Why Keep the Golden Rule?

Or “Why I am a Moral Realist: Part One”

As a composer and creative, I see art as a reflection of spiritual life, and moral value as part of it. With this in view, the world is so much larger and deeper. -GKK

2,300 words | 15 minutes

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth articulates what is widely considered the most practical principle of moral wisdom:

All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.

When Jesus is about twelve, a Gentile comes to Jerusalem and declared he will convert to Judaism if someone can summarize the Torah while he listens standing on one foot. A Pharisee known as Hillel the Elder responds:

That which is hateful to you do not do to another; that is the entire Torah, and the rest is its interpretation. Go study.

Five hundred years before Christ and about four thousand miles away from Judea, a student asks Confucius if there is “one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?” The teacher replies:

Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.

These statements present the principle of reciprocity or empathy as preeminent. Preserve your children, respect your elders, refrain from stealing your neighbor’s sheep—these and many other rules of conduct all harmonize with and ultimately reflect this one principle. The validity of the Golden Rule—or the Silver Rule, phrased in the negative—may seem obvious to modern ears; but if it’s valid, there must be a reason why people should follow it.

Neither the Golden Rule nor any moral rule is self-evident or self-justifying. In John Locke’s words:

I think there cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason… Should that most unshaken rule of morality and foundation of all social virtue, “That one should do as he would be done unto,” be proposed to one who never heard of it before, but yet is of capacity to understand its meaning; might he not without any absurdity ask a reason why? And were not he that proposed it bound to make out the truth and reasonableness of it to him?

Why should I keep the Golden Rule? is a perfectly valid question. It would be illogical, by contrast, to ask why of a self-evident truth. Locke gives an example: It is impossible for a thing both to be and not be—this statement is self-evident. To ask why it is true would be absurd. This is not the case with the Golden Rule, nor with the more specific rules such as Do not steal, etc. Moral rules logically depend on an antecedent, and the antecedent they depend on, if they are valid, must be self-evident.

Divine Judgment

Locke himself advocates a religious view: God has the power of life and death; we are therefore rational to obey his commands. Ultimately the prospect of Divine Judgment after death gives us reason to follow moral injunctions in the present life. This idea is much older than Locke. However old it is, it logically hinges on the doctrine that the human soul is, in Plato’s phrase, “immortal and imperishable.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) echoes this idea concisely through his dark character Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov:

If there is no immortality of the soul, then there is no virtue, and therefore everything is permitted.

The prospect of divine judgment would seem to constitute a reasonable response to the question Why follow the Golden Rule? However, it is impossible to know for certain what happens to the soul after death. As we read in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes:

Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?

Recently compiled accounts of near-death-experiences (NDEs) support the idea that the soul survives the body after death and that the events of one’s life are subject to self-evaluation from that vantage. This evidence deserves thoughtful consideration. Still, we may take another avenue. There is an alternative antecedent to the Golden Rule—one that is (to quote Deuteronomy) “neither in heaven, nor across the sea, but very near to you, in your mouth, and in your heart.”

The Alternative

Locke himself mentions this antecedent in another text: the “relation of equality” that exists between each person naturally imposes on each of us the duty to give others all due affection. Locke’s American disciple Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) said it this way:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

These famous words are echoed in the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

…Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world…

This principle has both ethical and political implications. According to it, I have no right to

violate, control, or abuse you, nor do you have the right to violate, control, or abuse me. Neither of us is inherently superior to the other. My needs are no more important than yours, nor yours than mine. This, I believe, is the most reasonable response to the question Why keep the Golden Rule? It may be stated concisely as follows: All human beings have equal intrinsic value.

Intrinsic value is the value that a thing has in itself, as an end and not a means to an end. For you to have inherent or intrinsic value means that your being alive and happy is good-in-itself, not because it is useful to someone else, or for any other reason. It is good for you to be well fed and clothed, to not be alone, to actualize your potential, to flourish in life. It is not, however, inherently better for you to be well fed and clothed than for me to be well fed and clothed, etc. Neither you nor I can claim greater intrinsic value or importance than the other.

Call this principle Aequitas for convenience (Latin for equality). Aequitas puts every human being as such on a level playing field. It does not, however, dispute the fact that people have greater or less extrinsic value than other people all the time. LeBron James, for example, is better than you at basketball. Meryl Streep is better at acting. Muhammad Ali was better at boxing, and Vladimir Horowitz better at piano.

The fact that some individuals are better than others in certain respects does not contradict the fact that all men and women are created equal. If Lebron James enters a deli, Joe Schmo is not morally obligated to stand aside when the superstar approaches from behind to order lunch. Perhaps he might do this anyway out of a sense of awe and admiration; if he does not, he has committed no sin. Being an excellent baller or actress et cetera means possessing a particular kind of superior extrinsic value; being human means possessing the same intrinsic value as everyone else.

