"To say ‘I deserve this’ is to say: I authored the action that produced it. Zhuangzi’s world gives every such claim an invisible plural. Effort arises through upbringing, pedagogy, institutional pathways, emotional and material support, health, luck and the ordinary labour of others that makes any striving possible. ‘Merit’ is in large part a social product. The ways in which our characters and personalities are shaped are themselves a social product.

Understanding agency in this manner, therefore, makes the idea of ‘equality of opportunity’ questionable, because opportunity is never really a neutral starting line. Such ‘equality’ is always already a field of conditions that shapes the very capacities by which people strive. Moral agency can never be cleanly separated out and credited or blamed. As such, moral inequality loses its footing, because differences in cultivation express differences in circumstance as much as differences in will. Without a self that can fully own its outcomes, social and political inequality loses its moral engine."

• No one is self-made: Zhuangzi and the case against meritocracy; Christine Abigail L Tan