Noblesse Oblige | Hacker News Reader

Noblesse Oblige

en.wikipedia.org

31 pointsmoorebrb9 comments

> Noblesse oblige, while seeming to impose on the nobility a duty to behave nobly, conveniently provides the aristocracy with an apparent justification for their privilege.

So too with meritocracy:

If meritocrats believe, as more and more of them are encouraged to, that their advancement comes from their own merits, they can feel they deserve whatever they can get.

They can be insufferably smug, much more so than the people who knew they had achieved advancement not on their own merit but because they were, as somebody's son or daughter, the beneficiaries of nepotism. The newcomers can actually believe they have morality on their side.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment

Either justification is cognitive dissonance at work as humans try to rationalize injustice. At least a meritocratic system theoretically provides more people access to riches.

But meritocracy imposes no obligations.

In any case, monarchy traditionally was highly constrained by the nobility, by tradition, by considerations relating to the continuation of the dynasty, by the life-long preparation to assume the throne, by royal councils, and so on, not to mention constrained by the nature of the kind of authority it is just as all authority is constrained. And in line with what you wrote, while someone who ascended the throne could appeal to the right to rule, that right was not rooted in his own merit. If you were a Christian king, you would recognize that your authority was only derivative, and granted through and constrained by the grace of God (John 19:11 comes to mind). Any glory of the king was a glory his people partook in (1 Corinthians 12:26). This belief in the origin of authority rooted in and derived solely from divine will both humbled the king and gave him the confidence needed to act within the narrow confined of the monarchy. Obviously, not all kings were equally morally scrupulous, but the belief that monarchies are worse is highly dubious, if not flatly wrong. Even in Europe today where constitutional monarchies survive, countries with monarchies are socially more stable than those without because the highest uniting figure in the country is above partisan squabbling.

This makes me think of "Skin in the Game" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think noblesse oblige arises naturally when powerful people have skin in the game, and it doesn't arise at all when they do not.

Arguably, while globalism may have some upsides, one of its biggest downsides is that the most powerful people have very little skin in the game at all.

We’ll see if it happens, but I think that people are going to become less and less accepting of entitled or narcissistic behavior like that as time goes on.

No, skin in the game is merely the intertwining of self-interest. Taleb is talking about ways to incentivize those with power, authority, whatever to act in conformity with the common good by entwining their good with the good of everyone else such that a loss to any party is a loss to both parties. Noblesse oblige is about one's higher moral obligations toward others as a person of noble rank, full stop, such that the person in question lived up to the noble ideal of magnanimity.

Incidentally, as it turns out, people are social in nature and thus contribution to the common good (when it is truly such in keeping with one's own good) is by definition common. Thus, what Taleb is talking about is the narrow understanding of the common good. A "powerful" person who doesn't give a crap about the common good and actually does harm to it is actually harming himself by harming the society he is a part of. Taleb is suggesting that we deal with such people in positions of authority by working to entwine their interests (monetary, in his case) with the interests of others.

A well attested quote from Danish nobleman and admiral Herluf Trolle (1516 - 1565) [my hasty, naive, and insufficient translation]:

Do you know why we are called lords, why we have golden chains and earthly property and are held in greater esteem than others? Because when king and sovereign, country and realm have need, then we must ward against the enemies of the land, protect and shield with all our powers and possessions our fatherland, so that our subjects may live and exist in peace and quietude. Yea, if we wish the sweet, we must also take the sour

No empty words, those. Trolle died from injuries sustained in a naval battle, refusing treatment until his men had been looked after. The past does have its moments.

I see this term used a lot in Korean dramas by 'Chaebol' type characters, always wondered what exactly they meant.

I often see it used ironically in the United States (for instance, to refer to a large charitable donation with precise instructions on how the money can be used -- surely for the good of the recipient!).

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