Practical Philosophy of Law: The Golden Rule Amendment

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
1

It is the purpose of this Constitution to create a government based upon the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule states that we each should treat others the way we would want to be treated. We hold that the truth of this principle is self evident.

As stated in the United States’ Declaration of Independence, governments, “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” are instituted to secure certain unalienable rights. The list and content of these rights is determined by application of the Golden Rule. The self evidence of such rights depends upon the degree to which their derivation from the Golden Rule is certain.

We hold that the existence of rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, among others, is self evident, but that the exact scope of these rights is less certain. It is the responsibility of the electorate and the government to determine, in good faith, subject to the Golden Rule, and pursuant to the processes set forth in this Constitution and other law that is valid under this Constitution, the contours of such rights.

Since each of us would wish that all beings capable of making decisions should take into account our cares and concerns, and the needs and necessities entailed by those cares and concerns, in all matters about which those others might make deliberate decisions affecting us or our situations, and to not favor the cares and concerns of others over our own cares and concerns because of the differences between ourselves and those others, so it follows under the Golden Rule, that all beings possessing cares and concerns should be treated with equal respect insofar as their cares and concerns should be treated with equal respect in all matters in which we are capable of making deliberate decisions. Thus, we hold that it is self evident that, in this regard, all beings possessing cares and concerns are equal and should be treated as such.

We, the people of this [world/nation/state/province/city], do covenant that we shall each endeavor, in all matters about which we are capable of deliberate decisions, to attempt to act in accordance with the Golden Rule. We, the people of this [world/nation/state/province/city], do covenant that we shall attempt to build community upon this foundation rather than upon any principle, or lack of principle, that would be inconsistent with the equal respect due to any being that possesses cares and concerns. These two covenants constitute the moral foundation of community.

A violation of this moral foundation shall not be subject to legal sanction unless the electorate or government determine in accordance with this Constitution, and law consistent with this Constitution, that legal sanctions shall apply to the particular violation.

It is the moral obligation of each member of the electorate to exercise his or her vote in a manner consistent with the two covenants which are the moral foundation of community. It is the moral obligation of each member of the government to act within the scope of the powers provided by law consistent with this Constitution, and to exercise any permitted discretion in a manner that is consistent with the two covenants that are the moral foundation of community.

Action in accordance with these moral obligations gives the electorate and the government moral authority. Actions that violate these moral obligations deprive the electorate and government of moral authority.

Accordingly, it shall be presumed when interpreting this Constitution or any other law, that the electorate or government that is responsible for the law’s existence, intended by their action to act in a manner that is consistent with the two covenants that are the moral foundation of community. Consequently, an ambiguity in this Constitution or other law shall be construed in accordance with this presumption. In determining whether this Constitution or any other law is ambiguous, one may consider any apparent inconsistency of the text with the two covenants that are the moral foundation of community.

2

It’s not. As a masochist, do you believe others should be treated badly? As a drug user, do you believe the government should provide free, high-quality drugs on demand to the populace?

The platinum rule: how about treating others the way they would want to be treated?
The silver rule: We shouldn’t treat others in a way we would not like to be treated.

There’s nothing self-evident about the golden rule, and as soon as you look into it in any depth you see it for what it is: a tool for legitimising decisions you’ve already made.

3

Yeah. The Golden Rule is great for teaching empathy to children, which is its main purpose. To mistake it for a practical philosophical principle for grownups is to misunderstand the purpose of morality. To inject it into a constitution is to misunderstand the purpose of such a document.

4

That’s an odd, legalistic interpretation of something pretty straightforward. If you put yourself, to the best of your ability, into someone else’s shoes, you would never come to such strange conclusions.

And Faust, I do think it’s an excellent practical philosophical principle for grownups. In fact, it’s application is a sign of being grown up.

I haven’t read the OP yet by the way.

5

Ok I just did read the OP. I never really understand why people like to try to coordinate moralities. It’s too much work. We, as a society, define certain radical behaviors as unacceptable. That’s fine, isn’t it?

6

Yeah, anon. Social Contract. Like utilitarianism, the GR may have a place in the SC. But as a foundational principle, it falls far short.

