quoted from Doreen Valiente in 1964. Later published versions include "ye"
instead of either "the" or "it": "Eight words the Wiccan Rede fulfill — an ye
harm none, do what ye will" (Earth Religion News, 1974); "Eight words ye Wiccan
Rede fulfill - An’ it harm none, Do what ye will" (Green Egg, 1975)
the Golden Rule of Christianity. It is often expressed as "Do onto others as
you would wish them do onto you."
Buddhism
See also: Buddhism and Karma
Putting oneself in the place of another,
one should not kill nor cause another to kill.[10]
One who, while himself seeking happiness, oppresses with violence other
beings who also desire happiness, will not attain happiness hereafter.[11]
In addition, the Dalai Lama has stated:
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy,
practice compassion.
"And if thine eyes be turned towards justice, choose thou for thy neighbour
that which thou choosest for thyself." Baha'u'llah.[18][19]
Confucius said in the Analects:
"Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself." - Analects
XV.24, tr. David Hinton
*
Jeffrey Wattles holds that the ethic of reciprocity appears in the following
statements attributed to Muhammad: [22]
* “Woe to those . . . who, when they have to receive by measure from men,
exact full measure, but when they have to give by measure or weight to men, give
less than due”[23]
* The Qur'an commends "those who show their affection to such as came to them
for refuge and entertain no desire in their hearts for things given to the
(latter), but give them preference over themselves"[24]
* “None of you [truly] believes until he wishes for his brother what he
wishes for himself.”[25]
* "Seek for mankind that of which you are desirous for yourself, that you may
be a believer; treat well as a neighbor the one who lives near you, that you may
be a Muslim [one who submits to God]."[26]
* “That which you want for yourself, seek for mankind.”[26]
* "The most righteous of men is the one who is glad that men should have what
is pleasing to himself, and who dislikes for them what is for him
disagreeable."[26]
Jainism
Killing a living being is killing one's own self; showing compassion to a
living being is showing compassion to oneself. He who desires his own good,
should avoid causing any harm to a living being.
—Suman Suttam , verse 151
Taoism
See also: Taoism
* "Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain, and your neighbor's loss as
your own loss." T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien.
* "The sage has no interest of his own, but takes the interests of the people
as his own. He is kind to the kind; he is also kind to the unkind: for Virtue is
kind. He is faithful to the faithful; he is also faithful to the unfaithful: for
Virtue is faithful." Tao Teh Ching, Chapter 49
The intent is clear; the interpretation is not. Example: Protect me from what
I want. The need and wish for autonomy even if it is to the choice to remain
enslaved. Mentally, physically, spiritually. It is a choice.
Don't confuse me with the facts. Ignorance is bliss. To impose science as God
without knowing the nature of God.
Now lets see how we can furthur screw things up.
Differences in values or interests
Shaw's comment about differing tastes suggests that if your values are not
shared with others, the way you want to be treated will not be the way they want
to be treated. For example, it has been said that a sadist is just a masochist
who follows the golden rule. Another often used example of this inconsistency is
that of the man walking into a bar looking for a fight. [35] It could also be
used by a seducer to suggest that he should kiss an object of his affection
because he wants that person to kiss him. Similar objections also apply to the
so-called "platinum rule," for if a seducer wants a woman to kiss him, but she
does not want him to, it follows from this rule that the seducer should not kiss
her--but that she should kiss him.
[edit] Differences in situations
Immanuel Kant famously criticized the golden rule for not being sensitive to
differences of situation, noting that a prisoner duly convicted of a crime could
appeal to the golden rule while asking the judge to release him, pointing out
that the judge would not want anyone else to send him to prison, so he should
not do so to others.[36]
[edit] Responses
M. G. Singer observed that there are two importantly different ways of
looking at the golden rule: as requiring that you perform specific actions that
you want others to do to you, or that you guide your behavior in the same
general ways that you want others to.[37] Counter-examples to the golden rule
typically are more forceful against the first than the second. In his book on
the golden rule, Jeffrey Wattles makes the similar observation that such
objections typically arise while applying the golden rule in certain general
ways (namely, ignoring differences in taste, in situation, and so forth). But if
we apply the golden rule to our own method of using it, asking in effect if we
would want other people to apply the golden rule in such ways, the answer would
typically be no, since it is quite predictable that others' ignoring of such
factors will lead to behavior which we object to. It follows that we should not
do so ourselves--according to the golden rule. In this way, the golden rule may
be self-correcting.[38] An article by Jouni Reinikainen develops this suggestion
in greater detail.[39]
It is possible, then, that the golden rule can itself guide us in identifying
which differences of situation are morally relevant. We would often want other
people to ignore our race or nationality when deciding how to act towards us,
but would also want them to not ignore our differing preferences in food, desire
for aggressiveness, and so on. The platinum rule, and perhaps other variants,
might also be self-correcting in this same manner.
