Questioning the Fundamental Right to the Material Equality: Do the Exceptional Cases Justify the Ultraliberal Meritocracy?

Abstract

The research that originated this article started from the premise according to which there are affirmative actions in the general society, that is, public measures applied in order to reduce the inequality affecting the so-called minorities, which regards the egalitarian ideology. Despite this presupposition and these generalized public measures, worldwide created, there is also a meritocratic discourse that diminishes the necessity of the affirmative actions, preaching that if there are certain persons that belonged to minority groups that could surpass their difficulties, does not remain any justification for the affirmative actions, because supposedly the respective same efforts could be taken by all minorities’ members. Better explaining, it was intended to comprehend if the speech of resilience taken by the most successful part of individuals belonged to minoritarian groups is able to crash the affirmative actions destined to mitigate the typical obstacles and the inequality faced by respective minorities. In other words, it was aimed to answer this question: “do the exceptional cases justify the meritocracy?”. Therefore, it was investigated the following points, conceived as fundamentals and as presuppositions to truly understand the described problematic: 1) the concepts of the egalitarian and the meritocratic ideologies; 2) the concept, the social function and the objective of the affirmative actions, including the analysis of some Brazilian examples, regarding specific law provisions; 3) the concept of minority, considering objectively defined criteria. Thus, in a nutshell, it was concluded that exceptional cases risen from minorities do not build an argument strong enough to shatter the affirmative actions, neither to sustain the ultraliberal meritocracy branch. Moreover, it consisted on a research that belongs to the exploratory and to the descriptive natures, also that used the inductive-observatory method, by a bibliographical technical procedure, done through a database collection.