#102: Why the Golden Rule is Useless

January 18, 2012

Ron Paul is not the first to suggest that the “Golden Rule” be applied in international relations. The Golden Rule (just “the Rule” in what follows), as I remember it, is “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” The Rule is usually attributed to Jesus of Nazareth, but in fact it already appears in the Old Testament Book of Tobias (ca. 200 to 170 bc) when Tobias says to his son Tobit, “And what is displeasing to thyself, that do not unto any other.” (verse 15). I found this interesting fact in a book by Rich Cohen, entitled Israel is Real (n., p. 40). A logician would tell you that Jesus’ “Golden Rule” is actually logically equivalent to Tobias’ rule, being its contrapositive expression.

Ron Paul, the Libertarian vying for becoming the Republican Party’s candidate for President, has frequently argued that the Iranian position vis a vis the U.S.A. is “understandable” because, he says, “how would we feel if another nation tried to tell us what to do and how to behave?” While this does not explicitly appeal to the Rule, it presupposes it, and, two evenings ago, is the most recent Republican candidates debate, he came right out and appealed to the Rule. He said:

“My point is, if another country does to us what we do others, we’re not going to like it very much. So I would say that maybe we ought to consider a golden rule in foreign policy. Don’t do to other nations what we don’t want to have them do to us. So we endlessly bomb these countries and then we wonder, wonder why they get upset with us? And yet it continues on and on. I mean, this idea that we can’t debate foreign policy, then all we have to do is start another war?” Ron Paul (Tues, Jan 17, 2012, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina)

In other words, he is telling the American people that they ought not to persist in acting against the ayatollahs because America is in the wrong in this argument. It is in the wrong because it has violated the Rule.

This is interesting on at least two counts. The first is that this is a fairly standard argument in the Leftist arsenal, it is a version of the “moral equivalency” that Leftists so love to assert. The “moral equivalency” argument is usually aimed at Israel when it defends itself. The Leftists argue [Arg 1] that when the Israelis strike back at terrorism, their acts are “no different” from those of the terrorists (therefore, equally bad, and for that reason, the Israelis should not do them). Alternatively, the Leftists argue [Arg 2] that when the terrorists attack Israel, what they are doing is “no different” from the Israelis defending themselves (therefore, equally good, and for that reason, the Israelis should not retaliate against them.)

Arg 1 presupposes the Rule, since it assumes that striking back at terrorists is as bad as what the terrorists do, and one shouldn’t do unto others what we wouldn’t want them to do unto us. Similarly for Arg 2.

Since this argument is stock in trade for Leftists, it is surprising when one hears it come from the lips of a self-advertised conservative (more specifically, a Libertarian).

The second count is that it draws our attention to the Rule itself as a principle of moral action, and this is what I want to discuss in this post.

Do Unto Others as You Would Have Others Do Unto You.

There are a number of things we can note about this putative moral principle.

First, it has the grammatical form of a “categorical” imperative, a logically simple “command,” but is actually a “hypothetical” or conditional imperative. A clearer expression of the Rule might be this:

Do x unto another, only if you would have him do x unto you.

In this reading of the Rule, “you would have him do x unto you” is a necessary condition for doing x unto another and it is this necessary condition that makes the Rule a moral test. The Tobias version from the Old Testament makes this “test” more explicit than the equivalent Jesus formulation, since it says quite explicitly, if you wouldn’t have it done to you, then don’t do It to someone else.

[I suppose the Golden Rule could actually be read as a bi-conditional:

Do x unto another, if and only if you would have him do x unto you.

I doubt though that this would be a defensible reading, since it would require us to do unto others whatever we would have others do unto us and there could well be cases in which our morally acceptable option would be to do nothing. But this issue is of little consequence.]

The second thing to notice about the Rule is that it is what philosophers call “counter-factual,” which means that it supposes the world to be other than it actually is. A more complete version of this rule might be:

Do x unto another only if you would have him do x to unto you, if he were in your position and you were in his (which is not the case).

