19] Reference Gioia, Degan, Giuliani and Pagliai2022, p. 137).Footnote 1 This formulation is unmistakably utilitarian. Utility provides the indispensable criterion through which merit is judged, and truth and goodness are subordinated to it, never the other way around ([1818–19] 2022, p. 218). From this stems, at least in part, the critiques of his contemporary Rosmini, more directly connected to the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition (Santori Reference Santori2021).
Yet Gioia’s account does not stop at this point. Although utility remains primary, its meaning is subjected to a significant broadening. This emerges already in his insistence that merit concerns not mere private advantage but “services,” that is, “a good promoted or an evil prevented” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 8). In other words, what matters is not utility in isolation but utility insofar as it takes shape within a relation to others and acquires social significance. In this sense, the language of services can already be read as pointing beyond a narrow utilitarian calculus and toward a logic of reciprocity: Merit concerns actions whose utility is socially mediated, publicly meaningful, and embedded in a broader network of human relations. From this perspective, utility is not simply an immediate advantage but the capacity to serve both individuals and the community, or at least its majority. Gioia does not elaborate a full-fledged theory of the common good in the classical sense; nevertheless, his analysis moves toward a notion of common benefit, insofar as utility is increasingly understood through the relational and social effects of actions. This widening of perspective also helps explain why Gioia’s utilitarianism cannot be reduced to Bentham’s ([1802] Reference Bentham1830).
Truth and goodness are subordinated to utility, although Gioia—in line with Dragonetti ([1767] Reference Dragonetti and Clerici2018, pp. 317–321)—shows greater attention than Bentham to the extrinsic value of purely theoretical truths. He emphasizes, in fact, that knowledge apparently lacking immediate applications can assume decisive utility at later times: “the truths that become practical often presuppose other truths which present no useful idea, although they serve as foundation and basis for subsequent truths” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 148).
From this emerges a position that, while rooted in utilitarianism, tends to transcend it, incorporating values and dimensions that Bentham left at the margins. This expansion safeguards knowledge detached from practical ends but also corrects utilitarianism from within. A similar movement is already traceable in Beccaria’s theory of punishment (De Caro Reference De Caro2016) and, albeit less markedly, in the evolution of utilitarianism between Bentham and John Stuart Mill (Hollander Reference Hollander2020, pp. 340–345).
Compared to Bentham, Gioia introduces another original element: attention to the history of cultures and civilizations. Whereas Bentham focuses his analysis on utility in relation to the individual or to society as a whole, Gioia adopts a broader historical and comparative perspective ([1818–19] 2022, p. 6). His method thus assumes an almost phenomenological tone. The author surveys a wide variety of cultures to identify constants, variants, and exceptions, demonstrating a rigorous commitment to reality, as free from prejudice as possible. From this investigation emerges a disenchanted stance, willing to engage with highly sensitive issues—abortion, euthanasia, divorce, the economic value of the person, gender relations—and to acknowledge the plurality of human solutions.
A further distinctive feature of Gioia’s approach is the awareness of the intrinsic difficulty of defining merit. Gioia repeatedly warns the reader about the provisional nature of his conclusions: They “do not exceed the limits of probability and plausibility” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 50). The reasons for this caution become clearer in the following section.
The Three “Plus One” Components of Merit
Before analyzing how Gioia defines the fundamental components of merit, it is worth noting his preliminary observations on the variability of its meaning: “The ideas that correspond in human beings’ minds to the word merit are … infinitely diverse: they vary in object, degree, purpose, and measure not only between peoples, but also between classes within the same city” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 7).
Building, albeit indirectly, on Aristotle’s observation and combining it with a historical-statistical approach, Gioia suggests that merit does not possess a necessary, universal, and univocal content. Rather, it appears historically and socially constructed, capable of incorporating even deeply heterogeneous elements. Yet Gioia does not stop at this observation, obvious as it is to him. On the contrary, he seeks to identify those features which, across diverse cultural expressions, command the broadest possible agreement and thus make it possible to speak of merit in a more general sense. He therefore continues:
Among the many different notions … the one that receives the greatest consensus brings together the following four ideas: 1. Overcome difficulty [difficoltà vinta]; 2. Produced utility [utilità prodotta]; 3. Disinterested purpose [fine disinteressato]; 4. Social convenience [convenienza sociale]. Thus, actions in which these four elements appear combined to the highest degree are regarded, at least among civilized peoples, as supremely meritorious—that is, worthy of universal esteem. ([1818–19] 2022, p. 7)
Gioio intends that theoretical contours of merit should be understood not as a technical inventory but rather as the description—empirical and therefore always open to refinement—of a formal schema, almost a kind of “practical postulate” rooted in human nature (Mathieu Reference Mathieu2011, p. 17), while remaining fully aware that he is far from adopting a Kantian framework. In other words, although merit varies from culture to culture, every society still appears to require some criterion by which meritorious action may be identified. Gioia’s aim is to describe the most recurrent features of this shared denominator.
