대입 추첨제는 어떤 문제의 답이 될 수 있을까? ―능력주의 비판론과 평등주의 이론의 관점에서―

Meritocratic principles and merit-based selection have recently been under attack. I engage these criticisms using resources from egalitarian theory. Drawing on the tradition of understanding talent, merit, and fair selection procedures in an institution-dependent sense, I assess the conditions under which merit-based inequalities could be appropriate. Throughout, I focus on the case of higher education admissions at the bachelor’s level (college admissions). I examine, in particular, the recently popular proposal to admit college students by lottery. I argue that familiar anti-meritocratic arguments for this proposal require non-obvious empirical support. I also argue, however, that there may be pro tanto reasons of procedural fairness for lottery admissions that depend not on empirical consequences but rather on the requirements of fairness as anchored in an institutional account of the merit appropriate to college admissions contexts. This procedural fairness argument may also fail to yield conclusive reasons for lottery admissions, for example if sufficiently bad consequences can be anticipated. Nonetheless, the argument is interestingly distinguishable from familiar arguments for lottery admissions in that it sees admissions lotteries not as a solution to the ills of meritocracy but rather as the result of carrying out merit-based selection on the understanding of merit appropriate to the institutional context.