Quotes from The Golden Rule
My experience of working on this book was initially an exercise of piety. Next it turned into an effort to construct the appearance
and reality of an academic specialty. Then it became an affair of self-redefinition. The book culminates as a gift, an invitation to
come and see what I have found.
The rule began to be brightly real to me a few years ago, not during a time for study, nor as a result of any deliberate experiment
to put the rule into practice, but through the experience of taking over all the kitchen tasks for the family during a two-week period
when my wife, Hagiko, needed to concentrate on her literary studies. One day, as our then eight-year-old son handed me his
dishes, for a moment I seemed to sense a slight, unspoken, unconsciously derogatory
attitude: "Here. You are the one who takes care of this sort of thing." In that moment I realized that I had related to my wife in such a way. (p. vi)
Children are taught to respect parents and other authority figures. Adolescents are urged to control their impulses. Adults are told
to conduct themselves in accord with certain moral and ethical standards. Morality, then, may seem to be just an affair of
imposition, a cultural voice that says "no" in various ways to our desires. To be sure, there are times when the word "no" must be
spoken and enforced. But, time and again, people have discovered something more to morality, something rooted in life itself. The
"no" is but one word in the voice of life, a voice that has other words, including the golden rule: Do to others as you want others to
do to you. This book is about the life in that principle. (p.3)
Confucian tradition has honored the beauty in genuine goodness, where the shadow of self-conscious hesitation is gone and nobility
of character expresses itself spontaneously. (p. 15) The Chinese sources . . . provide a strikingly comprehensive concept of the
imaginative role reversal often associated with the practice of the golden rule. Imagining oneself in the other's position can involve
an ethically informed intuition of heart and mind, seeing patterns of relationships, using scientific knowledge ("the investigation of
things") and creative imagination, extending feelings into the present situation that have been previously realized in a similar
relationship, attending to the Way that is immanent to the other person and interior to the agent, and identifying with the other as a
member in the universal family. Although mentioning these many antecedents of moral conduct may seem to erect a burdensome
ideal, an adequate understanding is often intuitively available to someone who approaches a situation with a loving, action-ready
attitude. (p. 26)
On its face, the rule "Do not do to others what you do not want others to do to you" sets up what the agent wants as a criterion of
morality. Plato, in sustained opposition to the Sophistic maxim of Protagoras, "Man is the measure," emphasized, above all, the
pursuit of intellectual insight into eternal, perfect, unchanging, divine "forms" and their relations with the things we sense around us.
If Plato had ever explicitly discussed a generally formulated golden rule, his basic objection would have been expressed in a
remark Socrates makes in the Republic: "Nothing imperfect is the measure of anything." Unregulated wants are no measure at
all. It is striking, however, that all occurrences of golden rule thinking in Plato's dialogues incorporate conditions that block this
objection. The person using golden rule thinking, Socrates or the Athenian, is virtuous, loyal to the highest conceivable standard of
goodness. The conditions that block the objection are, first, that no free-floating golden rule is presented as a sufficient moral
measure; and, second, that the wants of Socrates and the Athenian are hardly unregulated--they both strive for the divine
measure. Such idealism would facilitate the insight necessary to apply the golden rule appropriately. Ennobled wants do not exceed
what is fair.
In the interest of a more completely developed theory, one might ask what concepts of idealism, divine measure, and perfection
are required for a non- Sophistic golden rule. The answer need not be spelled out in detail here. Any intuitively repulsive
counterexample to the rule would suffice to indicate, by contrast, the requisite idealism. Any idealism worthy of the name will have
the resources to condemn abuses that satisfy the letter but not the spirit of the golden rule--manipulative shows of benevolence,
vengeful excesses, imperialistic impositions of one's own standards on another, including the caricatured adulterer or
sadomasochist who goes forth to treat others, and so on. The bulwark against
abuse of the rule and the key to its higher
interpretation is its link to ideals of character. (p. 36)
Such principle, statement of the law, simplify tradition, giving the mind a more unified, manageable focus. A summary rule is a
kelal in Hebrew, a ruile or principle. A principle, whose sage brevity goes to the heart of the matter, gives generality, and also
emphasizes spiritual teachings over ritual requirements. (p. 48)
[In Hillel] the golden rule summarizes not only the Ten Commandments but the whole Torah. Hillel might have cited the love of
God and neighbor, but he neither quotes from the Torah nor mentions God; in these two ways, he presents a nontheologic
philosophy of living to the proselyte. Renouncing the authority of scripture, Hillel responded to this questioner free of sanctimonious
piety, legalistic defensiveness, and commentarial intricacies. This particular liberty in the use of the golden rule was less available
once the rule had become canonical. (pp. 48-49)
The flexibility of a rule which remains widely accessible and reasonable, while conveying a high standard, can be understood as engaging the hearer/reader in a movement through several levels of interpretation, including at least the following.