His analysis also shows that merit is intrinsically linked to social dynamics. To call an action meritorious is already to imply that it is judged worthy of public recognition, an esteem that may be translated into a reward, even a symbolic one—referred to as “ideal wealth” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 103). I will return in more detail to this relational dimension in the following section, but it is worth noting already here that the fourth element, social convenience, occupies a somewhat different position from the first three. Gioia himself admits that he included it more for the sake of expository clarity than for strictly philosophical reasons ([1818–19] 2022, p. 9). It can thus be treated as a kind of “plus one,” insofar as it makes more explicit the relational meaning already implicit in produced utility.
For the moment, however, it is more appropriate to focus on the first three elements, which constitute the necessary basis of merit.
1) The first is overcome difficulty. By this expression, Gioia intends to emphasize that merit always presupposes an effort capable of overcoming an obstacle. The more the difficulty encountered is perceived as above average, the greater the merit attributed to the one who has overcome it. Gioia does not reduce it to a single domain but recognizes its variety—it can be physical, moral, or intellectual. This openness is significant, since merit has frequently been reduced solely to the combination of generic effort with intelligence (understood as talent). Gioia, by contrast, includes the moral dimension in effort—courage, rectitude, inner strength—and does not neglect attention to the physical aspect, which he considers the only dimension of effort transmissible by heredity. He discusses its importance in war but also in relation to the social relevance of beauty ([1818–19] 2022, p. 26) or stature, giving the example of Scythian and Ethiopian populations that chose leaders based on height ([1818–19] 2022, pp. 28–31). Nevertheless, while recognizing the difficulty of comparing these forms of effort, Gioia admits that “for the most part” the intellectual dimension occupies a position of primacy ([1818–19] 2022, p. 186), not so much because of any intrinsic superiority but because rational capacity directs and coordinates the others, serving as a guiding principle in the pursuit of utility.
2) The second element is produced utility. By this, “one understands a good promoted or an evil prevented, and it receives the general name of services” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 8). Overcome difficulty alone is therefore not sufficient to ground merit. An action is meritorious only if it produces actual utility for others and for the community. Otherwise, one risks equating opposing figures, such as the soldier and the thief ([1818–19] 2022, p. 8), both capable of overcoming obstacles but with diametrically opposite outcomes. In the first case, the effort produces a real benefit for the community; in the second, it results in harm and turns into demerit. It is therefore necessary to accompany the criterion of overcome difficulty with that of produced utility, in the direction of calculating both the good promoted and the evil prevented. However, Gioia warns again ([1818–19] 2022, p. 141) that such an evaluation is extremely complex. Not only is it difficult to calculate the good actually generated (and that which will be generated later), but it is even more challenging to estimate the evil avoided, since this requires hypothesizing events that did not occur but could have.
3) The third element identified by Gioia is disinterested purpose, that is, the motive for acting—“the end [that one] sets for oneself in rendering a service” ([1818–19] 2022, pp. 8–9). The chapter dedicated to this topic is perhaps the most interesting in the entire work. Here, Gioia makes clear the necessity of this element for determining the merit of an action. He writes:
One can do good for the people … in order to attain command (as Caesar did), to make a name for oneself (as Alcibiades did), to please the Gods (as Marcus Aurelius did), or to make people happy (as Lucullus did) … hence the same useful action may be regarded as admirable, indifferent, or abominable, depending on the motive from which it arises. Often, multiple motives contribute to the same action, one of which predominates, supported by others that either enhance or diminish its merit. ([1818–19] 2022, p. 223)
An action identical in its external effects can therefore be regarded as praiseworthy or blameworthy, depending on the intention that inspires it. The great difficulty, however, lies in examining the agent’s inner life. Gioia is aware of this, but he does not limit himself to declaring every judgment impossible; on the contrary, he identifies what he calls the “symptoms of merit” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 251): socially observable external signs that allow at least a probabilistic estimation of merit, even if certainty remains unattainable. His proposal is, ultimately, simple: One can assess how much personal advantage the agent gains from a given action, since “merit increases to the extent that the reasons for loving the beneficiaries decrease” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 76). The smaller these advantages, the greater the probability that the service rendered is genuinely disinterested and therefore meritorious:
As the reward for the service rendered becomes more distant, uncertain, or smaller, the merit of the one who provides it increases, and becomes perfect when the service is entirely gratuitous. … Those who, in particular cases, act out of mere interest will indeed obtain material rewards, but will not gain the special esteem reserved for gratuitous services. ([1818–19] 2022, p. 225)
This passage has considerable theoretical significance and entails at least two main consequences. First, Gioia does not reduce all utility to merely subjective utility (as Bentham tends to do). The value of an action does not depend on the utility it brings to the agent but on utility understood in relation to others and to the social whole, in the terms previously mentioned. Second, the close link between gratuitousness and merit becomes clear. The more an action departs from self-interest and approaches gratuitousness, the more its meritorious character increases. Gioia nevertheless acknowledges that absolute purity of motivation is rare, probably impossible, since intentions are almost always mixed ([1818–19] 2022, p. 223). Yet he identifies as supremely meritorious the freedom that, at least for the most part, acts for the good of others and of the community, guided by an intrinsic orientation toward the good of others and the community.