But once we leave the actual world behind, once we enter the world of speculation, we have to ask this: in addition to our positions being reversed, what else is different in this speculative world? What does the “reversal of positions” actually mean? Let’s use a concrete hypothetical example.

I’m at home with my wife and two small children. A man breaks in, threatens my wife and children with violence, and I manage to “get the drop” on him with my Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver, chambered for .44 magnum cartridges. Should I shoot the son-of-a-bitch? Would that be the morally acceptable act? This is where the Rule comes in: Well, if our positions were reversed, would I want him to shoot me? But what are the “positions” that we are imagining reversed? For example, do we reverse the wives and children as well as me and him? If he caught me trying to molest his wife, and he was the one holding the Smith & Wesson, would I want him to shoot me?

There’s still far too much unknown about this scenario before I can use it as a moral test. I mean, the me that I currently am in the real world would never wind up in someone else’s house trying to molest their wife and children. Looking at the scum in front of me, I can’t imagine him even having a wife or, at least, having a wife I would consider molesting. So, if this test or rule is going to work, we have to make the circumstances of the imaginary scenario far clearer.

How is this to be decided? It is by understanding what it is that the Rule is attempting to do. The Rule attempts to use a thought experiment in which we change just one item in order to see whether that item is responsible for an outcome. The Rule supposedly allows us to check whether it is just our own position in the situation that is making us willing to do the act and not some universal moral principle. What lies behind this is the intuition first made explicit by Hume and later made famous by Kant that what makes an act or a decision to act “moral” is that it is “disinterestedly” arrived at, which is supposed to be the same thing as being derivable from some purely universal principle.

Given this, it seems to me that the me who is now in his place (in the thought experiment) would have to be a lot like the very scum I’m thinking about shooting, in fact it would have to be identical with him except in the one circumstance that it is me looking out of his eyes, not him. This further means that that the unhappy wife and children involved would also have to be my own. Unless we make this assumption, the test is no test at all.

But this already blows the Rule out of the water. What world am I imagining when everything is the same as the real world except that he is looking out through my eyes and I am looking out through his? All of this assumes that we can even make sense of changing “only” the consciousnesses of him and me, without changing the bodies or personalities as well, a VERY dodgy assumption. But there is a far more serious objection to the Rule.

It seems to reduce to the question: would I want him to shoot me, if I were him and he were me?

Well the answer to this is easy: No, emphatically no.

We are now in a position to see the largest problem with this test and why it is no test at all.

The test proceeded on the assumption that my willingness, indeed my desire, to shoot the son-of-a-bitch was due to my being an “interested” party, rather than a dis-interested moral judge. Thus, the test recommended a thought experiment in which I am removed from my interested position. Well and good.

But the test actually succeeds only in shifting me from one interested position to an even more interested position, indeed to arguably the most possible interested position, one in which my own life is at stake.

We can see this when we consider that it doesn’t matter in the example I’ve been using who the person in front of the Smith & Wesson is. The man I’ve caught assaulting my family could be Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, the test would still say “don’t shoot.” I could have Hitler in front of my gun, check with the Rule if it was morally OK to perforate him terminally, and the answer would still be No. The so-called Golden Rule is immune to the most relevant moral considerations, namely whether the target of our action is evil. In other words, the result is not a consequence of a moral factor, it is a consequence of the non-moral fact that no one wants to be shot.

[It might be argued that this is not a defect in the Rule, it is just a consequence of the fact that the one and only moral thing ever to do is be nice to others, regardless of who they are or what they have done.  But if that is the case, then one doesn’t need the Golden Rule at all, all one needs is the categorical imperative: Be Nice!)

But this takes me back to my original question without having been helped at all. I’m still of two minds about shooting the molester. What to do? What to do?

Aw, what the hell: Blam!

So, in reply to Ron Paul and all the little Lefties who would like the Golden Rule applied to all the international vermin they adore, I suggest that they seek another moral test and, after they discover that moral “tests” are utterly useless, to fall back on that reliable, ancient, and intuitively satisfying solution: Blam!