1. The golden rule of prudence. Do to others as you want others to do to you . . . with realistic attention to the consequences of your choices for the long-run welfare of your recipient. This rule must be distinguished from a pseudo-golden rule of self-interest: Do to others as you want others to do to you . . . with an eye to avoiding punishment and gaining rewards for yourself. It is altogether legitimate that one have a prudent eye to the long-term welfare of one's own soul; prudence "counts the cost" of a proposed commitment or course of action. And it is altogether fitting that Jesus gave warnings about the consequences of selfish living and gave assurances to calm the fears and intrigue the imagination of those who are open to choosing the way of love and service. Jesus' promise of eternal life to all who will receive it in faith subverts natural concern about doing what is right at significant earthly cost to oneself. The prudent course is to do the will of God, and that is to act with golden-rule regard for the neighbor. But the logic of the golden rule requires that this same farseeing and forward-looking concern be extended to the recipient. Prudence combined with the golden rule thus involves the next level.
2. The golden rule of neighborly love. Do to others as you want others to do to you . . . as an expression of consideration and fairness among neighbors, where the scope of the term "neighbor" extends to all without regard to ethnic or religious differences. Since the neighbor can be the enemy, however, fulfilling a "conventional ethic of fairness" can require extraordinary love, which involves the next level.
3. The golden rule of Fatherly love. Do to others as you want others to do to you . . . imitating the divine paradigm. The rule has its paradigm in the way the Father loves, giving good gifts and being
merciful, and in the life of Jesus, which shows that love is not without its severe disciplines. These three levels are implied and
blended in Jesus' teachings. His authoritative teaching gave assurance that those who upstepped neighborly love to fatherly
love--loving enemies, giving generously, being a peacemaker, enduring persecution, and so on--would not thereby sacrifice the
eternal welfare of their souls. A due appreciation of the spirit of Jesus' golden rule, I believe, comes from the recognition that he
made use of the cream of scriptural and oral tradition which he invested with new meaning by virtue of his other teachings and by
his life. By the same reasoning, the intention to express the parental love of God must avoid falling into the trap of adopting a
superior and condescending stance. Rather, what is fitting is the same attitude of service that one would welcome as the recipient
of someone else's divinely parental love in like circumstances. (p. 67)
What difference does the presence or absence of religious faith make in the practice of the golden rule? While the question
focuses on personal experience, the discussion of the question is not insulated from social and political conflicts. As theologians
explored these questions during the medieval period in Europe, the Christian church sought and eventually gained dominant cultural
power. In that process, theologians and philosophers were occupied with efforts to integrate Christianity intellectually with Greek
philosophy and politically with unbelievers. These aims affected interpretations of the golden rule. Theologians affirmed that faith
had a transforming effect on the practice of the rule, even though the rule as a datum of of common reason could serve as a
principle for believer and unbeliever alike.
The West learned the universal scope of the golden rule as much from Stoicism as from classical Judaism and Christianity, since
exclusivistic notions of "the chosen people" and "the church of the saved" complicated otherwise clear humanitarian messages
about the need to extend welcome and concern to strangers, widows, and orphans; lost sheep and prodigal sons; Jew and Greek,
slave and free, male and female. The emphasis on the golden rule as a leading ethical principle, however, derived primarily from
the New Testament repetition of Hillel's teaching that the golden rule is the quintessence of the law and the prophets.
