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I don't understand your argument there - these rules exist as international agreements that are generally fairly well-respected, so doesn't that in fact make citizenship more like family, and therefore make moral intuitions about family membership more applicable to citizenship?
I think @OracleOutlook's response below already addressed the most important ones, so I'll just +1 it.
I think that in saying this, you also betray an interesting conflation of two different understandings of what meritocracy is. One of them is a sort of deontological one, under which to be a meritocrat is to hold that it is morally right that boons go to the most meritorious, while the other is more utilitarian, where to be a meritocrat is to say that granting awards and positions to the best is the optimal way to organise a society.
Your responses seem to place you in the former camp, while many of your interlocutors consider themselves to be meritocrats in the latter sense. As usual, non-central examples are the ones that really put the differences between deontologists and utilitarians in relief. The utilitarian case for meritocracy seems strong, but in reality most of its strength is concentrated in theoretical argument and precedent for the beneficial effects of central examples of it, that is, meritocratic distribution of awards and public positions within a nation. There is little to no precedent for meritocratic award of citizenship (outside maybe of the occasional microstate selling it), and a good volume of theoretical argument against it that is unique to the nationality case (see OracleOutlook's and my own response). Accordingly, the utilitarian who sees himself as a meritocrat because the benefits of meritocracy are well-supported will be parsing this label as referring to the well-supported core of meritocracy only, and not feel particularly compelled to support meritocratic award of citizenship either on the basis of "meritocracy is good" (deontologism!) or "how can you claim to be a meritocrat otherwise" (word games? virtue ethics?).
On an individual level, I don't deny that background winds up being more relevant (though it is by no means everything - my SO is in fact a random mathematician of [not my ethnicity], and for the least controversial example where genetic distance still rears its ugly head, when we are both sick, we can not eat the same things), but nobody is about to run a country that is all mathematicians. On a population level, all these individual values and interests and social niches level out - the Japanese mathematician and the Mexican mathematician might get along swimmingly, but if the Mexican mathematician then has a kid with his Mexican mathematician wife and it is sent to a kindergarten to be watched by the Japanese mathematician's kindergarten teacher cousin, I figure there will be friction.
This is interesting! I do think I disagree with the deontological case for boons going to the most "meritorious." It's usually sheer luck and good external factors (genetics, environment) that puts people on the top. It's not always the "most diligent" person who gets the best compensation. And if we did sort society based on something that is within people's control, (like "works hardest") instead of things outside people's control (like "is smartest") then it would overall be a worse society.
People didn't actually do anything worthy of merit to be the smartest, best looking, most talented, etc. At best they worked hard to improve on something that was already there, but that doesn't mean they worked harder than someone who is disabled and works twice as hard to do half as much.
But if you want to incentivize the best to do their best, you need to give them the best rewards. And it is one of the jobs of society to incentivize the best to do their best, partly because a rising tide lifts all boats. In this regard I follow the utilitarian model it seems.
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