If philosophy, as its name suggests, really does love the truth, why does it spend so much time making things up? From Plato’s ‘Ring of Gyges’ to Rawls’ ‘Veil of Ignorance’, not to mention the virtual meta-verse of ‘trolley-ology’, we seem obsessed with scenarios that neither have happened nor ever will happen. And indeed, we even play around with the words we use to describe such stories, from moral ‘allegories’ and ‘metaphors’, to hypothetical ‘cases’ and ‘examples’, all the way through to ‘intuition pumps’ and ‘thought experiments’. Never though ‘story’, or ‘tale’, or ‘fiction’. What though is the difference between a ‘case’ or ‘allegory’ that takes a paragraph and one that fills a novel? What is the difference between, say, the camping trip in Cohen’s Why not Socialism?, in which we imagine production without money, and Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness, in which we contemplate politics without gender?

Is it, perhaps the analysis that follows the example? Maybe, but if so, that analysis too could be included in a novel, or indeed expressed via dialogue, as it is in Plato. Could it then be a matter of depth? Again, maybe, yet surely there is more scope for that in, say, an eight-part saga than an 8000 word journal article? We could then, just maybe, take another route altogether. Rather than lying about the fact that we already produce fiction, we might ask what kinds of story we ought to be telling, and in turn experiment with new kinds as yet unseen. In this talk, as well as the accompanying paper, I do both these things, by considering in particular the contemporary problems of ‘AI’ and ‘human enhancement’ from the perspective of a leading academic journal’s first non-human editor, writing one hundred years in the future. Here then, instead of imagining a fictional history or ‘state of nature’ behind us, as Hobbes and Rousseau have famously done, I fictionalize the years ahead, though the aim in both cases, as I see it, is just the same – to explore where particular ideas take us in theory, and thus in turn which should be pursued in practice. Either way, by openly reflecting on this way of doing things we do something long overdue. We bring bringing this favourite method of ours out of the ‘cave’ and into the warm ‘sunlight’ of methodology.