Imagine two project managers. The first works in a department where deliveries frequently fall through: when this happens, he phones suppliers, rallies colleagues, stays late and puts things right at considerable effort to everyone. The second has planned the work carefully, clarified the sequence of tasks and identified the critical points along the way, keeping them under control. In his department, deliveries arrive regularly. At the year-end meeting, people recount the first manager’s ‘three heroic rescues’. Of the second, they say that he ‘had a quiet year’.

The scene is invented, but its moral is ancient. A Chinese text more than two thousand years old, the Héguanzǐ, tells how King Wen asked the celebrated physician Bian Que which of the three brothers, all physicians, was the most skilled. The eldest, he replied, because he treats illness before it manifests itself, and for this reason his name never leaves the household. The second treats it while it is still mild, and his fame extends no further than the village. He himself, the youngest, intervenes when the illness is serious and resorts to drastic treatments: thus his name is known throughout all the kingdoms. In short: the hierarchy of reputation is the exact reverse of the hierarchy of competence.

The problem deserves attention: how do we recognise competence whose result consists in something not having happened? An error averted or a colleague who has become self-reliant leaves no event to celebrate, only an ordinary day.

Discussions of meritocracy often take it for granted that merit is easy to recognise and that, when deserving people go unrewarded, favouritism is to blame. Aristotle was less optimistic. In the Nicomachean Ethics he observes that everyone agrees that the proper way to allocate rewards is on the basis of merit - axia - but not everyone understands merit in the same way: for democrats it is freedom, for oligarchs wealth, for aristocrats virtue. The real dispute is less about who deserves something than about what counts as merit. A decision can be impartial yet rest on a short-sighted or distorted view of what is valuable.

A promotion is not merely a reward

Benson, Li and Shue studied data on thousands of salespeople in more than a hundred US companies. Firms tend to promote those who have sold the most to managerial positions, overlooking characteristics that would better predict success as a manager, such as experience of teamwork. The result is that the best salespeople become, on average, worse managers: their team members’ sales decline. I have seen this happen several times: a company loses an excellent salesperson and finds itself with a mediocre sales director, who has left a job in which he excelled for one that brings him mostly frustration.

There is nothing wrong with rewarding the best. Recognising merit and assigning new responsibilities are, however, two distinct decisions requiring different criteria: an excellent salesperson may deserve a pay rise or greater autonomy without therefore having to lead other salespeople.

This transition matters to ethicology - the study of the conditions that make ethical behaviour more likely in organisations - because it shows that criteria for career advancement do not merely judge people: they shape an environment. In my book Eticologia I use the image of a moral landscape, borrowed from the fitness landscape through which the geneticist Sewall Wright represented evolution. It is a territory of peaks and valleys: on the peaks lie behaviours that are rewarded, sustainable and capable of spreading; in the valleys, those that are penalised or destined to disappear. The shape of the terrain depends on rules, incentives, relationships and stories. A promotion rewards an individual while also telling everyone else where the summit lies.

Counterfactual merit

Let us return to the two managers. The first may be highly skilled and bear no responsibility for the causes of the emergencies, but circumstances have brought his abilities to light ‘free of charge’. The second, if he wants to advance his career, faces an additional difficulty: he must show what would have happened without him. He must ask those making the decision to compare the observed world with one that nobody can observe. I propose calling this contribution counterfactual merit: merit that can be appreciated only by imagining a scenario contrary to the facts. Prevention is its clearest example, because it succeeds when nothing happens.

The name is not accidental. In 1973, the philosopher David Lewis proposed understanding causation in precisely these counterfactual terms. The classical model, which goes back to Hume, rests on regularity: A causes B if A precedes B and events like A are always followed by events like B. Lewis also proposed another formulation: A causes B if, in the absence of A, B would not have occurred. Lewis and prevention overturn the classical model: an action produces an absence, and an absence cannot be photographed. Philosophers have debated for decades whether what does not happen can have causes; organisations settle the matter more quickly by not recording it. Nassim Taleb made the point with a stark example. A legislator who had mandated reinforced cockpit doors before 11 September 2001 would have had no statues erected in their honour; if remembered at all, it would have been for the needless costs.

The problem of proof is real; counterfactual merit demands verifiable grounds: vulnerabilities documented before the intervention, the coherence of the change introduced, the testimony of those who carry that process forward every day. But the difficulty of judgement does not absolve us of judging. Counting emergencies resolved is easy; understanding whether someone has reduced the causes that produced them takes effort. If we abandon this work because it is complex, we end up rewarding what is easy to assess rather than what is valuable. Ease of measurement becomes a hidden criterion of merit.

Who makes whom indispensable

In 1975, Steven Kerr published an article with a telling title: On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B. People guide their actions by what is rewarded, not by what is declared desirable. A company that lists collaboration among its values while celebrating individual rescues will get rescuers, not collaboration.

This brings with it a subtler risk: that making oneself indispensable becomes advantageous. Those who pass on a skill lose their monopoly on a solution; those who withhold information ensure that the moment will come when everyone has to seek them out. Nobody needs to plot to cause breakdowns: it is enough for making oneself necessary to be more readily recognised than making others capable.

Here the question becomes ethical in the fullest sense. Recognition distributes opportunities, income and power, and steers behaviours that affect others. A career built on continual rescues can offload the cost of urgency onto colleagues and clients. Thomas Scanlon7 offers a useful criterion: a principle is justifiable if none of those affected by it could reasonably reject it. The implicit principle behind many promotions - we reward what can be seen - would hardly stand up before the second manager in our example, the one who prevents problems. Or before the first manager’s colleagues, who paid for his heroic evenings in overtime.

Changing what can be seen

If the problem lies in the landscape rather than in people, that is where questions must be asked and answers sought. The first concerns visibility: each candidate for promotion is asked to reconstruct a case in which work became more reliable - what it was like before, what changed, who can confirm it. In this way, those making the decision can justify their judgement with reasons that others can examine and challenge.

The second concerns stories, which select for behaviours within an organisation just as much as incentives do. If the year-end meeting also recounts the emergency that never happened, Bian Que’s eldest brother begins to leave the household.

The third concerns the structure of decisions: separating the reward for current performance from the choice of whom to promote to a different job.

One question remains. How much room can we allow for judgement about contributions that are difficult to attribute without opening the door to arbitrariness? Aristotle warned that the precision available in judgements of merit is modest, and that no formula can replace phronesis, the practical wisdom of those who must assess the particular case. By applying it, we might discover that there is someone who works exceptionally well but produces a result we have not yet learnt to value: the fact that others can work without having to call them.

References

Aristotele, Etica Nicomachea, a cura di C. Natali, Laterza, Roma-Bari 1999.

Benson A., Li D., Shue K., ‘Promotions and the Peter Principle’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134, 4 (2019), pp. 2085-2134.

Scolari S., Eticologia. Rendere l’etica naturale, S&C, Verona 2026.

Lewis D., ‘Causation’, The Journal of Philosophy, 70, 17 (1973), pp. 556-567.

Taleb N.N., The Black Swan, Random House, New York 2007. Trad. it. Di E. Nifosi, Il cigno nero, Il Saggiatore, Milano 2008.

Kerr S., ‘On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B’, Academy of Management Journal, 18, 4 (1975), pp. 769-783.

Scanlon T.M., What We Owe to Each Other, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1998.