Golden Rule Ramblings

We often phrase the “Golden Rule” as though it’s simple: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you. Or, according to Rabbi Hillel, what is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow. Or, love your neighbour as yourself.

All of these are slightly different takes on the idea of erasing the boundary between self and others. We naturally, each phrasing assumes, seek out what is pleasurable to ourselves and avoid what is painful. Overall, we assess our own actions with the benefit of context and contingency.

But we’re not exactly like each other. And sometimes we treat ourselves worse than we’d treat someone else; for instance, how many self-care memes or therapy quotes have you seen that suggest defusing negative self-talk by imagining what you’d say to a friend in your own situation, or by imagining what you’d think if someone said the mean things that you say to yourself, but to another person you care about?

The Golden Rule–or Rules–then, can seem deceptively simple but actually require a complex moral calculus. It isn’t enough to simply imagine positions reversed, I am you and you are me, what would I want you to do then? What you would do to yourself might not be kind; what I might want for myself may not what you’d choose.

After all, we all know the kind of gift-giver who only ever gets the recipient something they themselves would want, sometimes ignoring the recipient’s preferences–the basketball fan who’d give season tickets to someone who hates sports, the baking hobbyist who’d give a cake stand to someone who’d rather order from the grocery store. When the giver makes an honest mistake, we forgive them, but when the giver ignores or doesn’t bother to try to find out what would make the recipient happy, we start to think them oblivious at best and self-centred at worst.

So the Golden Rule is a starting point, an idea that we all deserve certain good things by virtue of being human beings, and that no one deserves to matter more than someone else. Many (most, I hope) can agree with that idea. Where we run into problems is how to apply this abstract principle in real life.

• What do we do when treating one person or group with kindness conflicts with treating another person or group with kindness? For example, what do you do when external limitations mean not everyone can get what they want? (Other than, of course, making sure those limitations actually exist and aren’t an artifact of habits of thinking.) What do you do when two groups are in conflict? When one person has harmed another? When does having compassion for a transgressor slip into lacking compassion for the person they’ve hurt? What if one of the parties in the conflict is ourselves? Does that make the situation different, or should we treat our own wants as if we were some third party?
• How do you know how others do (or don’t want) to be treated? People have very different tastes. Can we accept that some people’s tastes might be extreme? Must we always accept that everyone knows exactly what they want done unto them? If someone asks us to do something that, if done to us, would definitely be harm, should we assume they know what they want or should we do what we think is best for them based on what we would want in their situation? Does following the Golden Rule also mean we have a responsibility to find out what others consider hateful and pleasant, or does it just mean that we have a moral obligation to act appropriately once we know?
  
  After all, when thinking about how we want others to do unto us, wouldn’t we want them to take the trouble to find out what we like? Doesn’t that mean we should take the trouble to learn about them? But does that mean we’re ethically culpable when we don’t or can’t? What if the reasons we don’t or can’t are exacerbated by things outside our control, like the social environment in which we grew up?
• Is it even possible to love others just like we love ourselves? Can imagining others’ pain or joy really ever be the same as feeling our own? Perhaps for some very empathetic people, but is it possible for everyone? Is there value in striving for an ethical standard that most people literally can’t ever achieve? Probably, but wouldn’t it make more sense and cause less harm if we articulated the standard that’s actually within our powers?
• How do we treat punishment and justice? Perhaps, when we’re our best selves, we’d like to be held accountable for our wrongdoings, but it’s hard to deny than many of us would like to be forgiven for our misdeeds and the harm we’ve caused others. Does that mean that we should be permissive, as we’d like others to be with us? Or do we assume that the higher good–what we and others actually want–is to be better people?
• Indeed, to expand that point, what if we don’t know how we’d like to be treated? Human beings are complex, and sometimes we have conflicting wants. Even if we can assume that other people want roughly the same things we do, how do we know which of the things we want is most important? I want to finish this blog entry, but I also want to relax. Is it more ethical of me to push others to complete tasks they want to put off, or to facilitate the self-kindness of needed recreation?
• If we want to follow the Golden Rule–if doing so gives us pleasure, including moral pleasure–shouldn’t we act as though other people do too? Does being good to others mean also allowing others to be good to us? At what point do we prioritize wanting to be good to others over their potential desire to be good to us? If there’s only one candy left, and you and I both want it, is it more ethical for me to give it to you, so you get the joy of the candy, or for me to allow you to give it to me, so you get the joy of giving? If the latter, doesn’t that mean you also want me to give it to you, and the candy ends up going to waste?

I’ve never doubted the underlying morality of love your neighbour as yourself, but at different times in my life, it’s brought different meaning and guidance to these questions. To me, its value is as a landmark visible across a vast sea: it’s good to know where you’re aiming for, because otherwise all questions of navigation would be useless, but what exactly you do in the moment-to-moment in order to reach it will depend on all sorts of contextual, contingent variables. What is the wind like right now? The water? What kind of boat do you have? What’s its state of repair? How are you capable of using it? We can adjust our present tactics based on how well our last strategy worked (or didn’t).

We may not always trim our sails the same or take the same heading, but it can still be useful to have a sightline in mind.