The “Plus One,” Relation, and Modesty
In the previous section, the relational significance of merit and the role of social convenience as a kind of “plus one” were briefly anticipated. Although Gioia presents this fourth element as reinforcing produced utility, I would stress that its importance lies above all in making explicit the relational meaning already implicit in utility itself. A meritorious action is not merely useful in an abstract sense; it is useful in a way that is socially fitting, publicly intelligible, and embedded in a network of human relations. In this sense, social convenience should be understood in relation to the etymological idea of con-venire: it indicates what “comes together” with the relational order and what contributes to the consolidation of communal life (Marianelli Reference Marianelli, Conti, Marianelli, Meattini and Polinori2021, p. 35).
This point leads to a further consideration. In Gioia, the relational structure of merit is inseparable from a dynamic of reciprocity. A meritorious action is not an isolated performance but part of a grammar of social relations in which good tends to generate further good, in line with the Italian civil tradition. As Genovesi observed: “It is a law of the universe that we cannot achieve our own happiness without contributing to that of others” (Genovesi [1763] Reference Genovesi and Savarese1962, p. 449). Gioia himself confirms this perspective, showing how merit always invokes otherness: “various authors have shown that services generate services, that the assistance we provide to others induces them to assist us in return, and that therefore, even when calculated according to the rules of egoism, those who sow in another’s field increase the harvest in their own” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 225).
Here, merit appears as a generative principle; a meritorious action tends to generate further meritorious action, and freedom calls forth the freedom of others. The language of “services,” already introduced earlier, thus finds its fuller meaning. Merit concerns actions whose utility is not only socially relevant but also relationally generative. For this reason, the four components of merit find their deepest significance not in isolation but within a horizon of reciprocity, where utility is consolidated through forms of recognition and return, similarly to what Dragonetti had already observed ([1767] Reference Dragonetti and Clerici2018, pp. 305–306).
Alongside this “plus one” of social convenience, Gioia also emphasizes another theme closely tied to the role of gratuitousness. Merit is such that no one can simply claim to deserve something on their own, since it becomes socially perceptible only through the recognition of others. This is why one of the recurring “symptoms of merit” is modesty ([1818–19] 2022, pp. 5, 261, 489). If the agent openly proclaims his or her own merit, the principle of disinterested purpose is immediately weakened, because the probability increases that the action was motivated by vanity or by the desire to appear to others (not to mention the sometimes fortuitous nature of results). For this reason, Gioia notes, a good society should provide “advocates of merit” ([1818–19] 2022, pp. 491–492). Just as there are advocates who strive to mitigate the culpability of defendants, so, too, there should be figures entrusted with bringing to light merits hidden within the social fabric, merits that would otherwise remain in the shadows in accordance with the principle of gratuitousness.
The practical applicability of such a proposal is clearly problematic (Terracciano Reference Terracciano2025, p. 162), not least because it raises difficult questions about who is entitled to identify merit, according to which standards and under what institutional safeguards. Yet the underlying insight remains significant. Others are not called upon only because merit may in turn deserve recognition (as previously mentioned) but more fundamentally because merit becomes socially visible only through them. Merit, without others, could perhaps exist, but it would not appear as merit. Without a relation to another, it remains caught in a paradoxical condition: Either it stays silent, or it risks being extinguished as merit itself.
III. GIOIA WITHIN THE HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY DEBATE
Gabriele Mandolesi (Reference Mandolesi2020) and Paolo Santori (Reference Santori and Sardoč2024) recognize in Gioia a reflection that, although marked by nineteenth-century style and an abundance of historical-cultural data, stands out for its systematic nature and offers insights of great interest even for current debates. Roberto Brigati (Reference Brigati2015, p. 61) goes so far as to observe that, thanks to its attention to polysemy and the historical variability of meanings, his thought appears more discerning than many philosophical discussions on merit of the past thirty years. Building on these evaluations, it is possible to further deepen the historical-philosophical analysis of the work, highlighting new significant aspects in light of certain key moments and authors from modern and contemporary thought.
Personal Responsibility and Future Merit
In Gioia’s analysis, what immediately strikes one is the absence of an explicit reference to personal responsibility as the foundation of merit. Freedom is assumed as a given, likely reflecting the view that its existence need not be questioned. Nevertheless, the link between merit and responsibility, widely debated since modernity, remains central. Fred Feldman (Reference Feldman1995), for example, has observed that merit can be attributed even without personal responsibility, as when it is said that the victims of an earthquake “deserve” our sympathy. Arguments of this kind have led the majority of scholars, as Sergio Clavero García explains (Clavero García Reference García and Sergio2023, p. 1177), to distinguish between deserts, understood as a broad “genus” that includes legitimate needs not chosen, and merit, referring to that “species” of cases connected to the voluntary exercise of freedom and personal responsibility. Gioia evidently uses the term merit almost exclusively in this second sense, which is why, in this study, the two terms can be considered interchangeable—also considering that the distinction is not intrinsic even to English (McLeod Reference McLeod2003). For this reason, although his study is primarily directed at social reality, the lack of a more detailed analysis of human freedom should be regarded as a limitation of Gioia’s account. This limitation becomes even more pressing if one considers, for example, the influence of Hobbes, who—through a certain reading of Protestant theology—completely dissociates merit from freedom. It exists “by birth” and depends on the grace of God, or, in a political sense, of the Leviathan (Olsthoorn Reference Olsthoorn2013, p. 25), while freedom remains only in its coincidence with necessity (Hobbes [1654] Reference Hobbes and Molesworth1840, p. 274).
