Opportunity

Chapter 5 proposes using opportunity rather than preference-satisfaction as a normative criterion. I present an ‘Individual Opportunity Criterion’, which essentially states that expansions in any individual’s opportunity set should be treated as having value to that individual. I give a contractarian justification for this criterion under the assumption that individuals’ preferences are neoclassical, arguing against philosophers who claim that preference-satisfaction is not an acceptable normative criterion, even when preferences satisfy neoclassical assumptions. I then show that the contractarian justification of the Individual Opportunity Criterion extends to cases in which those assumptions do not hold, including cases in which an individual’s decisions are dynamically inconsistent.