Applied Case: The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule is the famous moral rule that says to treat others as you would have them treat you. Some version of this statement can be found in nearly any ethical tradition.

This is a very tiny sentence, which is very suspicious.

Tiny moral sentences often survive like this by hiding the expensive and important part. They become fridge magnets, classroom posters, parental weapons, workplace decorations, or little pellets of virtue-language that can be fired at a situation from very far away.

So Modal Path Ethics approached the Golden Rule with deep caution.

Also, wearing a wrist brace.

The Thought Gauntlet dislocation of the right thumb was just the obvious drama. The subtler and deeper harms were happening on the other chiral side, which has now purchased a carpal tunnel splint and would like everyone to know that consequence and swelling is rarely confined to the side where the story points.

This will become relevant later.

Bad Ethics.

The weakest reading of the Golden Rule is that you should imagine everyone else as a copy of yourself and then behave accordingly.

This is very bad. Do not do this.

Do not give everyone the thing you want simply because you want it. Do not mistake your preferences for universal medicine. Do not build an ethics out of self-projection and then call the projection empathy because it wore a nice shirt.

Other people are not you in different hats.

These guys have different bodies, histories, fears, needs, limits, thresholds, attachments, burdens, and paths. The Golden Rule cannot replace attention. It cannot replace consent. It cannot replace listening. It cannot replace the hard work of learning what the other locus actually is.

If the rule meant “treat people as though they were you,” Modal Path Ethics would have to strike it with an axe.

Thankfully, that is not the good version.

The Common-Pool Problem.

The Golden Rule becomes much smarter when read through common-pool logic. Thanks, game theory. Sorry about all those rude things I said.

In a common-pool field, every player is also another player’s environment. The move I call rational from my seat becomes part of the logic available against me from another seat.

• If depletion is rational when I do it, I have helped author a field where depletion returns through someone else’s hand.
• If opportunistic rule-bending is rational when I do it, I have helped make opportunistic rule-bending available as a general tool.
• If extraction, humiliation, concealment, abandonment, escalation, or “that’s just how the game is played” becomes logical from my position, then I am helping build the field in which that same logic can later be played through me.

This really should have been the famous one. It has fish, not unlike Jesus of Nazareth.

The Golden Rule is not just asking the self to imagine being treated differently. It is really asking the self not to build a field whose action-logic becomes intolerable when the field turns back.

A logical move is also logical against you.

The Modal Path Ethics Ruling.

The Golden Rule is very field-intelligent. Good job, everyone.

It does not solve ethics alone. It does not contain all moral knowledge. It does not remove difference, asymmetry, consent, history, repair, or the need to actually perceive the other person in front of you.

But as a first-pass test against self-exemption, this is extremely clean.

• Do not endorse an action-logic that becomes unacceptable when the field routes that same logic back through you.
  • Do not build fields where the logical actions are ones you would reject from the other end.
• Build fields where the logical actions remain livable when the field turns.

Two big thumbs up.

One thumb is still splinted. Still counts.