lack of built-in machinery for inviolable contracts which makes non-defection hard to enforce
Out of topic: if you change nothing else about the universe, an easy to use “magical” mechanism for inviolable contracts would be a dreadful thing. As soon as you have power of life or death over someone you can pretty much force into irrevocable slavery. I suppose we could imagine a “good” working society using that mechanism. But more probably almost all humans would be slaves, serving maybe a single small group of aristocrats.
You might want to add a “free of influence” condition to the contract system, but in a society that normalizes absolute power (such as many ancient monarchies), that becomes difficult to define.
If you suddenly introduce it in the middle of our universe’s execution, sure. The scenario I was considering is where it exists from the beginning, with life evolving to take advantage of it from the get-go. In which case… Well, it really depends on the specific evolutionary setup, but plausibly organisms would evolve to accept death rather than a bad deal in such situations (the way humans evolved e. g. death-before-dishonor), and so most deals made would be net-positive.
I didn’t spend much time considering specific mechanisms, though; by all means, I can imagine it going perversely too.
Out of topic: if you change nothing else about the universe, an easy to use “magical” mechanism for inviolable contracts would be a dreadful thing. As soon as you have power of life or death over someone you can pretty much force into irrevocable slavery. I suppose we could imagine a “good” working society using that mechanism. But more probably almost all humans would be slaves, serving maybe a single small group of aristocrats.
You might want to add a “free of influence” condition to the contract system, but in a society that normalizes absolute power (such as many ancient monarchies), that becomes difficult to define.
If you suddenly introduce it in the middle of our universe’s execution, sure. The scenario I was considering is where it exists from the beginning, with life evolving to take advantage of it from the get-go. In which case… Well, it really depends on the specific evolutionary setup, but plausibly organisms would evolve to accept death rather than a bad deal in such situations (the way humans evolved e. g. death-before-dishonor), and so most deals made would be net-positive.
I didn’t spend much time considering specific mechanisms, though; by all means, I can imagine it going perversely too.
How would life even evolve in the first place with such a system in place?
Have you thought through all the common thought experiments and methods described on LW before posting this?