This relates to a snippet from musings about Ruby:

Now Ruby on Rails is a different, although related, offshoot. Don’t conflate the two. The RoR creator is a much more controversial figure, a “utility monster” if there ever was one.

What does that mean? To my eyes, it’s politicized distortion of a concept from academic philosophy. In context, it literally means:

  1. RoR’s creator was, and remains, by far the highest-status contributor to the project he started; and,
  2. Project resources are granted to him with priority; and,
  3. He doesn’t present any obvious demographic markers that would make him a member of a “marginalized group”.

To untangle this takes some doing. Patience, please.

Now I’m an amateur in philosophy. Little relevant training, and no credentials, so don’t take me too seriously. We used to have someone with a doctorate in political philosophy, and what follows would be far better addressed by them. I’ll do what I can.

  • A “meritocracy” is a system under which power and status are granted on the basis of demonstrated accomplishment and ability. In theory, things like social status, personal connections, wealth, and demographic markers are irrelevant. Python’s earliest days are a clear example of that. You rose in the pecking order if and only if you got tangible things done to visibly advance the project.

  • “Utilitarianism” is a philosophy holding that the best decisions are those that maximize the utility across a community. “Utility” is a somewhat subtle concept, which can often be read as “happiness” without much loss of important nuance (although some philosophers would disagree). There’s more than one flavor of this general theory.

There are multiple philosophical schools in favor of meritocracies. And also opposed. Utilitarianism is one such line, employed in both directions by different thinkers.

The academic philosopher Robert Nozick criticized utilitarianism by way of a thought experiment, involving a hypothetical “utility monster”. Someone who derives far more utility from, say, apples, than anyone else. A mindless application of utilitarianism therefore counsels that all apples should be given to that monster. Giving them to anyone else could only reduce the community’s aggregate utility.

Now that’s so silly you wouldn’t think it would get much attention, but by the norms of academic philosophy it did land a major blow (although far from fatal). It points to potential internal incoherence. Utilitarianism was “supposed to be” about benefiting everyone, not just about pleasing an elite of greedy pigs.

Note that Nozick wasn’t talking about meritocracies, just utilitarianism1.

Fast forward to another philosopher. Coraline Ada Ehmke, who has made opposition to meritocracy something of a personal brand. Best I can tell, nothing about her educational background is public knowledge, so while I may be wrong, she “reads like an amateur philosopher” to me. People with credentials in the “soft sciences” often throw them in your face <0.5 wink>.

One of her passions is abolishing meritocracies, believing they grant power that “should be” given to others. Apparently to garner some “philosophy cred”, she invoked Nozick’s “utility monster” to describe those at the top of many OS projects’ developer hierarchies (still too typically cishet white males).

But, unlike Nozick’s monsters, those aren’t primarily benefiting only themselves. They’re instead viewed as benefiting the project itself, and so also the project’s entire community. Ignoring that makes the attempted analogy very strained to my eyes. Nozick’s fundamental aim was to concoct monsters who benefit only themselves.

In any case, that gained traction in her circles of influence. and so I accept it as a kind of “consensus‑flavored truthiness” now. In those circles, Nozick’s “utility monster” is read with Ehmke’s take rather than with the original intent.

An irony is that her argument is inherently utilitarian: they’re arguing that maximizing community utility is best served by abolishing meritocracy. But Nozick was arguing against utilitarianism itself. His monster constructed to try to knock that philosophy down must be very confused to find itself a key player on that philosophy’s team :wink:.

A sounder line would be to accept utilitarianism, and pursue instead that meritocracies sometimes demonstrably give rise to insulated elite cliques. They can fail to meet utilitarianism’s goals.

  1. I don’t recall Nozick ever addressing meritocracy directly. But he was widely viewed as “radical libertarian”, so it’s easy to guess that he would have approved if, and only if, all the governed freely agreed to abide by such a system - and pretty much regardless of which “system” you asked him about. His work was much more about individual rights than about governance models, His philosophical bent couldn’t have much less in common with Ehmke’s. ↩