I know what it is for my life to go better or worse, but it doesn’t make sense to ask whether my life is better than yours. And that means there is no comparative measure, no single scale of human worth. As a result, a system of selection for jobs and educational opportunities cannot be designed by considering who is most worthy of those opportunities, because, as Michael Young argued through his Chelsea Manifesto, there isn’t a single scale of merit on which to rank them.
