It seems us more fair to give everyone according to one’s merit than to make strictly equal. This commonplace of modern democratic societies is discussed from the double viewpoint of the gift’s paradigm linked to Hannah Arendt’s concept of action. It emerges from this that our current idea of merit is highly destructive: it involves us in reductive view of action as a measurable fact, strictly attributable to an individual; formalized in this way, action is no more than a calculation — produced by it, valued by it. Action looses its meaning, its plural and symbolic features: action is trivialized. The requirement of our merit’s acknowledgment then appears as aporetic, as we want our uniqueness to be acknowledged.