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In Erewhon a young man is tried in open court for pulmonary consumption, a crime there, and sentenced to hard labour. The judge tells him that his bad constitution and bad luck are no excuse, since society must protect itself from people who are unfortunate. Meanwhile an embezzler is visited by a 'straightener', a sort of moral physician, and receives sympathy and treatment for his 'illness'.
Erewhon swaps which misfortunes are punished and which are pitied: illness is punished and crime is treated. The swap shows that a society's line between culpable and excusable is not drawn by an honest test of free will. It is drawn by which failings the society finds costly or disgusting. Held up against this, Victorian treatment of poverty, bankruptcy and bad luck turns out to be the same moral-luck logic that looks absurd when applied to a cough.
In 'The Book of the Machines', an Erewhonian thinker applies Darwinian selection to technology. Machines vary, compete and improve with each generation, far faster than organisms do. Humans serve as their reproductive system, like bees that pollinate flowers, and grow ever more dependent on them. On this argument Erewhon destroyed every invention less than 271 years old, before machine consciousness could emerge and make humans its servants.
Erewhon keeps two currencies. The Musical Banks issue a beautiful coinage that everyone publicly praises, yet no one actually uses it to buy anything. Real commerce runs on the other money. The institution shows how an official faith keeps its social standing through performed respect, while practical life quietly follows a different value system that everyone relies on and no one admits to.