Partially connected to the theme of responsibility, Feldman has highlighted another gap: the limited attention to the future as a criterion of merit. Normally, merit is assessed only on the basis of the present or the past, whereas, strictly speaking, one should also consider what will happen. Feldman (Reference Feldman1995, pp. 70–71) cites, for example, the case of a soldier honored before undertaking a high-risk, potentially suicidal action. But in more ordinary contexts, this also applies when it is believed that a young person deserves a certain job for what they may contribute in the future, not only for what they have already achieved. Although he does not offer an equally analytical treatment, I observe that Gioia shows sensitivity to this criterion, which makes the evaluation of merit even more complex. Attention to future times, in fact, leads him to value purely theoretical knowledge, as it may prove useful later. The measurement of utility, aimed at considering both promoted good and prevented harm, must therefore include not only what has happened so far but also what will happen tomorrow ([1818–19] 2022, p. 222). Thus, the merit of the invention of the compass is not exhausted in its conception but extends to its countless subsequent benefits: saving lives, reducing superstition, diminishing fears, and so on—results that were at least partially unintended or unpredictable at the time of discovery ([1818–19] 2022, p. 190).
On Effort and Achievement
I think it is important to emphasize the centrality of overcome difficulty in Gioia’s thought. It does not coincide with natural talent or with the achievement; rather, it represents the effort or energy expended in relation to the obstacle faced. This clarification is necessary, given that scholars (Clavero García Reference García and Sergio2023, pp. 1181–1182) have stressed the danger of conflating merit with outcome. The latter is only the visible effect of an action, which rarely reveals the degree of difficulty confronted—it may result from minimal effort or from exceptional exertion. The outcome, by itself, says little about the overcome difficulty, which emerges only from the relation between the agent’s innate talent and the effort they deployed to achieve a goal. According to Gioia, the achievement, insofar as it expresses a produced utility, describes only one of the factors on which the overall evaluation of merit should be based. It is the overcome difficulty—together with the disinterested purpose—that measures the ethical weight of the outcome. In this sense, an action is not meritorious simply because it succeeds but because it has employed well-directed freedom in confrontation with an obstacle.
For Gioia, therefore, merit is not identified with talent or with the outcome alone. Both must be interpreted in light of all the components of merit. Gioia would agree with Clavero García that reducing merit to the result alone is limiting. However, he would hold that the outcome must still form part of the overall evaluation of merit, as it represents one of its aspects. Consider two individuals with identical talent and equal effort aimed at the common good, operating under similar conditions, who perform the same action with different results: success on one side, failure on the other. For Gioia, the former is socially more meritorious. Indeed, while appreciating the effort (overcome difficulty) and intention (disinterested purpose) of both, greater gratitude would be recognized toward the one who achieves the result (produced utility), even if this depends only in part on their own capacities. The achievement, therefore, is not the sole criterion of merit but remains a relevant element—not so much on the moral plane but on the social one.
Although he does not cite the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) explicitly, Gioia seems to follow a line traced by Smith in that work. In the abstract, we would all agree that merit should not depend on the external outcome of an action, since it lies beyond the agent’s control. In practice, however, effort and good intention alone are insufficient to elicit full gratitude; the outcome and the external consequences of the action are also necessary (Smith [1759] Reference Smith and Haakonssen2004, pp. 109–110). When the achievement is modest, gratitude toward the beneficiary diminishes compared to a more significant outcome; in this sense, “a shadow of merit” (Smith [1759] Reference Smith and Haakonssen2004, p. 114) inevitably affects the perception of results. Smith concludes that, since the consequences of intentions partly depend on luck, the latter also influences judgments of merit. Thus, while recognizing that in theory merit should not depend on fortune, in practice it inevitably does: “The person himself who has unsuccessfully endeavoured to confer a benefit, has by no means the same dependency upon the gratitude of the man whom he meant to oblige, nor the same sense of his own merit towards him, which he would have had in the case of success” (Smith [1759] Reference Smith and Haakonssen2004, p. 115).
I argue that, although following a different path, more attentive to historical and social data than to the dynamics of sympathy, Gioia essentially converges with Smith. He considers that the achievement of an action is not irrelevant in the overall assessment of merit. Gioia thus appears to acknowledge that, since produced utility can include unintended effects (present or future), a component of fortune or grace contributes to defining the boundaries of his conception of merit. For this reason, he insists on the importance of modesty and of not being disturbed by outcomes ([1818–19] 2022, p. 261). More profoundly, I suggest that merit need not be opposed to fortune or grace: As Gioia shows, the truly meritorious person is aware of being the beneficiary of them.
