An Objection

The Garlikov Objection to the Golden Rule

By John Taylor; 2007 Mar 28

Rick Garlikov contends that the Golden Rule is "not a feasible rule for determining what is right because what you want may not be what others want, and because even if you all want the same thing, it may still not be the right thing." In order to address this, I will have to back up and describe the context in which the Golden Rule has been understood over the millennia. I am very afraid that Mr. Garlikov will object that I am name dropping or making a fallacious appeal to authority. But my intention is only to do what a good botanist does in describing a plant; not only its anatomy is relevant but also the environment or ecosystem in which it grew and thrived. You cannot look at one in complete isolation from the other. So I cite past thinkers only in order to understand better what the Golden Rule is and how it is meant to be applied.

Mr. Garlikov in another of his essays suggests that math teachers use different colored poker chips to help students understand place holders and decimals. Ten white chips can be cashed in for one red chip, and ten red ones for one black, and so forth. It seems to me that some moralist long ago came up with a similar teaching technique for describing the mechanisms of justice and altruism, only instead of colored chips he or she used metals. Plato, for example, built his Republic around an old story that he called the "myth of the metals." The idea was that each of us is made of a certain ore -- the type of which cannot be known beforehand. Only the desires we indulge and the life we choose to live demonstrate whether we are made of a base metal, such as iron or copper, or a more precious metal, such as silver or gold.

The Golden Rule, then, is named for gold because it indicates that its user is made of the right stuff, the brightest and most valuable metal. He or she is leading a golden life, unselfish, making full use of the best, purest altruistic motives. Like poker chips, there is a whole set of rules and metals both cheaper and more precious than the Golden Rule.

The basest rule (some scholars prefer to call them precepts or rulers) would be preemptive aggression, "do unto others before they do you." The next higher level or metal is the iron rule, also known as the lex talionis or law of retaliation, "do unto others as they did unto you." This is not much better than blatant aggression, since it leads to blood feuds. Acts of retaliation accelerate over time and act as a slow burning fuse, always threatening a new breakout of violence; the famous family feuds in the isolated Ozark Mountains demonstrated this in recent times.

Base metal rules aim not at reparation but retribution. Legal systems in the ancient world limited retributive justice by aiming at equal retribution, restricting those paying back wrongs to equal payment, "an eye for an eye." In other words, "Do unto others as they did you, but do not pay wrongs back with interest." Norman J. Bull describes another base metal of reciprocity, what he calls the "tinsel ruler", "Treat others as they deserve." This introduces concern with motives but like the shine of a false decoration its shine has no substance, it is only the iron ruler dressed up, hence the name "tinsel." He distinguishes above these a "silver ruler," which is the negative phrasing of the Golden Ruler, "Do not do unto others what you would not like them to do unto you.

"This is certainly an advance on the two previous principles. But, being negative rather than positive, it makes no demands of active goodwill. It could be fulfilled by doing nothing at all." (quoted in. H.T.D. Rost, The Golden Rule, A Universal Ethic, pp. 65-66)

Bull adds that not all scholars agree that the silver rule is inferior to the Golden Rule, or even that there is any significant difference between them.

If you really get rich in ethical matters, can you cash in your golden chips for even more valuable metals? It is true that gold as as rich as it gets in matters of reciprocity, but above that is the highest kind of moral relation conceivable, love. There are various rules of love and I have no idea if ten golden chips can be cashed in for one love chip, or what the exchange rate is. Since love has been compared to spirit, I do not even know if it is appropriate to name the higher love rules after metals. But that has not stopped many from doing so.

The Rule of Love, "love thy enemies as thyself," has been called the "Platinum Rule." Above that still is Baha'u'llah's "do unto others more (or better) than you would have them do unto you." I guess you could call that the Uranium Rule. But the important thing to remember is that these operate according to a different set of rules from reciprocal relations; the object here is not to right a balance but to offer up a sacrifice as an expression of love, love for God, for others, for your higher self, or whatever. Of late I have been writing a lot about these higher rules of love and how they fit into the Ten Commandments, so I will not elaborate further.

What I think is most important to emphasize in all this is that reciprocity is one way and love another way to address the central difficulty of ethics, the ineffability of human motivation. Moral acts are by definition unknowable, even by moral agents themselves. Anything you or I do may be done for many reasons, some mixed, some clear and yet others hidden. Worse, our reasons change and mix around every time we look at them. Do you know why you do everything you do? I certainly do not. When I try to examine it the very act of looking changes the reasoning. If so, how do we say for sure whether we ourselves or anybody else is iron or golden? We can guess but we are never certain.

This was the key point of Plato's Metal Myth. It was a common Hellenic belief that nobody can be called good or bad until after he dies. Only when the accounts are all in can you judge whether the good outweighed the bad. The same unknowability is part of nature, and it turned up later in quantum theory and Schrodinger's cat. The measurement system is entangled with the experiment, so there is no way to know the "superposition" of the cat.

This difficulty gives us the best hint at how the Golden Rule is meant to be applied. In a situation where knowledge is incomplete, not only knowledge of what is going on in our own heart but in the outside world, we can only do our best to apply the golden rule, to best approximate the behavior of gold, that is, the optimum actions of a perfect person in that situation. It does not and cannot tell you what that is specifically; it only puts canvas, paint and pallet in your hands and asks you to paint a "golden" painting. Whether the picture turns out to be gold in the end, nobody can say.

Returning to the Garlikov Objection, we saw yesterday that its more sophisticated form was stated thus:

"... one way of taking the Golden Rule is that one should remember other people are human beings with feelings, just as you are, and so they should be treated decently and rightly, just as you would want yourself to be treated and just as you and everyone else deserves to be treated. But that understanding of the Golden Rule does not really help you determine what is right, or what is the right way to treat others. It only lets you know that once you know what is the right way to treat others, that you ought to do it, just as you would want them to treat you in ways that they know to be right."

The confusion here is in the part that asks the Golden Rule to "determine what is right." We are not talking about a mathematical formula but a delicate set of moral scales. If a rule of ethics ever were able to reliably and repeatably determine what is right, then it would cease to be part of ethics. One side would be right and the reverse would be wrong, and nobody could argue. The issue would enter under the purview of law. For example, it is morally wrong to steal but it is also illegal. Stealing breaks the Golden Rule, but it also breaks the law, at least it does in just about every country I know of. Therefore whether to steal from others is not what most would call a moral question. Few if any moral philosophers trouble themselves over whether it is right or wrong to steal because the answer is obvious.

The Golden Rule, like any tool, becomes useful only when we need it. That is, it is an aid in murkier moral situations, when the right and wrong paths are out of sight and nothing is clear-cut. In parlous times, when our footing is unsure, we need a cane to help us walk, a golden cane. To follow the GR is to recognize our ignorance and make the best of it, hoping only to approximate what a person whose mettle is gold might do. It asks us to take an imaginative leap and put ourselves in others' shoes, to act according to the flimsy but often adequate evidence of our own imagination.

This is why I love the GR, it is a creative thing, far closer to art than a science. In ethics there are no formulas for what is right, only a dialectic with truth. Like any great piece of art, golden deeds act as a mirror between self and society, reflecting the best of each in the other.