Society & Justice Thought Experiments
Society thought experiments zoom out from individual moral decisions to ask what the rules of collective life should look like. How should power be organized? What makes a distribution fair? What happens when individual rationality produces collective disaster? These are the questions of political philosophy, and the thought experiments in this category have been driving that conversation for centuries.
The social contract tradition
Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau each imagined a 'state of nature,' life before political society, as a way of understanding what government is actually for. Hobbes imagined pre-political life as a war of all against all, 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.' People surrender freedom to a sovereign to escape this condition. The sovereign's authority is absolute because the alternative is worse.
Locke's version is considerably more hospitable. In the state of nature, people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property. Government is created to protect these rights, not override them. If it fails, citizens have the right to revolt. This argument is the intellectual background of the American Declaration of Independence and most liberal democratic theory.
Rousseau's general will introduces a more puzzling idea: the legitimate authority of society rests not just on consent but on the expression of a common good that transcends individual preferences. These different starting points produce radically different conclusions about taxation, redistribution, civil disobedience, and the limits of state power. The debates they generated are still live.
Designing society from behind the veil
John Rawls's veil of ignorance is one of the most influential thought experiments in 20th-century political philosophy. Imagine you had to design the rules of society without knowing who you would be in it: your wealth, race, gender, intelligence, or any other personal attribute. What rules would you choose?
Rawls argues that rational agents in this 'original position' would choose two principles: first, equal basic liberties for all; second, that inequalities are only justified if they benefit the least-advantaged members of society. The veil of ignorance is a device for achieving impartiality by removing the self-interested distortions that normally skew our sense of what's fair.
Critics from the right, like Robert Nozick, argue that no hypothetical agreement behind a veil could generate real obligations. Nozick's libertarian alternative, the Wilt Chamberlain argument, asks whether a series of voluntary transactions can make an unequal distribution unjust. If people freely pay to watch a great athlete perform, is the resulting inequality something the state may redistribute? Nozick says no. The tension between procedural and outcome-based theories of justice runs through most contemporary political disagreement.
Prisoner's dilemmas and collective action
The prisoner's dilemma is one of the most important ideas in all of social science. Two prisoners can either cooperate (stay silent) or defect (betray each other). If both cooperate, both get light sentences. If one defects while the other cooperates, the defector goes free and the cooperator gets the worst sentence. If both defect, both get moderate sentences. The logical structure means that each individual, reasoning purely in their own interest, will defect, even though mutual cooperation would leave both better off.
This structure underlies arms races, environmental degradation, tax avoidance, and the overuse of shared resources. Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons shows what happens to shared resources, whether a common pasture, a fishery, or the atmosphere, when individuals each have an incentive to overuse them while the costs are shared collectively. Each individual is rational. The collective outcome is catastrophic.
The stag hunt offers a more optimistic version of the same problem. Two hunters can each catch a hare alone, or cooperate to catch a stag, which requires both. The stag is far better, but cooperation is fragile. It requires trust and coordination. The question the stag hunt poses is when and why cooperation sustains itself, and what institutions make it more likely.
Omelas and the price of order
Ursula K. Le Guin's 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' presents a city of extraordinary happiness: festivals, abundance, joy. The condition for all this happiness is a single child kept in a basement in misery, who must never be comforted or helped. Everyone knows about the child. Most stay. A few walk away.
The target is the utilitarian arithmetic underlying many policy arguments. Is it acceptable that some people's suffering be the price of others' prosperity? The fact that we don't usually see the child doesn't change the structure of the bargain. Whether knowing makes you responsible, and what walking away actually accomplishes, are questions the story leaves open.
The utility monster, introduced by Robert Nozick as a critique of utilitarianism, pushes the same intuition further: what if there existed a being who derived vastly more utility from any given resource than ordinary humans? Strict utilitarian logic would demand giving this monster almost everything. The absurdity of that conclusion is meant to show the absurdity of pure aggregative thinking.
Property, markets, and what you can keep
John Locke's original argument for property rights rests on labor: you own yourself, so you own the work of your hands, and mixing your labor with the world makes the result yours, provided enough and as good is left for others. This 'proviso' has been debated ever since. In a world where most resources are already claimed, what justifies existing property distributions?
Demoktesis imagines a different baseline: what if resources were originally owned collectively, and individuals could only acquire property by purchasing it from the demos? This inverts the Lockean assumption and asks what follows if common ownership is the default rather than private ownership. The implications for taxation and redistribution are substantial.