On Talent and Effort
These latter reflections on the relationship between merit and achievement provide the background for a comparison with the interpretations developed by Michael Young and John Rawls in the second half of the twentieth century. Although working in very different contexts and with distinct objectives, both authors trace merit back to a combination of talent and effort.
Young, who played a decisive role in spreading the term meritocracy,Footnote 2 stages in his dystopia The Rise of the Meritocracy (1958) the possible antidemocratic drifts of such a principle. What emerges is not the “government of the people” but the “government of the most intelligent part of the people.” Originally conceived to overcome privileges tied to inherited status and wealth, the meritocratic model in Young’s account turns into a new injustice, scientifically justified, in which the most intelligent individuals consolidate power and reproduce severe inequalities based on the heritability of intelligence. His analysis only partially takes up Gioia’s distinction between physical, moral, and intellectual forces, though it does point out, for instance, the “Mythos of Muscularity” (Young [1958] Reference Young1961, p. 109) as a palliative ideology for the less intelligent. In this respect, Young’s discussion of intellectual strength recalls Gioia’s reflection on physical effort, with an important difference. For Gioia, heredity concerns only the physical dimension, whereas intelligence —whose biological basis he seems not to consider—appears to him less visible and generally well distributed, thus capable of fostering social mobility and sustaining democratic processes.
Rawls, in A Theory of Justice (1971), observes that neither talent nor the capacity to exert effort constitutes an authentic basis for merit. Talent results from the natural lottery of birth, while effort largely depends on family background and social context. In this sense, basing the distribution of rewards on merit appears “impracticable” (Rawls [1971] Reference Rawls1999, p. 274). This does not mean denying merit altogether, but it excludes its role as a regulative principle in the “original position.” Its consideration should rather be subordinated to the “difference principle,” aimed at correcting unjust inequalities and making them as fair as possible (Martino Reference Martino and Luppi2022, pp. 62–66).
Although operating in a very different historical context and unaware of the fractures produced by consumer capitalism, Gioia shares several aspects of this approach. Talent, for instance, does not enter into his definition of merit. Dragonetti had already warned that human beings should not be esteemed for their talent, as it does not constitute a “real quality” ([1767] Reference Dragonetti and Clerici2018, p. 335). Consistently, Gioia emphasizes overcome difficulty, while being aware, like Rawls, of frequent confusions and consequent errors in the calculation of merit. Sometimes “admiration arises where one should smile” because the effort was minimal or nonexistent, or “the advantages of a certain quality are exaggerated over others of greater importance” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 9).
However, Gioia never concludes that merit is a useless criterion. On the contrary, abandoning its pursuit would, in his view, weaken the vitality of communities and impoverish their ethical fabric. The reason is that, for Gioia, merit is not merely a distributive principle but also a socially mediated form of recognition. It names those actions that become publicly visible as worthy of esteem and capable of generating further reciprocity. To set aside the question of merit would therefore not amount to neutrality but would risk leaving implicit the criteria by which communities identify and acknowledge exemplary conduct. Rawls, on the other hand, while operating within a very different conceptual framework in which merit cannot function as a principle of justice, is not insensitive to this ethical dimension (Luppi Reference Luppi2022). Indeed, his distinction between legitimate expectations and moral merit (Rawls [1971] 1999, pp. 273–277)—in a way reminiscent of Hayek—is meant precisely to prevent the difficulty of establishing merit objectively from turning social success into a sign of moral superiority. Yet Rawls’s just basic structure is not thereby stripped of evaluative content. In securing legitimate expectations, it also presupposes and encourages certain fundamental moral virtues, beginning with the sense of justice (Rawls [1971] 1999, p. 383). In these terms, Rawls does not so much eliminate the problem of merit as relocate it. He excludes merit as a primary distributive criterion, while indirectly reintroducing, at the heart of his theory, a set of qualities and dispositions that remain worthy of social recognition. Seen from Gioia’s perspective, this confirms a deeper point: The problem of merit cannot be entirely excluded but only displaced and reformulated. This is especially true if one holds that the market, governed not by merit but by the law of supply and demand, cannot by itself provide a sufficient criterion for the distribution of recognition, positions, and wealth, and that some ethical criterion must therefore still be maintained. Even in the opposite case, however, one would still be tacitly accepting that the law of supply and demand performs, de facto, the selective and distributive function that the language of merit is meant to name and regulate.
On Gratuitousness
Mandolesi (Reference Mandolesi2020, p. 42) has observed that Gioia adopts from Dragonetti the first two elements in the definition of merit. Yet even the third element—disinterested purpose—was already present in Dragonetti’s reflection: “Citizens should be distinguished and rewarded in proportion to their gratuitous services. Virtues are numerous services … that can be offered to the state. Those virtues are more than human which are self-sufficient” ([1767] Reference Dragonetti and Clerici2018, p. 264), by which Dragonetti appears to mean virtues capable of sustaining themselves without, or at least prior to, immediate external reward.