7

The Golden Rule is something I hope all politicians take seriously in their lives. In that sense, it’s a great foundational principle. Trying to write it into law doesn’t make sense, as you can’t write the spirit of the Golden Rule into law. And the only way the Golden Rule makes any sense at all is to grasp the spirit of it. Otherwise you get legalistic nonsense such as Only_Humean’s examples demonstrated. Maybe that was his point? Ah. Maybe. :-k

8

Yeah - empathy.

9

Somewhere, I don’t remember exactly, I heard that you can’t legislate morality. You can be moral, teach morality, ask for morality, but you can’t legislate it. As I recall, at least one premise of GR is to uphold the spirit of the law even if it means ignoring the letter of the law.

10

Yes :slight_smile: A much clearer way of putting what I tried to say in my last sentence.

You know what you think moral behaviour is, rules and systems are post-hoc attempts to add some formal weight to your feeling - and there’s not a moral “law” yet that can’t be legalistically bent to justify whatever you want to try and get away with.

11

Faust - yes, empathy.

Only_Humean - I agree then!

12

As a pilot, and especially as an instructor, I hated aviation law and especially people who made these laws necessary and people who badly wrote some of laws.
At first, there was no law in aviation because it was a new thing.
Then some idiots did stupid things and hurt others and/or themselves.
To prevent these incident, a few laws were made, and then followed by tons of regulations and laws that made me feel as if I was a lawyer instead of flight instructor.

Some laws and regulations are well designed and necessary to ensure safe and/or efficient operation, in aviation as well as in daily life.
However, it’s clear for me that the presence of more complex laws indicates that people of the country/region can’t talk, negotiate, and settle the matter by themselves, as far as certain types of laws are concerned.

As far as constitution and some other state laws are concerned, I think it’s a hodgepodge, a sort of narcotic that gives (false) impression that state is something dependable and good.
So, I don’t take it so seriously.

In short, if we were more intelligent and aware, we should only need such laws and regulation like basic traffic rule of (going faster on the yellow light, etc :smiley:).
In other words, I think laws are for stupid people/country and often made and mainly used by stupid people, although there are always exceptions.
Laws are excellent for making your life complicated and making lawyers rich.

13

Hi All,

I had given up. I thought this thread was going to die without a single response. I am quite excited to read your reponses. :smiley: I appreciate your thoughts.

Here is my response to a number of points:

Faust argues that the Golden Rule is not a serious foundational principle.

The first advantage of the Golden Rule is that it brings together many traditions that are in conflict with each other by identifying a common ground. The second advantage is that it begins as a simple principle that even children can understand, but in the hands of maturing reflection, it leads to progressively more mature, complex concepts of morality.

Neither secularists or religionists tend to find the Golden Rule to be an objectionable statement of what is essential to morality. Most religions have texts that indicate a pretty strong commitment to it as a fundamental principle, and most people without strong religious beliefs, but who are still commited to living in a functioning civil society, see it as an approximate statement of a fundamental principle of how people should interact in order to make a functioning civil society possible.

While it may not be as precise of a statement of fundamental moral principle as one might find in the works of Philosophers like Kant or Rawls or Singer, it provides a good starting place which ends up pointing to those more precise statements and then provides a standard for determining their accuracy. It points at these more precise statements of moral principle in the following way:

  1. When one first begins to try to apply the rule, one asks “What would I like other people to do for me and avoid doing to me?” and one comes up with a long list of things Ione would like other people to do or avoid doing. Applying the Golden Rule, one concludes that one should do for others all of the things that are on one’s list of things one wants them to do for oneself, and one should avoid doing all of the things to others that are on one’s list of things one wants other people to avoid doing to oneself.

  2. But shortly thereafter, one asks oneself, is that the way one wants other people to treat oneself? Of course not. The result of their doing that would be that they would be doing things to oneself or for oneself that one doesn’t want or need them to do. One does not want people to decide what to do to or for oneself based upon their interests, but rather, one wants them to decide what to do to or for oneself based upon one’s own interests. Thus, one concludes that the Golden Rule is really focused upon a method of choosing actions which requires that one take the interests of the other into account when deciding how to act.

  3. Next I note that I would not want others to give a different priority to my interests than they have for me when deciding how to treat me, so I conclude that the Golden Rule requires not only respecting the other’s interests, but respecting the relative priority they have for those others.

