On Sugden’s normative economics and the comparison of non-nested opportunity sets

In his book The Community of Advantage , Sugden proposes a form of normative economics that is almost free of the concept of preferences. Specifically, Sugden relies on the idea that everyone can accept the principle that more opportunities is better than less. Yet, this approach cannot be easily applied to the choice of economic reforms that fail to provide more opportunities for everyone. This paper complements an approach proposed by Sugden to deal with non-nested opportunity sets. We rely on the idea that people should take responsibility for the choices that were not endorsed before the reform takes place. In this perspective, a reform project is admissible if it allows people to stick to their initial choices and provides them with a rich set of opportunities (that is, the new opportunity regime must also satisfy Sugden’s Strong Interactive Opportunity Criterion). As an illustration, we show how routine redistribution schemes can make free trade be preferred to autarky even if it does not provide more opportunities for everyone.