In 2015, China rolled out a test system for improving good behavior among citizens of test communities. It's now been four years and there are some observations that can be made from this as seen in the video below.


If we remove the fact that the communist regime most probably took the "charity" money and that their corruption causes further problems with this system, would this system work in a functioning democracy?

The biggest questions to be answered are: How does a social credit system react to when you protest something? What happens if society needs something to progress that won't do it without challenging the established system?

In a democracy, these things are essential in order to progress as a society. And what happens when you reach a high credit score and reap the benefits? What happens if you stop doing good deeds when you already have the essentials you got from that high credit score?

This would probably (and in an ironic turn for a communist regime) bring about the "master/slave-dialectic" scenario, in which the ones with a low credit would act as much as they can to raise that credit, which in itself is a positive push the credit system brings with it. But the ones who already got to a high credit would stop seeing a benefit by doing good deeds, they already reap the benefits and can easily rely on the low credit people to slave under them. Which staggers their momentum while the low credit people will turn themselves into people who automatically act out of goodness and therefore most likely reach the masters of high credits. The only thing that might stop this is that the low credit people would have fewer tools to advance while high credit people would have the technology to advance even further.

But if we change it into a rubber-band system, in which differences in credits slowly tick back to its 1000 point normality, what would that bring about? If you go lower and lose benefits you can either do good deeds in order to return to 1000 and continue further, or you could for a long time wait it out and then return to 1000. This would encourage doing good deeds, but the time to wait would also work as a punishment of the bad deeds you've done. And for those with a high credit score, they can't lean back and reap the benefits for too long either, since their score ticks back to 1000. The only way to keep having a higher credit is if they do good deeds themselves and one way of doing this is to help low credit people to get back to 1000 by giving them opportunities to raise their credit.

While it's easy to dismiss this system as totalitarian or reducing the freedom of people, is there a way to have such a system without it being an invasion of freedom as it looks like in China?

The biggest question I get out of this is; what good is a moral system if the consequences and benefits of being morally good are vague and not a guarantee to give you something back? A moral system cannot work if all it does is benefitting other people while you suffer or if it only benefits you and not other people. There has to be a balance that benefits both you and others when you do good deeds and punish you when you cause harm, without being enforced and decided by other humans.

To turn an eye into the future and the possibility of such a system. Imagine an A.I that tracks all basic acts that people do and keeps track of their mental health while doing it in order to evaluate how the acts affect both the individual and others. It then keeps track of a credit score system that works like the rubberband-version above. The moral system used as a blueprint for how to value these scores are whatever that society has as its common moral system; if laws are changed, if the general ideas of morality change, the system change with it and pushing for a change doesn't affect the credit scores. Meaning our discussions, opinions etc. are still free in order to question the status-quo, only actual acts change credit scores.

Would such a system be able to positively force people to act better? What would be the drawbacks? And how is it really different from the actual flawed abstract credit score we socially have in today's free democracies?