  4. But then I consider that how I choose to interact with one other has effects on many others. I would not want others to ignore my interests when interacting with others, and accordingly, when choosing my actions, I should take into account the interests of all others whose interests could be affected by my actions.

  5. I note that there are others who I care about. I do not want those others to neglect themselves since in doing so they are neglecting something I care about. Applying the golden rule, I conclude that I should not neglect my own interests. Thus, the Golden Rule leads to the conclusion that everyone’s interests should be taken into account when deciding how to act.

  6. How would I want others to resolve conflicts of interests and prioritizations of interest when my interests are involved? Whatever methods or principles I would want them to use should, according to the Golden Rule become the principles that I should apply when resolving those conflicts.

  7. If the Golden Rule seems to point to different alternative principles to use in resolving conflicts of interests and prioritizations of interest, then the issue of which prinicples should be used should be decided by the Golden Rule. So for example, it provides a basis for usig Rawls’ veil of ignorance, and indeed suggests how that doctrine should be interpreted. It also provides a basis for deciding what a “maxim” is in Kant’s first statement of the categorical imperative. At this point, we have followed the Golden Rule into the field of meta-ethics. In working out the problems of meta-ethics, it continues to be the guiding principle.

Rather than just be a device fo teaching children basic notions of morality, it has become the guiding principle for delving deeper and deeper into finding and precisely stating the ultimate principles of morality.

Thus, the Golden Rule provides a method for working out the problems of Ethics which we have not answered yet. I suggest that Ethics is like mathematics. You start with a simple activity like counting that generates concepts of numbers, but then you can spend thousands (millions?) of years in the study of those concepts trying to discover all of principles that govern the interrelations between them. Likewise, the simple decision procedure of the Golden Rule leads to a long term process of working out its implications as it is applied to the infinite phenomena provided by experience.

If you want politicians to take it seriously, would you like to think that Courts interpreting what politicians do would not ignore any such intentions when deciding the proper interpretation of their actions? Or would you like the politicians to seek to acheive one result based on the Golden Rule, but have the Courts undo that result by refusing to interpret the laws as arising out of the context of being enacted as a consequence of the Golden Rule?

The problem you speak of is a problem for every legal principle. You can’t write the spirit of any set of words into that set of words. Rather, it is the responsibility of the reader to read the spirit of the words into the words. By themselves, words are just ink or sounds.

The reason I am suggesting putting the Golden Rule into the Constitution is that it begins by expressing a simple spirit. As Faust points out, we use it in the moral education of children. While the simple spirit of the Golden Rule is easy to grasp by almost all people, it is a spirit that can carry those people far beyond the simple sentence that expresses it. It becomes a spirit that grows more mature and more complex as one develops moral competence, making lawmakers and judges (and other citizens) progressively better at acting within the spirit of the Golden Rule.

If we use our Constitution to embrace the Golden Rule, we can overcome one difficulty with teaching moral reflection in public schools. Currently, at least in the US where we require separation of church and state, it becomes questionable to discuss moral principles in school because there are many who regard that as an attempt to do with secular institutions what they think only religious institutions should be allowed to do. However, once we recognize in our Constitution an agreed upon moral foundation resting on a foundation outside of religious dogma, we can start to teach children in school the progressively more mature ways of applying the Golden Rule, ultimately introducing them to the important questions of meta-ethics and applied ethics.

This notion is generally raised with regard to not enacting laws regarding the kinds of sexual behaviors that are so common, that making them illegal would not affect poeples behavior that much but would send a lot more people to prison. So, for example, it is generally thought to be unwise to put people in prison for sexual infidelity to their spouse or premarital sex. Nothing in the Amendment I am proposing does anything like that. In fact, the Amendment specifically says that there will not be sanctions for immoral acts unless the law elsewhere provides for such sanctions.

The point of the amendment is not to make immorality illegal, but rather to clarify the agreed moral obligations of citizens when they go into the voting booth, of legislators when enacting laws, of the executive branch when it enforces the law, and judges when they interpret the law. It clarifies the social contract so that persons obligated by that contract can better understand what their obligations are under that contract.

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Beyondthecave: There was a thread that briefly discussed similar ideas, in case you’re interested.

