Ishmael poses an example society in which people in group A eat people in group B, who eat people in group C, who, in turn, eat people in group A. Their society is perfect in every way because they all follow the law, and Ishmael asks what their law is. Which groups eat which other groups is a matter of preference, and there is some overarching law that Ishmael wants the narrator to discover. The narrator concludes that he needs to observe the society and look for both what they do that makes their society work and what they do not do, which allows their society to function.

The penalty for breaking the law in this society is death, and Ishmael announces that someone has broken the law and is about be executed. The narrator asks what the person did to break the law, and Ishmael says that the man’s biography is public record. The narrator decides he needs to look through the biography to discover what this man did that no other person in this society has ever done, which might be the action that broke the law.