[edit] Science of the Golden Rule
There has been some research published arguing that some of fair play and the
Golden Rule may be stated and rooted in terms of neuroscientific and
neuroethical principles.[40]
[edit] Cynical version of the Golden Rule
While the golden rule in religion implies devotion to selflessness, "the
Golden Rule" is often recited as "Whoever has the gold makes the rules."
Although websites credit Lyndon Foreman for this version, his precise
significance as a notable figure is unclear. This ironic version is most often
used dismissively by economists and stock traders; it is not so much an opposite
of the Golden Rule as a claim that moral precepts are decided by those who have
wealth and the power that wealth can bring—i.e. they are not really moral
precepts, merely rules allowing those with wealth and power to hold onto or
increase that wealth and power.
[edit] See also
The Abolition of Man
It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered,
when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.
—John Bunyan
`Man's conquest of Nature' is an expression often used to describe the
progress of applied science. `Man has Nature whacked,' said someone to a friend
of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty,
for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. `No matter' he said, `I know I'm one
of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on
the losing side. But that doesn't alter the fact that it is winning.' I have
chosen this story as my point of departure in order to make it clear that I do
not wish to disparage all that is really beneficial in the process described as
`Man's conquest', much less all the real devotion and self-sacrifice that has
gone to make it possible. But having done so I must proceed to analyse this
conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of
increasing power over Nature?
Let us consider three typical examples: the aeroplane, the wireless, and the
contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for
them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so
he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to
carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man. Any or all of the three things
I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men—by those who sell,
or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or
those who make the goods. What we call Man's power is, in reality, a power
possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by.
Again, as regards the powers manifested in the aeroplane or the wireless, Man is
as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for
bombs and for propaganda. And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical,
negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or
subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply,
they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective
breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one
generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view,
what we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some
men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
It is, of course, a commonplace to complain that men have hitherto used
badly, and against their fellows, the powers that science has given them, But
that is not the point I am trying to make. I am not speaking of particular
corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am
considering what the thing called `Man's power over Nature' must always and
essentially be. No doubt, the picture could be modified by public ownership of
raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But
unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over
others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in
principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a
government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in
breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones.
The latter point is not always sufficiently emphasized, because those who
write on social matters have not yet learned to imitate the physicists by always
including Time among the dimensions. In order to understand fully what Man's
power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really
means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence
to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors:
and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels
against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This
modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation
from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a
continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really
attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants
what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They
are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their
hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost
certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also
the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the
power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And
we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation
comes—the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct—the
less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be
so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole
steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the
heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great
planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the
future.
The real picture is that of one dominant age—let us suppose the hundredth
century A.D.—which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all
subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human
species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal
minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller
still. Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are
realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of
men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side.
Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him
weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who
triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.
I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent
victories is a good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man's conquest
of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which,
perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by
pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect
applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be
the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We
shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho' and be
henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will
indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen,
the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt,
nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power.
But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects.
In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans
of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed,
when we read them—how Plato would have every infant "a bastard nursed in a
bureau", and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and,
after that, no women,1 and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no
turn for poetry2—we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers,
real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such
sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed
with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific
technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out
all posterity in what shape they please.
The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the
kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him
were prescribed by the Tao—a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject
and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some
pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated
the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them
alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed.
Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in
the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the
product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated
from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The
ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They
have surrendered—like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to
control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what
kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For we
are assuming the last stage of Man's struggle with Nature. The final victory has
been won. Human nature has been conquered—and, of course, has conquered, in
whatever sense those words may now bear.
