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The Not-So-Golden Rule

© Francois Tremblay

The so-called Golden Rule can be summed up in : "Treat others as you want to be treated". It is generally acknowledged as a great statement by people who don't know any better, and never intend to follow it anyway. To those with the smallest understanding of morality, it is an absurd statement.

All moral principles must answer one simple question : "how should I judge an action ?". This is what we use the words "good" and "evil" for, regardless of our system or belief. The Golden Rule tells us that we should judge an action by equating our values to that of other people. But this is obvious nonsense ! A five year old understands that there are other people out there and that those people have different values than his own. Children who don't are autistic or suffer from mental retardation.

And the recognition that other people have different values is the basis of living peacefully in society. To deny it is dangerous insanity, even if it's for what seems a good cause. It's nice to think that we can apply our own standards on everyone else and live in a very simplistic world, and all live in complete and total harmony, but we don't and that's not how life works.

Is the Golden Rule practical ? No. It is widely acknowledged in game theory that tit-for-tat is the most optimal strategy, and the motor of cooperation in the animal kingdom, not the Golden Rule. An agent using the tit-for-tat strategy cooperates with others until provoked. When provoked, the agent must retaliate and then be quick to forgive. Likewise, we generally acknowledge that criminals (and other people who break the Trader Principle in society) must be punished in some way, in order to keep other agents from being harmed. We do not follow the Golden Rule.

A pervasive example of the Golden Rule these days is enforced self-help. It is assumed that one person's emotional life reflects that of everyone else, and that everyone naturally needs self-help in cases of disaster. But for some people, this attention runs counter to their own way of coping with disaster, and only makes their pain worse. The refusal to acknowledge individuality leads to even worse attitudes, such as "interpreting" a person's truthfulness based on their outpouring of emotions, creating prejudice and persecution.

This is psychologically problematic, for sure, but are there practical examples where the Golden Rule is obviously and uncontrovertibly evil ? Yes, in cases where we are confronted with radical differences in value systems. Cultural relativism would have us believe that, when confronted with absurd moral beliefs such as human sacrifice or female circumcision, we should be silent and accept them. The Golden Rule not only forces us to accept these beliefs, but that a morally retarded person is perfectly justified to impose those beliefs on us.