For centuries the golden rule had enjoyed favor as a principle in both religious and philosophical ethics. The honeymoon ended as philosophers exercized their critical freedom to reformulate traditional teachings in a manner more satisfying to the requirements of reason. The drama of the golden rule during early modern European ethics was the emergence, in response to philosophical critique of the three enduring alternative responses: (1) retaining and revisioning the rule, using critique to clarify its meaning; (2) retaining the rule in some reformulated version; and (3) rejecting the rule or replacing it with a newly constructed principle designed to capture everything of value in the rule and to avoid the rule's handicaps.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in America were times of great economic expansion and inequality, opportunity
and abuse, times of American power and of world war. Early scientific doctrines of evolution were being used to gain
understanding of the human species and social life, and the result was a profound challenge to traditional religion. Does religion
render a person less fit for the rigors of competition, or does real religion empower a person to deal in a progressive way with
those very challenges? As that debate went on, America was a center of a dynamic, religiously motivated golden rule movement,
affecting society, politics, economics, business, and interfaith relations. Many enthusiastic individuals chose the rule as their motto;
a popular literature on the rule arose; many a store was called "Golden Rule Store"; it was the custom to bestow on exemplars of
the rule the nickname, "Golden Rule." Authors expounding the maxims for the exercise of a given craft would dub their principles
"golden rules," and many books carried titles such as Golden Rules of Surgery. A Golden Rule Brotherhood was formed with the
intention of unifying all the religions and peoples of the world. During this period the golden rule during this period came to
symbolize a wholehearted devotion to the service of humankind.
This movement, which spread beyond the boundaries of Christianity, held the conviction that all men and women are brothers and
sisters in the family of God, and they formulated the essentials of religion in the gospel of the Fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man. The phrase "brotherhood of man" was used to include, not exclude women. Since the struggle to synthesize
religious idealism with scientific realism had become especially urgent, the golden rule became caught up in the debate. Does living
by the rule render the individual needlessly vulnerable to rugged, evolutionary competition and conflict, or is the rule itself a vehicle
of evolutionary progress? The flexibility of a rule which remains widely accessible and reasonable, while conveying a high
standard, can be understood as engaging the hearer/reader in a movement through several levels of interpretation . . . .
Three professors of nursing responded to studies showing that intuitive abilities do not enable even many helping professionals to demonstrate empathy in a way that is actually helpful to the client. Conceiving of empathy as a skill, Jean R. Hughes, E. Joyce Carver, and Ruth C. MacKay, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, designed a successful training program to develop empathy through interpersonal interaction. They created programs for nurses in the Burn Unit of Victoria General Hospital, working with E. L. La Monica's three-stage definition: "Empathy . . . involves accurate perception of the client's world by the helper, communication of this understanding to the client, and the client's perception of the helper's understanding." The nurses learned better to recognize cues, to show understanding of the patient through verbal recognition of both content and affective dimensions of the patient's message, and to be alert to the client's perception of the helper's understanding. Those participating in the study came to recognize that it is more difficult to understand others and to make oneself understood than we normally realize, and they learned "how misunderstandings could result from a series of small but inaccurate assumptions resulting from failure to validate client messages." Though it was emotionally demanding to go through training concerning a matter that affects one's sense of professional and interpersonal competence, during the course of the training, the nurses moved from resistance and skepticism to commitment and personal initiative in seeking out supplementary materials relevant to their own felt needs. The 20-25 hour programs began with initial sessions with lectures and written exercises, moved on to role-playing with partners, and concluded with videotaping and group review of role-playing exercises. The nurses reported improved understanding in their relations with their patients and with colleagues as well. The programs yielded consistent behavioral improvement throughout the group of nurses, with no decline after seven months. A major lesson of this program is that, in cultivating empathy to the level of service effectiveness, it is helpful to communicate and test one's perceptions in conversation. Imagination is not enough. (p. 116)
A universal principle, for the Stoics, was a rationally intelligible structure of the universe, something binding every human
being--indeed any rational being. Some religious philosophers conceived those universal principle as "ideas in the mind of God."
Samuel Clarke preserved the sense of divine and universal pattern as he spoke of the fitness of things. Kant bracketed the notion
of being consistent with universe patterns and represented moral principles as being consistent simply with reason itself, with the
supreme dignity of every rational agent, and with legislation appropriate to an advanced civilization. In the twentieth century, the
golden rule became attached to the career of universal principles, and it would be reinterpreted along with them. The universality
of a principle was reduced to being simply a matter of consistency with other judgments the individual agent is prepared to make.
