> Why isn't it a good idea?
I had the same question.
> Whatever qualities or services performed by the original person probably didn't pass to the children
Maybe if you subscribe to the hard times theory. There’s plenty of reason to suspect that certain aptitudes can be genetically heritable, and that doesn’t even address the issue of skills transferring by osmosis or deliberate instruction in the household.
The aptitude for having one of your daughters be the King's mistress may not be of particular value as a legislator.
That isn’t what is being discussed here. An inept man could conceivably have a sexually attractive daughter. From a meritocratic perspective, it would be a mistake for a king to install the inept man as an advisor simply to gain access to the man’s daughter.
What we are discussing, however, is the existence of a man who has been identified as possessing some competency, and his office passing to his offspring on his death, on the basis that his children may have inherited the competency genetically or via an informal education. Heredity isn’t as simple as that, but at the same time, it isn’t clear that competencies “probably” do not pass between parent and child.
> Heredity isn’t as simple as that, but at the same time, it isn’t clear that competencies “probably” do not pass between parent and child.
We have several thousand years of history recorded where people tried this and the failures vastly outweigh the successes.
> We have several thousand years of history recorded where people tried this and the failures vastly outweigh the successes.
Tried what?
Selecting children for leadership positions becausr of their parents.
The majority of all successful civilizations on earth have done this and even those that did not have the usual patrilineal inheritance we associate with European cultures usually had a mechanism for the inheritance of land, title, and status. The idea that this would have bad outcomes only really emerges during the Enlightenment Era, and it only became a mainstream cultural attitude in the last hundred years. Even today, after 60 some-odd years of civil rights legislation, meritocracy is more of an idea than a reality. It conflicts with a cultural imperative to build legacy through one’s children, and the institution of private property that facilitates building this legacy. You could theoretically do away with these norms as they are not culturally universal, but then you probably are looking at living in the paleolithic era (which will also not be meritocratic) or utopian ideologies like communism.