Measuring Opportunity: Toward a Contractarian Measure of Individual Interest
Author(s)
Sugden, Robert
Abstract
Contractarian theories justify social rules by showing that, because those rules can be expected to work in everyone’s interests, everyone could agree to them. This requires a unit of account for measuring interests. Adopting a Humean approach in which desires are not subject to rational appraisal and recognizing that in reality individuals often do not have stable or consistent preferences, this paper considers the problem of constructing such a unit of account. It argues for the strategy of measuring the amount of opportunity that a person has to satisfy preferences in general, rather than the preferences he actually has.