From this angle, both Dragonetti and Gioia hold that authentic merit requires utility to be accompanied by a certain disinterested orientation toward the good of others and of the community. Here, however, a paradox emerges. The most meritorious action is the one least governed by self-interest at the motivational level; yet, in order to be socially recognized as meritorious, an action must also produce utility and enter a horizon of recognition and reciprocity. In this respect, Gioia’s position is marked by a sharper tension than Dragonetti’s. The latter remains closer to an Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics of virtue and is therefore more open to the idea of virtue for its own sake. Gioia, by contrast, integrates gratuitousness more systematically into a broadened, yet still utilitarian, framework. For this very reason, the tension between gratuitous motivation and socially mediated utility becomes sharper. Gioia does not seem to thematize this tension fully. Yet the paradox is present and is a realistic one—we are generally more inclined to recognize as meritorious those actions that appear less driven by personal gain. This means, paradoxically, that an ethically meaningful reciprocity presupposes some degree of gratuitousness. When action is governed primarily by self-interest, the reciprocity it generates is ethically thinner and therefore less meritorious.
Broadening the perspective, one notices that the theme of intention recurs frequently in modern reflections on merit. Among the authors cited by Gioia, it is sufficient to recall Smith and his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Here it is clearly stated that the sense of merit manifests itself in our appreciation of another’s action only when it is perceived through sympathy for the agent’s intention. It is within this relational framework that conduct can be perceived as appropriate, and the very possibility of recognition remains bound to the sharing of the principles that inspired the action: “Our heart must adopt the principles of the agent, and go along with all the affections which influenced his conduct, before it can entirely sympathize with, and beat time to, the gratitude of the person who has been benefited by his actions” (Smith [1759] Reference Smith and Haakonssen2004, p. 85).
In the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume adopts an even more pronounced position, holding that merit is entirely tied to the motive behind an action: “all virtuous actions derive their merit only from virtuous motives,” to the point that “the external performance has no merit” (Hume [1739–40] Reference Hume, by and Norton2007, p. 307). Whereas for Gioia merit arises from the combination of the four identified elements, for Hume it seems reducible to the mere motive of the action.
Nonetheless, Smith, Hume, Dragonetti, and Gioia agree on a fundamental point: Good intention influences the definition of merit, albeit with differing weight. Thus, I maintain that Gioia’s distinctiveness does not lie so much in introducing the reference to disinterested purpose but in the way he treats it. On the one hand, he proposes using observable signs of action to attempt as objective a calculation as possible, while acknowledging the probabilistic nature of such an evaluation. On the other hand, he insists —with Dragonetti—on gratuitousness as a real and achievable possibility of human action, even if often mixed with other motivations. Both Smith and Hume show greater caution in this regard, especially in the social realm. In his Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith observes that economic agents unknowingly contribute to the public interest while pursuing their own self-interest, concluding: “I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good” (Smith [1776] Reference Smith and Cannan1976, p. 478). Hume notes that “experience sufficiently proves, that men, in the ordinary conduct of life, look not so far as the public interest…. That is a motive too remote and too sublime to affect the generality of mankind” (Hume [1739–40] Reference Hume, by and Norton2007, p. 309).
This issue would require a broader inquiry into the conceptual and historical development through which self-interest came to predominate as the main anthropological horizon for interpreting human action. In this regard, drawing on the insights of several studies (Hirschman [1977] Reference Hirschman1997; Hösle Reference Hösle2011; Cotta Reference Cotta, Melloni and Luther2017; Ballor and Van der Kooi Reference Ballor and van der Kooi2022; Borghesi Reference Borghesi2024; Heydt Reference Heydt, Haara and Toivanen2024), one may plausibly hypothesize that the Catholic horizon in which Gioia stands, unlike more distrustful Protestant and especially Calvinist anthropologies, leaves greater room for human cooperation in the “good” and thus for a socially relevant notion of gratuitousness. Although it cannot be demonstrated here, this hypothesis would help explain why Gioia—in the wake of Genovesi and Dragonetti—can still assign a relevant role to disinterested motivation even in the socio-economic domain.
Merit and Virtue
Merit Without Virtue?
Friedrich A. Hayek also recognizes the multidimensional nature of merit and the uncertainty inherent in its assessment. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), he therefore proposes limiting consideration to the component that, in Gioia’s terms, corresponds to produced utility. The effort or intention behind an action is, in fact, inaccessible. What can be observed is the agent and their outward behavior, which—following Hume’s lesson, explicitly invoked—does not provide indications of the person’s moral depth (Hayek [1960] Reference Hayek and Hamowy2011, pp. 156–158). From this emerges Hayek’s distinction between the moral significance of merit, termed moral merit, and merit as competence or outcome, defined instead as value. On the social plane, it is the latter, not the former, that matters. Teachers, doctors, and police officers must demonstrate possession of certain skills and the ability to exercise them effectively; how much effort was required, or what subjective motivations drove them, is largely irrelevant and impossible to establish. Intentions may be more or less good. What should be rewarded is the value, that is, the produced utility—and nothing else at the social level (Hayek [1960] Reference Hayek and Hamowy2011, pp. 159–165).