The notion of universality had temporarily lost its cosmic, religious, metaphysical, and
philosophical-anthropological connotations. There has been an attempt to use this reduced basis to retain everything worth conserving from the older tradition, and it is striking
how much this approach has yielded. (p. 122-123)
The risk in an ethics of sensitivity and respect lies in placing disproportionate emphasis on the problems of imposition and appropriation. It is also important to describe and reflect upon experiences of interaction when what one person does is welcomed by the other as expressing love. When we interact in the momentum of shared understanding and positive inspiration, we do not feel imposed upon or made passive by the other's speaking and doing, nor are we prey to self-concern about offending the other. We do not in fact experience the other person as other; the experience is one of kinship. Otherness is not annihilated in a mystical oblivion, but neither does it confront us as a challenge. We do not pause to imagine ourselves in the other's shoes because we are not worried about stepping on the other's toes. We engage not in deliberation but in action, and we spontaneously make course corrections as we apprehend the other's changing needs and adjust our own grasp of things. When we live in faith as members in the family of God, we are not staggered by the otherness of the other, and faith learns to embrace situations when otherness is stark and difference looms large: those, too, are situations that arise within the family. (p. 154)
I can never forget a comment made by a Buddhist speaker on an interfaith panel. He remarked on "the stink of religious
experience." I take his point to be not that religious experience must be deceptive, but that it tends to bring, in its wake, an
offensively self-conscious display. If these topics were not worth the effort, silence would surely be safer. (p. 161)
New conceptions of the relation of religion and ethics are at work here. Kantian ethics (referred to rather than advocated by these
writers) acknowledges a difference between moral reason and religion, but assigns to moral reason the unique responsibility for
critically determining what is right, while religion provides enhanced perspective, supporting motivation, hope for grace to act in
genuine benevolence, and hope for a heavenly reward. On a variation of Kantian thought, God has blazed the trail which reason
often cannot discover by itself; once the trail has been discerned, reason can pave it with a universally accessible rationale. For the
authors summarized here, however, morality based on sympathy and duty is incomplete in ways that are only healed on the
spiritual level. For von Balthasar, the divine is the content of spiritual interaction; it is given by grace, commanded, and enjoyed.
For Rost, the moral life simply is the expression of divine love to others; the alternative is for a person to be directed by material
interests. (p. 162)
Important current criticisms of the rule prompt a further unfolding of a golden-rule ethics. The rule, it has been charged, cultivates
blindness to the otherness of the other, since it assumes a basic commonality between agent and recipient. Some challenge the
notion of a common humanity citing (1) the pervasive influence of differences such as gender, race, and class, and (2) the
uniqueness of individual personality. However, in saying what humanity has in common it is not necessary to confine oneself, say,
to basic needs and to shared facts about the human condition, e.g., the inevitability of death. The dimensions just mentioned--such
as gender and uniqueness of personality--are also common: gender is a factor for everyone, and everyone is unique. These
universal statements importantly characterize what it means to be human. The golden rule does assume a common humanity in this
expanded sense. Each of us wants to be treated with due regard for the features that we have in common with others, and with
due regard for the features that classify us in one way or another, and with due regard for our uniqueness. (p. 174)
The children's game of leap-frog provides a metaphor of the relation between philosophical and religious progress. The first child
goes forward by leaping over the child just in front of him. Then the first child kneels down, and the second one leaps over him.
Every philosophic advance prepares a new religious advance, and vice-versa. (p. 182)
The previous histories indicate that the golden rule is most cherished where morality is conceived primarily in terms of relationships
and where people share a commitment to humankind as one family. These conditions are typically grounded in faith in a higher
Source or personal God, as has been seen in Chinese, Greek, Jewish, and Christian traditions (not to mention others). They
developed the golden rule as a universal principle, and in each tradition the concept dawned, more or less clearly and prominently,
of God as the universal Father of every personality. Because the experience of God includes motherly as well as fatherly love (not
to mention phases which are not obviously personal), there should be no room for dogmatism about the name that someone
chooses to express his or her relationship with Deity. Family talk connotes personality, nearness, experienceability, and love; and it
gives the golden rule new meaning: "Treat other persons as brothers and sisters, as sons and daughters of God, as you want others
to treat you."