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Thanks Anon for alerting me to the previous thread. I thought I would add some of the issues discussed there to the current thread.

The original question was whether it would be helpful when enacting law to include a statement of the purpose of the law. To some extent it would be. But on the other hand, it would be additional language which could introduce new ambiguities. Legislatures sometimes try to do this, and, sometimes, it creates ambiguity. Legislatures sometimes do this when they don’t like court interpretations of prior legislation. But then the question often becomes a question of how much of the prior interpretation the legislature is trying to eliminate.

I doubt there is a law that does not have at least some ambiguity as to what was intended.

An obvious example would be the first amendment:

What is “the freedom of speech”. Congress is not allowed to pass laws that will “abridge” the “freedom of speech”. Justice Douglas argued that the “freedom of speech” means complete freedom of speech and thought that was obvious. A lot of other people thought that “freedom of speech” was a limited right with an established history in the common law at the time the US Constitution was ratified. The latter view prevailed. That is why you are not allowed to yell “fire” in a crowded theatre, why limited regulation of commercial speech is allowed, why campaign financing can be regulated to some degree but is also partially protected from regulation, and why obscenity and child pornography are subject to regulation while other speech and entertainment related to sex is not subject to regulation.

As the questions arose as to how the First Amendment applied to each of these subject matters, there was honest disagreement about the extent of “freedom of speech”. Many related issues have not been entirely resolved because Courts generally do not attempt to write comprehensive decisions that give complete resolution of all issues relating to a topic, but instead, they confine themselves to deciding only those issues that must be decided in order to decide the case.

That is just one example. In my job I frequently work on deciding how to interpret ambiguous law. In our Court, 90% to 95% of cases settle. When cases don’t settle it is because there is either a disagreement about interpretation of the law or about the probability that one side or the other will prevail on evidentiary issues (issues about what the facts are).

If there are significant legal issues, the parties will probably file motions to try to get the Judge to decide those issues before trial so they can either settle the case, or clarify what set of facts that they will actually have to prove at trial to prevail. They brief the issues and it is my job to do the legal research, advise the Judge as to those legal issues, and draft decisions on the motions. So, questions about what the intent of a law is do exist, and the existence of those issues is one of the main reasons that Courts hire people like me to assist judges.

The ambiguities in the law result in part from the inadequacies of language to express intentions, but also from the nature of intentions themselves. An intention is not entirely there like a rock: a solid thing with a definite shape. Intentions are not even entirely obvious to those who possess them.

A person may only have pre-reflective awareness of his intention, or even if he has some reflective awareness, that does not entail complete awareness because many elements of an intention are more implied than actual.

To explore an intention, one may have to start by clarifying the purpose being pursued by asking questions like: Would factual state of affairs F1 satisfy my purpose? Would factual state of affairs F2 satisfy my purpose? Even if one extensively explores the purpose in this manner, unless one has a very good imagination, one is probably not going to think of all the potential situations that might plausibly satisfy the purpose in order to demarcate the exact scope of the purpose. Consequently, even a very reflective person is likely to be left with some ambiguities and vagaries in his/her purposes.

But the purpose is only a part of the intention. An intention has a structure something like “I will do act X to accomplish purpose P in situation S. Even after we have explored our purpose P, to fully understand the intention we must reflect on what possible actions could constitute an X: Would I be doing X if I did A1? Would I be doing X if I did A2? And so on. X must be something that the person with the intention believes will serve purpose P. It must also be something I would be willing to do in situation S.

The third step in reflecting on an intention involves asking about what constitutes situation S: would I do X for my purpose P in situation S1? Would I do X for purpose P in S2? And so on.

I am not saying that one is likely to have no sense of the obvious things that would count as act X, purpose P, or situation S. The hard questions have to do with borderline issues.

Legal interpretation involves the attempt to determine the intentions of lawmakers and judges who set legal precedent. Thus, for purpose of legal interpretation, act X was the enactment of a law or issuance of a precedent that is at least partially ambiguous or vague. In either case certain physical words are added to the larger body of physical words that make up the law.