Hayek’s position is important precisely because it marks, with particular clarity, the point at which Gioia’s framework becomes most difficult to transpose into modern liberal terms. Unlike Gioia, Hayek maintains that, in practical terms, the components most directly tied to morality should not enter into the evaluation when it comes to rewarding services rendered to the community. Recognition should be attributed solely to value. In this way, Hayek seeks to protect meritocracy from its most dangerous implications, arguing that no public reward should assume a moral connotation: “it is neither desirable nor practicable” (Hayek [1960] Reference Hayek and Hamowy2011, p. 157). It is not desirable because it might generate an illiberal society in which only the dominant ideals are recognized and rewarded; it is not practicable because it would presuppose the possibility of knowing “all that guides” (Hayek [1960] Reference Hayek and Hamowy2011, p. 161) human action.
From Gioia’s perspective, however, the issue is more complex than Hayek allows. This complexity does not eliminate the force of Hayek’s warning, but it does prevent the matter from being reduced to a simple opposition between liberal neutrality and moralized recognition. As Sorin Baiasu (Reference Baiasu2007) has argued in a different but relevant context, institutional recognition is never normatively empty. Institutions do not merely register value neutrally but already presuppose criteria of appraisal, selection, and justification. For this reason, the question is not whether institutions can avoid all evaluative commitments but which evaluative commitments they can legitimately sustain and under what constraints. From this perspective, the danger of an “ethical state” cannot simply be dismissed, but neither does every public recognition of merit necessarily collapse into it. This is especially true when the values at stake are not thick perfectionist ideals but more limited and broadly shared standards tied to civic contribution, public service, or common benefit.
At the same time, Gioia’s position remains open to serious objections. His appeal to the probabilistic assessment of merit certainly avoids the illusion of complete transparency, since he does not presume to penetrate the whole of the agent’s interiority. Yet this only partially addresses Hayek’s concern. The practical question remains: Who is entitled to identify merit, according to which standards and under what institutional safeguards? As already noted in relation to the “advocates of merit,” the very attempt to translate merit into public recognition raises difficult problems of authority, visibility, and arbitrariness. In this respect, Gioia’s confidence that institutions can meaningfully recognize merit appears more vulnerable than he seems to acknowledge fully.
It is certain that, in the perspective outlined by Hayek—and not in the “bastardized” reinterpretations advanced by so-called paleolibertarianism (Slobodian Reference Slobodian2025)—the question of how far one should encourage the idea that greater effort corresponds to greater success remains “a real dilemma” (Hayek [1982] Reference Hayek1998, vol. II, p. 74). On the one hand, it represents a motivational lever to activate individual energies; on the other, it risks fostering an illusion, since the market order is not founded on this principle. Therefore, Hayek warns, no one should consider themselves entitled to social reward on the basis of a presumed moral superiority (Hayek [1960] Reference Hayek and Hamowy2011, p. 162). Accordingly, within a liberal framework, stripping merit of its ethical connotation constitutes the necessary antidote for meritocracy to function as a legitimate and desirable feature of democratic life.
Michael Sandel (Reference Sandel2020, pp. 126–133) objects to this framework by arguing that Hayek’s notion of value depends too heavily on the contingencies of supply and demand, so that high value does not necessarily correspond to a genuine contribution to the community and may instead reinforce a social order in which monetary reward becomes the dominant measure of worth. He also emphasizes the psychological and moral effects of this logic, noting that the lower valuation assigned to the poor or less successful may undermine their self-esteem. These objections are significant, especially insofar as they draw attention to the moral consequences of treating market recognition as socially decisive. At the same time, Sandel’s critique does not fully exhaust the problem. First, inequality does not arise only from market valuation but also from selective competition for scarce positions and goods, which inevitably produces inclusion and exclusion. Second, the moral psychology of recognition is not unidirectional. Alongside the discouragement experienced by the excluded, one must also consider the phenomenon of social envy toward the meritorious, on which Gioia insists ([1818–19] 2022, pp. 435–442). While contemporary rhetoric tends ideologically and unjustly to identify the excluded with the losers and the successful with the winners, this should not obscure the presence of envy as a socially operative passion. As Gioia puts it, “envy follows merit as shadow follows the body” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 433).
Virtue Without Merit?
Although Hayek’s distinction between value and moral merit is useful in abstract analytical terms, I maintain that a broader historical perspective shows how difficult it is to separate merit from virtue. As Brigati (Reference Brigati2015, pp. 64–66) observes, merit may refer either to a competence or a quality possessed or acquired—an ontological dimension, essential in nature—or to an action in the making, to services rendered, which instead have an occurrent character. The point, however, is that this ambivalence finds a close parallel in the notion of virtue (ἀρετή), which can likewise refer both to a kind of sound excellence or competence and to the morality of action. Virtue and merit, therefore, turn out to be more deeply intertwined than is commonly acknowledged, to the point that distinguishing them clearly—as Hayek and, in part, Rawls would like—proves extremely arduous.