For someone (or something) to possess worth or value, however, it must be seen as valuable to someone. Value-to-no-one signifies non-value. Aequitas, then, implies that humans have value or dignity not in a vacuum, but from someone’s perspective. However, not everyone accepts Aequitas. If it is valid, it must be so from a perspective that transcends that of the individual or group that rejects it. But why would this perspective be valid and that of those who disagree invalid?

The theist’s answer is “the eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.” Aequitas exists in the mind of the Creator, and therefore exists universally. A pantheist or panpsychist, by contrast, may propose a Conscious Universe which possesses qualities that register to us as objective moral value. The secularist, moreover, may cite a mental reality grounded in the human species such as the Collective Unconscious. One way or another, according to Aequitas, a larger mental reality defines and effectively creates what we perceive as moral reality. That larger perspective is universal because everyone is somehow embedded in or surrounded by it.

Alternatives to the Alternative

Aequitas entails some kind of idealism, which runs against the current of materialism. In search of a less fraught response to the question Why?, we might postulate an alternative antecedent: 

Social Harmony

We should keep the Golden Rule simply because it is in everyone’s interest to do so. If everyone followed it, the total measure of happiness in society would increase; if everyone ignored it, strife, conflict, and chaos would abound. Since no one wants the latter, we should all do what tends to the former.

It is true that following the Golden Rule will increase overall social harmony, but we are facing the prisoner’s dilemma—why should I do unto others if by doing so I risk disadvantage, and the opportunity remains open for me to guarantee some individual profit, or avoid loss? For example, if I secretly chance upon someone’s lost wallet full of cash and personal identification, why should I not appropriate the cash rather than locate the individual at his or her address and return it with the wallet, as the Golden Rule would have me do?

If everyone behaved this way, you would eventually find yourself violated.

To this the egoist can respond that he will be careful not to lose his own wallet, that it is not guaranteed that he or his friends will suffer the same misfortune as the fool whose wallet he has found, that a bird in hand is worth two in the bush. He may also argue with Machiavelli that one should practice virtue when doing so facilitates a good reputation and the personal advantage it affords, which is the ultimate value, but forget about it otherwise.

Whatever their moral value, these arguments are not illogical or self-contradictory. We will revisit them later. For now, we must simply observe that the appeal to social harmony cannot defeat it.

But It’s the Law!

In a desperate attempt to preserve moral intuition, one might protest: It is illegal to steal! That’s why you should return the person’s lost wallet.

This means that if by some chance it were not illegal to steal, there would be no reason for one to return the wallet. Or that if it were illegal to steal only from certain people and not others, and the ID revealed the likeness of someone with the unfavored ethnicity, etc., there would be no reason to return the wallet. Right and wrong would be defined by whatever the government happens to have legislated. The idea of an unjust law would be nonsense, justice being defined by the law. But who is willing to deny that chattel slavery in the American south was a moral evil regardless of its legal status before abolition? Or that any instance of state-sponsored genocide was tragic even though it was ‘legal’ according to the state perpetrating it? Chattel slavery, genocide, and other violations of human dignity can only be condemned as such when evaluated not by the laws of a particular nation, which may or may not criminalize them at a given time, but rather by a standard that transcends or supersedes those laws. As Locke observed, legislators are as morally bound to do the right thing as anyone else.

Without a moral axiom such as Aequitas—whether tacitly assumed or officially declared—state laws can have no logical basis other than the whim of a ruler or the fancy of a majority. With them, however, moral reasoning can begin to take place. One can evaluate right and wrong and distinguish justice from injustice. Political constituencies and social groups can make progress as their members seek to improve policy, resist oppression, and pursue equity.

A Foundational Axiom

Aequitas out-competes these rivals as the most reasonable antecedent to the moral imperatives we hold dear, from the Golden Rule to the more particular rules such as do not kill or do not enslave people. The prospect of divine judgement or self-evaluation after death is practically irrelevant to religious skeptics. Rather than urge theological conformity in vain, we may all find common ground on this axiom. The threat of legal punishment, moreover, is a shaky foundation for morality, and unable to support the moral intuitions about fair treatment that have become commonplace in the modern world.

To recapitulate: The Golden Rule says Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Why should I do that? one might ask.

The question is valid. Because people have equal intrinsic value as human beings.

Says who? comes the reply.

God, the Universe, the Collective Unconscious, your ancestors, your child, or anyone else who says it.

In this view, Aequitas is as axiomatic or self-evident as the statement mentioned above: It is impossible for a thing both to be and not be. The thing is simply true, and to deny it is to deny reason.

Reason in this sense is simply the ability to discover truth by thinking. We are able to draw rational conclusions once certain information is given­. Aequitas is given. Propositions that contradict it—such as I’m inherently better than you, or whites are inherently better than non-whites, etc.—are simply false.

But what does it mean for a moral axiom to be true and those that contradict it false? What does ‘moral truth’ mean anyway?

These questions are also valid. We shall consider them in the next post.

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Do you think that music can reflect the idea of inherent human dignity and fraternity? Share your thoughts in the comments!