Thought Experiments: An Old Method for Modern Problems

Talking about politics has always been challenging. Partisanship, biases, and misinformation affect how we discuss and perceive even the most neutral of political policies. In many cases, our natural inclination towards tribal politics trumps our values and reason. One of the ways political theorists minimize these blind spots and expand their perception is thought experiments. A classic example is how social contract theorists used, ‘The State of Nature,’ to structure the relationship between the government and citizens. The State of Nature represents the human experience before the establishment of effective governance. If, like Hobbes, you think life in the State of Nature would be, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” (aka, the purge). You might also believe that a strong government with a robust police force is necessary for a good life. On the other hand, if you think people would live peacefully, choosing to cooperate, you might advocate for little or no government.

Either way or any other, the idea is that you put a picture to your perception of human nature, then see where government is needed.

Thought experiments test the internal logic of political beliefs, inspire creative thinking, and produce more productive conversations than whether capitalism or socialism is better. In the spirit of promoting better dialogue, this paper will present three thought experiments and demonstrate their real-world relevance. While engaging in thought experiments is unlikely to solve all of the world’s problems, it may give us a way to raise the level of our political discourse and help us develop a deeper understanding of our own beliefs and others’. If nothing else, these thought experiments could be an interesting twist on the traditional family political debates over the holidays.

1- The Ship of Theseus, Originally by Plutarch

Imagine you buy a ship and take it on an epic voyage. Throughout the voyage, the ship experiences some damage, so you replace the mast, along with several boards and hundreds of rusted nails. Over the next several years, you go on many more voyages and after every trip, you make more repairs to your ship. Eventually, you get to a point where you have replaced every part of your ship. Is it the same ship you bought all of those years ago? If not, at what point did it become a new ship?

There are hundreds of well-reasoned answers to this problem. For example, the theory of continuity argues that the processes of change and purpose are what determine if the ship is the same or not (Đukić, 2025). If the ship were completely torn down and a new one built in its place, then it would be a new ship. However, if the ship’s new parts are added in slowly, so that the majority of new parts participate in voyages with some of the original parts. This gives all of the parts overlapping and shared experiences as well as a shared purpose, creating continuity and maintaining the ship’s identity.

Alternatively, David Hume argued that there is no such thing as a persistent identity (Hume, 1739). For him, every new nail makes the ship a different ship. With every new step, we become a different person. Culture, society, the self, and even objects are all in a continuous state of dying and becoming new. Continuity and consistency are both nothing more than illusions.

This thought experiment is typically used to illustrate the complexity of identity. Addressing questions such as: Are you the same you, you were ten years ago? But we can also apply it to cultural identities. There is a lot of rhetoric about a loss of culture, threats to culture, and a need to preserve culture, coming from Western countries. At what point does a culture become something different? With every new wave of immigration? With every generation? Does culture maintain continuity even if it changes over time? Or is culture in a constant state of change, becoming something different with every new piece of technology, every war, or catastrophe?

Politics. Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

2- The Drowning Child, by Peter Singer

You are walking past a shallow pond and you notice a small child drowning in the pond. You look for the child’s guardians but no one else is around. You are on your way to a meeting and are wearing expensive clothes. If you go into the pond to save the child you will ruin your clothes and possibly be late for your meeting. Do you have a moral obligation to save the child? What would you think about a person who chose to leave the child?

If there is an obligation to save the child, is it wrong to spend 100 dollars on a pair of shoes you do not need, when that 100 dollars could save dozens of children dying from treatable diseases (Singer, 2017)?

What is the moral difference between the child drowning in front of you and the one dying of dysentery thousands of kilometers away?

In the same line of reasoning, are wealthy countries morally obligated to assist populations suffering from acts of nature, diseases, or conflict? If a country has the resources to save millions of lives with little impact on its own population, should it not do so? On the domestic front, is it wrong for government officials to spend 250 million dollars on an unnecessary building instead of health services, food distribution, medical research, or education? Is there a moral equivalence between these situations and someone leaving the child to drown because they did not want to ruin their clothes or be late for a meeting?

3- The Veil of Ignorance, by Rawls

Behind the Veil of Ignorance, you do not know who you are. You are ignorant of your gender, nationality, age, ethnicity, economic status, and social status. You do not know if you have children or not, whether you are strong, intelligent, ill, crippled, or any other self-identifying element. From this position of self-ignorance, construct the society you will live in. Remember, you could be anyone in this society. What does your society look like?

Rawls (argued that since you do not know who you are, you cannot recommend policies that benefit yourself at the expense of others. Your most rational option is to construct a society that offers the most mutual benefits and rejects policies that discriminate. You should maximize freedom and advantages while minimizing harm for everyone, so even if you end up being on the lowest rung of society you will still have a good life.

Rawls used this thought experiment for domestic policy, however, others have applied it to the international arena (Kalashnik, 2025). Like the original thought experiment, you go behind the veil of ignorance, but this time you are a world leader and it is your job to construct an international system. The catch is that you do not know which country you are the leader of and other leaders must agree with your proposal.

Were you able to shed your biases and give equal consideration to the needs and concerns of all countries? If so, how do you know the needs of countries you are not familiar with? Are you able to judge what is good, just, or fair without relying on your cultural, religious, or experiential knowledge (Davies, 2018)? Are your definitions of ‘good’ and ‘justice’ universal? If our understanding of ‘good’ and our knowledge of needs are limited to our own perception, is diverse representation a requirement in constructing just or fair policies?

Conclusion

Whether these thought experiments resonated with you or reaffirmed why you hate philosophy, their value lies in challenging our preconceived notions. Too often, complicated, nuanced issues are allowed to be flattened by rhetoric and turned into an easily digestible, binary choice that comes down to ‘us’ or ‘them.’ Using thought experiments to reassess politically loaded issues, enables us to side-step the rhetoric and examine the foundational principles underneath our political positions. In doing so, we can find where our real agreements and disagreements lay. Then we can pursue managing fault lines with science, research, reason, or compromise. Through this process, thought experiments may aid us in building consensus around international and domestic political practices. All of that to say, politics affects all of us in almost every aspect of our lives, we should not leave the best tools of the field to academics.

Bibliography

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2. BBC News. (2025, July 28). What is the veil of ignorance? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l7dey54zjo

3. Britannica. (n.d.). Ship of Theseus philosophy. Retrieved October 16, 2025, from https://www.britannica.com/topic/ship-of-Theseus-philosophy

4. Davies, B. (2019). John Rawls and the ‘veil of ignorance.’ In Introduction to ethics: An open educational resource (pp. 92–97). NGE Far Press.

5. Hume, D. (1739). A treatise of human nature. (Original work published 1739). http://faculty.winthrop.edu/oakesm/PHIL101/Web1/readings/Hume_Treatise.pdf

6. Kalashnik, A. (2025). The global veil: A Rawlsian thought experiment for international justice. SSRN. https://ssrn.com/abstract=5384145

7. Nida-Rümelin, M. (2025). The knowledge argument against physicalism. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2025 ed.). Stanford University. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/

8. Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

9. Singer, P. (n.d.). Famine, affluence, and morality. https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS089/PDF_files/PeterSinger.pdf

10. Singer, P. (1972). Famine, affluence, and morality. Philosophy & Public Affairs, 1(3), 229–243. https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil308/Singer2.pdf

11. Zylstra, J. K. (2024). Continuity theory & the component theory of the ship of Theseus. DMJR Journals. https://dmjr-journals.com/assets/article/1748690461-CONTINUITY_THEORY_&_THE_COMPONENT_THEORY_OF_THE_SHIP_OF_THESEUS.pdf

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