These experiments about property and economic organization ultimately come back to the question of what a just society looks like. They're particularly good dinner conversation because almost everyone has intuitions about fairness that turn out, on examination, to be in tension with each other.
27 society thought experiments
- Counterfactual MuggingA perfect predictor asks you for $100, and explains that if the coin had landed the other way, it would have given you $10,000 only if it predicted you'd pay now. The coin has already landed. Do you pay?
- DemoktesisImagine a society in which every person owns a one-millionth share of every other person. Is this radically egalitarian, or is it a form of collective slavery? And what does your answer reveal about what you think equality requires?
- Game of ChickenTwo drivers race toward each other. Whoever swerves first loses face but survives. If neither swerves, both die. What's the rational move when rationality depends entirely on what the other person does?
- Newcomb's ProblemA perfect predictor has already placed money in boxes based on what it predicted you would do. Do you take both boxes, or just one?
- Rousseau's State of NatureIf civilization introduced inequality, competition, and dependence, does that mean natural human beings were better off before society? And if so, what follows?
- The Allais ParadoxYour choices between two pairs of gambles are perfectly consistent with your own reasoning. And yet they violate the foundational axiom of rational choice theory. Are you irrational, or is the theory wrong?
- The Desert IslandA group of people wash up on an uninhabited island with no prior legal system, no inherited property, and no government. What principles of property and authority would be reasonable for them to adopt?
- The Ellsberg ParadoxGiven the choice between a bet with known odds and a bet with unknown odds, both with the same expected payoff, which do you prefer? And does your answer stay consistent across both bets?
- The General WillIs there a version of what society should choose that is distinct from what any particular person or majority wants? And if so, how would we ever know what it is?
- The Hobbesian State of NatureWithout any government or authority, what would human life look like? And if the answer is genuinely terrible, what does that tell us about how much power we should grant the state?
- The Invisible HandCan a system with no central coordinator, no shared goal, and no benevolent designer reliably produce outcomes that benefit everyone? And if it can, does that tell us anything about how other social systems should work?
- The Leviathan ContractIf the social contract was never actually signed, can it still be binding? And if an absolute sovereign protects you but rules badly, do you still owe obedience?
- The Lockean State of NatureIf people have natural rights to life, liberty, and property before any government exists, what does government actually owe them, and when can they justifiably overthrow it?
- The Ones Who Walk Away from OmelasA perfect city thrives in prosperity and joy, but its happiness depends entirely on one child being kept in squalor and misery. Knowing this, do you stay?
- The Original PositionWhat principles of justice would you choose if you had no idea what position you would occupy in the society those principles governed?
- The Pasadena GameA game has payoffs that can be arranged to produce any expected value you want, including infinity, negative infinity, or zero. Does this game have a well-defined value? Should you play it?
- The Prisoner's DilemmaTwo people can cooperate for mutual benefit or betray each other for individual gain. If both betray, both lose. What do you do? Does it matter if you'll meet again?
- The Protective AssociationCould a legitimate government arise from voluntary agreements alone, without anyone's rights being violated? And if so, what would it be permitted to do?
- The Repugnant ConclusionIs a world of 10 billion people with excellent lives worse than a world of 100 trillion people with lives barely worth living, if the total happiness in the second world is greater?
- The St. Petersburg ParadoxA coin is flipped until it lands heads. Your payout doubles with each flip. The expected value of this game is infinite. How much would you actually pay to play?
- The Stag HuntYou and others can cooperate to catch a stag that feeds everyone, or you can break away and catch a rabbit that feeds only you. If anyone defects, the stag hunt fails. Do you stay?
- The Tragedy of the CommonsIf a resource is shared and each person's rational self-interest leads them to overuse it, is collective ruin inevitable? And does the answer require either private ownership or government control?
- The Utility MonsterImagine a being who gets vastly more pleasure from any resource than any human does: every meal is 1000x more enjoyable, every experience 1000x more vivid. Should society give it almost everything?
- The Veil of IgnoranceIf you had to design the rules of society without knowing who you would be in it, your wealth, race, gender, intelligence, or any other trait, what rules would you choose?
- The Wilt Chamberlain ArgumentIf you start with a distribution everyone agrees is fair, and people freely give Wilt Chamberlain their money to watch him play, is the new distribution unjust? If not, how can redistribution ever be justified?
- Tyranny of the MajorityIf a democratic majority can impose its will on any minority, what makes democracy different from any other form of tyranny? And what, if anything, should limit majority rule?
- What Makes a Good Dinner Conversation?What is it that makes some conversations at a dinner table end with everyone feeling more alive, and others end with everyone checking their phones?
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