This connection becomes especially clear in light of Gioia’s definition. According to the four components he identifies, to say that an action is virtuous is essentially to affirm its meritorious character. The only significant exception occurs when produced utility is absent, even in the presence of great effort and gratuitousness. In such a case, the action remains virtuous but cannot be socially perceived as meritorious. Even this distinction, however, is narrower than it may first appear. For Gioia, utility must be measured not only in the present or in the past but also in relation to the future. And, as he repeatedly notes, the usefulness of a disinterested effort is not always foreseeable (consider, for example, purely theoretical knowledge). Thus, the distance between virtue and merit tends to narrow almost to the point of disappearing. If, moreover, reference to the produced utility is suspended—as in Hume, although neither Gioia nor Smith would regard this as sufficient on the social plane—then virtue and merit virtually coincide: To speak of the one is equivalent to speaking of the other.
A historical indication that this overlap was already perceived by modern authors can be found in certain titles they chose for their works. Shaftesbury, a figure of primary importance in the early eighteenth century, entitled his influential work An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit (1699), where the use of “or” indicates that virtue and merit are conceived as interchangeable (Shaftesbury [1699] Reference Shaftesbury and by2003, p. 172). Diderot’s free adaptation later became the Essai sur le mérite et la vertu (1745). Gioia, when speaking of merit and rewards (ricompense), moves along the same line already traced by Dragonetti with virtues and rewards (premi). For these authors, in short, the connection between virtue and merit is inseparable. Such historical observations reveal how clearly they already recognized the instability of the distinction between merit and virtue; and also highlight another legacy of Gioia’s reflection (and not his alone): the idea of their intrinsic connection.
IV. CONCLUSION
Gioia’s reflection lends itself to an overall assessment along the two dimensions, primarily theoretical and secondarily pragmatic, that underpin the structure of this paper.
On the theoretical level, despite the limitation of not engaging directly with the notion of personal responsibility, Gioia offers a historically original and conceptually rich account of merit. More precisely, it: (i) does not restrict itself to the most immediate aspects but also considers less obvious dimensions, such as the necessity of modesty, the calculation of future merit, or the presence of social envy; (ii) carefully distinguishes between talent, effort, and achievement; (iii) displays significant originality in the way it treats gratuitousness; (iv) reveals how tightly bound its understanding is to that of virtue, making it difficult to isolate the two; and (v) more generally, highlights the relational contextuality and the plurality of components that must jointly contribute to the definition of an adequate notion of merit.
On the pragmatic side, however, the picture becomes much more problematic. Gioia is fully aware that merit is extraordinarily difficult to identify and assess in concrete social life. The problem concerns not only the evaluation of intention but also the measurement of effort, the calculation of utility, the unpredictability of future effects, and the institutional conditions under which recognition may be conferred. For this reason, the historical solutions he envisages cannot credibly be transferred to contemporary contexts, and some of them already appear problematic in his own time.
Yet beyond these limitations, it is still possible to underline one fundamental insight that runs like a watermark throughout Gioia’s entire reflection. For him, the difficulty of identifying and attributing merit is not a sufficient reason to abandon the effort, whether in the theoretical or in the social sense. On the contrary, any form of social life that aims to remain ethically sustainable requires that the question of merit remain open, debated, and subject to critical scrutiny. This is so not least because—as this article has argued—merit and virtue tend to stand or fall together. This does not mean treating merit as a simple, univocal, or readily applicable criterion. It does mean, however, recognizing that a community cannot, without loss, cease to ask which forms of conduct it considers worthy of esteem, which kinds of commitment and contribution to the common benefit ought to be recognized, and which examples deserve public encouragement. In this sense, abandoning the question of merit does not produce neutrality; rather, it risks impoverishing the ethical texture of social life.Footnote 3
More fundamentally, this insight—as this article has shown—reveals a point that is not always sufficiently clarified: Merit proves difficult to escape. Even when one declares the intention of setting it aside, it re-emerges in other forms: in the criteria of distribution regarded as legitimate, in the qualities treated as primary, and in the grounds on which trust, recognition, or reward are conferred. Properly speaking, then, the alternative is not between discussing merit and not discussing it. It is rather between discussing it explicitly and critically, or accepting its operative criteria implicitly under other guises. If this is so, then one of Gioia’s most enduring contributions lies less in the practicability of his historical solutions than in having shown, perhaps without fully realizing it, that the question of merit is best kept open to public and theoretical discussion, both as to its meaning and as to the difficult conditions of its possible application. The refusal to define merit, and to confront the difficulties of translating it into social practice, may leave room for one of its surrogates. More specifically, it may open the way to the kind of “counterfeit coin” ([1818–19] 2022, p. 333) that claims to replace merit while in fact offering only an ideological version of it. It is perhaps this vigilance over the concept that constitutes Gioia’s most timely contribution to the history of economic and philosophical thought. His theory may thus be regarded as one of the more complex modern elaborations of merit at the intersection of utilitarianism and civil economy.
COMPETING INTERESTS
The author declares no competing interests exist.
FUNDING
The author discloses receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article: This work was supported by NextGenerationEU [grant code: J53D23016440001; PI: Emanuele Pili; grant: € 230.986; project title: “PRIN 2022 PNRR | CHEWIE – Well-being, Humanism and Civil Economy”].