The issue for the interpreter of law is to determine the meaning of those new words. The first and primary source the interpreter turns to is the ordinary meanings of the words used, or some technical meanings that appear applicable. But, neither ordinary nor technical language is perfectly unambiguous or clear. When the language by itself is inadequate to eliminate all ambiguity and vagueness, one looks to context to try to determine what was intended by the lawmaker or judge.

We consider the purposes they would have had and the range of situations they would have meant their language to apply to given those purposes. In the case of Court precedent, we look at the facts of the case in which the decision was made to see what situation the Court was intending its language to apply to. In the Case of lawmakers, we look to the legislative history (the debate and testimony leading to the legislation) to try to find out what they were trying to accomplish and what sorts of situations they were concerned with affecting. In both cases, we look to the wider context of the law to discern the public policy purposes that are generally endorsed by the law on the assumption that those policies are important to the judge or the lawmaker, or at least should have been. If we err on the side of assuming lawmakers and judges are fulfilling their duties, that is not as bad as erring on the side of assuming they were not acting appropriately.

In my jurisdiction, we also have a statute that requires that we assume that the intent of any statute was to have a reasonable result.

The evidence regarding what public policy is often ambiguous. That ambiguity leaves questions as to how to interpret ambiguous language of the law. That brings us to my proposal. By identifying the ultimate purpose of the law within the nation, that will clarify some of the ambiguity as to what the public policies are, which will then help to eliminate some of the ambiguity in the language of statutes, regulations, and case precedents.

Sometimes the legislation is ambiguous because certain legislators will only support the legislation if the issue is left to the courts to decide. So, sometimes, these ambiguities are intentional. When a court has a case, it must decide the case. What is the court supposed to do?

And this is only an instance of the problem of finding the “intent” of the legislature. What if the different legislators had different reasons for supporting the legislation and as a consequence had different notions of how the legislation should be interpreted? The only thing the legislators have to agree on is the language of the legislation. What is a court supposed to do if there is no shared intention? The court still has to decide the case before it.

The Court must turn to public policies to determine what the legislation should mean. It can do that better if public policy is made clearer by the constitutional amendment I have proposed.

I am currently listening to some recorded lectures covering Philosophy of Law and the current topic is Dworkin’s theory of legal interpretation which, is described as requiring that interpretation is guided by the pursuit of “integrity”. I am jumping ahead of what the lectures have said, but what this suggests to me is that the interpreter is not free to impose his/her own moral framework on the law, but on the other hand, he/she is interpreting the law as a consistent body of law arising from a consistent set of public policies that are ultimately consistent because they arise out of a shared moral foundation emerging from reason and the human situation. As Jefferson put it in the Declaration, Governments are created to serve a specific moral purpose. Law is created by Government in it’s attempt to serve that purpose. All legislation and all legal interpretation must ultimately serve that purpose by fitting in with the project as it has been carried forward to date, but without losing site of the ultimate purpose.

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Firstly, I’m not a US citizen, so the details of the constitution and declaration are not known to me nor relevant to me. I’m approaching it as a rank beginner. Reading about it is interesting, though; the battle between the various interpretations of its position in law seems to be drawn along roughly political lines.

In any case, having read through the Declaration, the moral purpose you refer to seems to be to protect certain “Natural Rights” of its citizens. It has no role in ensuring that they act morally, only that there is a framework within which they are protected from oppression, endangerment and so forth, and able to act as they please within that framework. There is no drive to create moral citizens - in fact, the specific mention of “liberty” seems to imply they are free to act as they like, as long as they don’t impinge on the natural rights of their fellow citizens.

Maybe I’m missing something - in what way is the golden rule (which is a guide to personal action) relevant? Law is created with a specific moral purpose - to allow people to make their own choices, as much as is possible. The fact that most laws deal with acts that are immoral does not mean in any way that (personal) morality is the guide to the law; the law simply defines those actions that it will take sanctions against, in order to protect its citizens and the goals of the government.

There are very many acts that very many people consider immoral that the law doesn’t (and, as far as I can imagine, shouldn’t) interest itself in, as it’s personal business that the state should keep its nose out of. For example, if you enshrine the Golden Rule in the constitution, you could end up making adultery illegal. No reasonable person would want to be cheated on, it’s not unimaginable to say, and the constitution demands that we guide our society by the golden rule. I don’t think that backing up common morality with state incarceration is a good idea. The aim of the western state is (generally and idealistically) that of a protector and facilitator, not a nanny.