In the religious ethics of relationship proposed here, one's primary relationship is with God, the Source Personality. Put simply, the
idea is this. The person is already a son or daughter of God. Once the person accepts this truth, the relationship acquires new
reality and leads to new growth and a wholehearted impulse to service. God is never merely one's own Parent, but always also the
Parent of others, and this is the origin of the brotherhood of man (siblinghood of humankind). A love begins to manifest whose
source is deeper than the need to prop up a beleaguered affirmation of human dignity. Experiencing by faith what it is to live as a
son or daughter of God, one comes to live as a brother or sister in relation to others. In this light, the golden rule becomes the
principle of the practice of the family of God. (p. 183)
Conclusion
Here, then, is a condensed summary of leading ideas emerging from this study. The rule is, from the first, intuitively accessible,
easy to understand; its simplicity communicates confidence that the agent can find the right way. The rule tends to function as a
simplifed summary of the advocate's moral tradition, and it most commonly expresses a commitment to treating others with
consideration and fairness, predicated on the recognition that others are like oneself.
The golden rule is offered to those among whom a minimal sincerity may be presupposed--the hearer will not manipulate the rule
in defense of patently immoral conduct. The golden rule is not best interpreted as an isolated principle in a value vacuum to be
examined as a candidate for the role of sole normative axiom in a formalized ethical theory. Nevertheless, the rule is a principle in
a replete sense. Even before it is formulated, its logic is observed to operate in the human mind. Once formulated, it shows itself to
be contagious and quickly rises to prominence. It functions as a distillation of the wisdom of human experience and of scriptural
tradition. It serves the needs of educated and uneducated people alike, and stimulates philosophers to codify its meanings in new
formulations. Given the equal, basic worth of each individual, the rule implies a requirement of consistency; as Clarke put it,
"Whatever I judge reasonable or unreasonable for another to do for me; that, by the same judgment, I declare reasonable or
unreasonable, that I in the like case should do for him." In addition, this principle of a philosophy of living carries implications for
social, economic, and political realms.
Much of the meaning of the rule can be put into practice without any religious commitment, since it is a nontheologic principle that neither mentions God nor is necessarily identified with the scriptures or doctrines of any one religion. The rule is an expression of human kinship, the most fundamental truth underlying morality. From a religious perspective, the golden rule is the principle of the practice of the family of God, and it means relating with other people as a brother or sister. At the limit, it involves conduct patterned on a divine paradigm, extending to others the same attitude of service that one would welcome as the recipient of someone else's divinely parental love in the same kind of situation.
The rule cannot be captured in a static interpretation for it engages the thoughtful doer in a process of growth. To follow it to the end is to move from egoism to sympathy, to sharpen moral intuition by reason, and to find fulfillment beyond duty-conscious rule-following in spontaneous, loving service. In the process of achieving mature identification with others, the imaginatively adopting the other's perspective may be helpful, along with every other technique of understanding and cooperating with others. Thus the unity of the rule, amid its wide diversity, is its function as a symbol of this process of growth.
Whoever practices the golden rule opens himself or herself to a process of change. Letting go of self to identify with a single other individual, or with a third-person perspective on a complex situation, or with a divine paradigm, one allows a subtle and gradual transformation to proceed, a transformation with bright hope for the individual and the planet. The rule begins by setting forth the way the self wants to be treated as a standard of conduct; but by placing the other on a par with the self, the rule engages one in approximating a higher perspective from which the kinship of humanity is evident. To pursue this higher perspective is to risk encountering the divine and the realization that every step along the forward path is illumined by the Creator.
Idealistic striving tends to generate a consciousness of levels of achievement. Consciousness of levels differences is safe when
these levels are each understood as phases of the realization of the relationships within the kinship of humankind. The spiritual
level is in large measure a way of facilitating and conducting the emotional and intellectual levels of relating. When we are
spiritually engaged, love can pervade our emotional reactions to such an extent that we are able to elaborate, more or less
spontaneously, an intelligent and wise affection for every person we meet. Thus emotion becomes an indicator of the degree to
which the spirit pervades the entire personality. Growth is not constructed by adding progress on one level to progress on another
level; rather growth results unconsciously as the personality engages wholeheartedly in experience. Thus it would not improve
things to reformulate the golden rule in terms of levels of realization; the simple, summary way is best.
"Do to others as you want others to do to you," is part of our planet's common language, shared by persons with differing but
overlapping conceptions of morality. Only a principle so flexible can serve as a moral ladder for all humankind. (pp. 188-189)
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