The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will,
for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race. They are the motivators,
the creators of motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves?
For a time, perhaps, by survivals, within their own minds, of the old
`natural' Tao. Thus at first they may look upon themselves as servants and
guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a `duty' to do it `good'. But
it is only by confusion that they can remain in this state. They recognize the
concept of duty as the result of certain processes which they can now control.
Their victory has consisted precisely in emerging from the state in which they
were acted upon by those processes to the state in which they use them as tools.
One of the things they now have to decide is whether they will, or will not, so
condition the rest of us that we can go on having the old idea of duty and the
old reactions to it. How can duty help them to decide that? Duty itself is up
for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And `good' fares no better. They know
quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The
question is which, if any, they should produce. No conception of good can help
them to decide. It is absurd to fix on one of the things they are comparing and
make it the standard of comparison.
To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my
Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask, `Why should you
suppose they will be such bad men?' But I am not supposing them to be bad men.
They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men
who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote
themselves to the task of deciding what `Humanity' shall henceforth mean. `Good'
and `bad', applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that
the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their
difficulty factitious, "We might suppose that it was possible to say `After all,
most of us want more or less the same things—food and drink and sexual
intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for
individuals and for the species. Let them simply say, This is what we happen to
like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where's
the trouble?' But this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we
all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the
Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we, and
posterity, may have what we like? Their duty? But that is only the Tao, which
they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they
accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its
subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened. The
preservation of the species? But why should the species be preserved? One of the
questions before them is whether this feeling for posterity (they know well how
it is produced) shall be continued or not. However far they go back, or down,
they can find no ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes at
once petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping
outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects
necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artefacts. Man's
final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.
Yet the Conditioners will act. When I said just now that all motives fail
them, I should have said all motives except one. All motives that claim any
validity other than that of their felt emotional weight at a given moment have
failed them. Everything except the sic volo, sic jubeo has been explained away.
But what never claimed objectivity cannot be destroyed by subjectivism. The
impulse to scratch when I itch or to pull to pieces when I am inquisitive is
immune from the solvent which is fatal to my justice, or honour, or care for
posterity. When all that says It is good' has been debunked, what says 1 want'
remains. It cannot be exploded or `seen through' because it never had any
pretentions. The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by
their own pleasure. I am not here speaking of the corrupting influence of power
nor expressing the fear that under it our Conditioners will degenerate. The very
words corrupt and degenerate imply a doctrine of value and are therefore
meaningless in this context. My point is that those who stand outside all
judgements of value cannot have any ground for preferring one of their own
impulses to another except the emotional strength of that impulse.
We may legitimately hope that among the impulses which arise in minds thus
emptied of all `rational' or `spiritual' motives, some will be benevolent. I am
very doubtful myself whether the benevolent impulses, stripped of that
preference and encouragement which the Tao teaches us to give them and left to
their merely natural strength and frequency as psychological events, will have
much influence. I am very doubtful whether history shows us one example of a man
who, having stepped outside traditional morality and attained power, has used
that power benevolently. I am inclined to think that the Conditioners will hate
the conditioned. Though regarding as an illusion the artificial conscience which
they produce in us their subjects, they will yet perceive that it creates in us
an illusion of meaning for our lives which compares favourably with the futility
of their own: and they will envy us as eunuchs envy men. But I do not insist on
this, for it is a mere conjecture. What is not conjecture is that our hope even
of a `conditioned' happiness rests on what is ordinarily called `chance'—the
chance that benevolent impulses may on the whole predominate in our
Conditioners. For without the judgement `Benevolence is good'—that is, without
re-entering the Tao—they can have no ground for promoting or stabilizing these
impulses rather than any others. By the logic of their position they must just
take their impulses as they come, from chance. And Chance here means Nature. It
is from heredity, digestion, the weather, and the association of ideas, that the
motives of the Conditioners will spring. Their extreme rationalism, by `seeing
through' all `rational' motives, leaves them creatures of wholly irrational
behaviour. If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to
impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere `nature') is the only course
left open.
At the moment, then, of Man's victory over Nature, we find the whole human
race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that
in themselves which is purely `natural'—to their irrational impulses. Nature,
untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners and, through them, all humanity.
Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be
Nature's conquest of Man. Every victory we seemed to win has led us, step by
step, to this conclusion. All Nature's apparent reverses have been but tactical
withdrawals. We thought we were beating her back when she was luring us on. What
looked to us like hands held up in surrender was really the opening of arms to
enfold us for ever. If the fully planned and conditioned world (with its Tao a
mere product of the planning) comes into existence, Nature will be troubled no
more by the restive species that rose in revolt against her so many millions of
years ago, will be vexed no longer by its chatter of truth and mercy and beauty
and happiness. Ferum victorem cepit: and if the eugenics are efficient enough
there will be no second revolt, but all snug beneath the Conditioners, and the
Conditioners beneath her, till the moon falls or the sun grows cold.
My point may be clearer to some if it is put in a different form. Nature is a
word of varying meanings, which can best be understood if we consider its
various opposites. The Natural is the opposite of the Artificial, the Civil, the
Human, the Spiritual, and the Supernatural. The Artificial does not now concern
us. If we take the rest of the list of opposites, however, I think we can get a
rough idea of what men have meant by Nature and what it is they oppose to her.
Nature seems to be the spatial and temporal, as distinct from what is less fully
so or not so at all. She seems to be the world of quantity, as against the world
of quality; of objects as against consciousness; of the bound, as against the
wholly or partially autonomous; of that which knows no values as against that
which both has and perceives value; of efficient causes (or, in some modern
systems, of no causality at all) as against final causes. Now I take it that
when we understand a thing analytically and then dominate and use it for our own
convenience, we reduce it to the level of `Nature' in the sense that we suspend
our judgements of value about it, ignore its final cause (if any), and treat it
in terms of quantity. This repression of elements in what would otherwise be our
total reaction to it is sometimes very noticeable and even painful: something
has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a
dissecting room. These objects resist the movement of the mind whereby we thrust
them into the world of mere Nature. But in other instances too, a similar price
is exacted for our analytical knowledge and manipulative power, even if we have
ceased to count it. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful
objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the
price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes
of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy
developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture. To many, no
doubt, this process is simply the gradual discovery that the real world is
different from what we expected, and the old opposition to Galileo or to
`body-snatchers' is simply obscurantism. But that is not the whole story. It is
not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object,
stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly
real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think
so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial
abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
From this point of view the conquest of Nature appears in a new light. We
reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may `conquer' them. We are always
conquering Nature, because `Nature' is the name for what we have, to some
extent, conquered. The price of conquest is to treat a thing as mere Nature.
Every conquest over Nature increases her domain. The stars do not become Nature
till we can weigh and measure them: the soul does not become Nature till we can
psychoanalyse her. The wresting of powers from Nature is also the surrendering
of things to Nature. As long as this process stops short of the final stage we
may well hold that the gain outweighs the loss. But as soon as we take the final
step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process
is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has
been sacrificed are one and the same. This is one of the many instances where to
carry a principle to what seems its logical conclusion produces absurdity. It is
like the famous Irishman who found that a certain kind of stove reduced his fuel
bill by half and thence concluded that two stoves of the same kind would enable
him to warm his house with no fuel at all. It is the magician's bargain: give up
our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been
given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be
the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. It is in Man's
power to treat himself as a mere `natural object' and his own judgements of
value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will. The
objection to his doing so does not lie in the fact that this point of view (like
one's first day in a dissecting room) is painful and shocking till we grow used
to it. The pain and the shock are at most a warning and a symptom. The real
objection is that if man chooses to treat himself as raw material, raw material
he will be: not raw material to be manipulated, as he fondly imagined, by
himself, but by mere appetite, that is, mere Nature, in the person of his
de-humanized Conditioners.
We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to lay down our human
prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we
are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute values of the Tao, or
else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures
of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own `natural'
impulses. Only the Tao provides a common human law of action which can over-arch
rulers and ruled alike. A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the
very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
I am not here thinking solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our
public enemies at the moment. The process which, if not checked, will abolish
Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists.
The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist
in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our
midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of
Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunked' and mankind to be cut out into
some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will)
of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.
The belief that we can invent `ideologies' at pleasure, and the consequent
treatment of mankind as mere
