Political Thought Experiments from Plato to Rawls

Abstract

Political thought experiments are a relatively new topic in the literature on thought experiments, whereas thought experimenting in science, linguistics, metaphysics, epistemology, and in areas of ethics that are not (immediately) political has been an object of intense scrutiny.1 Thought experimenting in political thought has been discussed mainly in connection with one or two authors, John Rawls mainly and to some extent Ronald Dworkin. In this paper I set the goal of attempting to somewhat systematize the approach to this activity, which involves three ambitious subgoals: fi rst, characterize and briefl y defend political thought experiments; second, point to two long and prominent traditions of thought-experimental armchair speculation in political philosophy; and third, and most briefl y, connect these traditions to similar and historically related e orts in literary fi ction or in the borderline areas between literature, political philosophy, and science. The price of this ambition will be extreme sketchiness and the programmatic nature of the proposals, and I apologize for it. My excuse and rationale is that one needs a general framework for thinking about this historically vast topic and even sketching properly such a framework would demand a lot of space (and time). A proposal about the starting point is needed, no matter how programmatic. Political thought experiments (which I shall in the following abridge as “political TEs”, using “TE” alone for “thought experiment”) are normally concerned with properties of imagined political arrangements, or more abstractly, of principles guiding and structuring them. Should property be common or privately owned? Should all be treated equally, or according to some other rule? I shall take my examples from two great works, Plato’s Republic and Rawls’s Theory of Justice. The latter is centered upon the TE of the original position, in which one is famously asked to imagine being behind the veil of ignorance (ignorant of one’s various important actual characteristics, like gender, wealth, abilities, and particular preferences), and to judge various principles for organizing a society one is going to live in. The properties thus investigated from the armchair are moral properties in a wide sense, prominent among themjustice. In this respect political TEs are a subspecies of ethical TEs, like the Trolley problem (Foot 1967) or Thomson’s Violinist (Thomson 1971). On the other hand, their study belongs to political epistemology, the branch of social epistemology concerned with how people come to know (truths) about politics and political life, in particular general truths.