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Opportunity as a Space for Individuality: Its Value and the Impossibility of Measuring It*

In recent work in political philosophy and normative economics, there has been a growing interest in using concepts of opportunity to evaluate economic and social arrangements. This new emphasis is a reaction against the previous orthodoxy of welfarism, which evaluates states of affairs in terms of the extent to which individuals’ preferences are satisfied. Opportunity-based approaches differ from welfarism, and indeed from all forms of consequentialism, in taking an ex ante rather than an ex post viewpoint: they consider what each individual has the opportunity to achieve, rather than what he or she actually achieves. In most current theories of opportunity, opportunity is treated as a good that is distributed among individuals; ensuring that this distribution satisfies principles of equality or fairness is taken to be a proper concern of public policy. This idea is clearly expressed in John Rawls’s claim that opportunity is one of the “social values” that should be distributed equally unless an unequal distribution is to everyone’s advantage. Amartya Sen voices a similar idea when he suggests that opportunity (or “capability”) might be the right answer to his question, “Equality of what?” So, too, does G. A. Cohen, when he advocates equality of “access to advantage,” and John Roemer, in his work on equality of opportunity.