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Because, the alternative is annihilation.

Since we (the generation I belong to) were children, the threat of the destruction of our world has hung over our heads. We did not know we would make it this far. Now, the threats that hang over the heads of our children and grandchildren are much more numerous than those which hung over our heads.

It is no longer “certain radical behaviors” that threaten us, but the ordinary things we all do as a matter of course every day. The act of defining the behaviors of some other group of persons (i.e., radicals) as the problem is, itself, a large part of the problem we face. The “radicals” are only a small part of the problem. The overwhelming problem is ourselves. The reason we are here in this situation is because of what we have done, and what we have failed to do. We have grasped for extraordinary powers, while refusing to undertake the responsibilities associated with those powers.

We will succeed in avoiding annihilation only if we can move ourselves to fundamentally change ourselves.

To be, to let others be, we must redesign our ways of living, not alone, but in concert. We must find a more sustainable way of living. Very little that needs to be accomplished can be accomplished alone. Our responsibilities are shared responsibilities and we can only fulfill those responsibilities if we can coordinate our actions. We can consistently coordinate our actions only when we have coordinated our commitments, and we will be unable to consistently coordinate our commitments unless we coordinate our most basic commitments.

It seems to me that a willingness to unambiguously voice a common commitment to the basic precept of respect for each other found in the golden rule is an appropriate place to start. It hardly constitutes a full “coordination of moralities”, but rather constitutes recognition of the place where we do meet and can meet: a place where we can begin to work better together with and for each other, so that we can discover other places where we can work even better together with and for each other.

I am not calling for the end of diversity. Far from it. I am calling for the recognition of common ground from which diverse peoples can find a way of consistently cooperating in pursuit of a common good.

The thing I want us to overcome is not diversity, but rather the opposition each of us feels to treating some or all other people as if they matter as much as one matters oneself, regardless of which of the many philosophies or theologies that are used to justify that feeling of opposition.

But if the truth is that we are interdependent, why do you think that the possession of moralities is something we can do in a completely independent (“uncoordinated”) manner? I would suggest that this activity you call “coordinating” is actually the activity of working at exploring the multiple ways morality appears (Think of “emptiness” as all the ways of appearing rather than negation of all appearance. You put it like this: “Emptiness is also a description of ‘reality’ in its ultimate inclusive sense though - that is, of all conceivable phenomena, whether ‘real’ or imagined - free of all categorical dualities. Emptiness is not expressive of some negative static state at all, but of the full dynamic reality which pervades all phenomena.”).

Your essay predominantly describes enlightenment as a process whereby meditative reflection leads to recognition of emptiness and that this recognition constitutes wisdom. Then, this wisdom makes one compassionate. But let us reconsider.

If wisdom and compassion are identical, then perhaps a focus on the development of compassion will result in wisdom. That is the nature of what I am arguing. The private wisdom located in a private experience of emptiness is not yet the intersubjective wisdom that, through empathy, attends not only to one’s own encounter with emptiness, but also to the encounters of others with emptiness. Compassion builds intersubjectivity. Thus, it is the precondition for the full wisdom needed for living in sustainable community.

Using an alternate terminology:

The
Good,
Defined by
Infinite applications of
The Golden Rule to life’s experience,
Is the Ground of Reason:
The single standard
Of what is best.
The
Good,
As ultimate determinant,
Determines which procedures,
Methods, concepts, rules, and tests
Are best to use for reason and her progeny,
Like Science, Mathematics, Theology, or Philosophy,
And each and every other discipline within the rule of reason.
The
Good,
The ground of reason,
Defines our one and only path
To wisdom, knowledge, truth, perpetual peace, and life.
The good is known provisionally, and only very partially,
Through all our careful applications of The Golden Rule
To our so very incomplete experience of being spirit.
But, this is our only knowledge of what is right,
And so this best but partial knowledge should
Determine what should count for now,
Both generally and in specific cases,
As reason or the methods of science
And of reason’s other progeny,
Or what a word should mean,
(Generally or in a context)
Like “justice”, “truth”,
“Equality”, or “know”
Or “I” or even “is”.

18

The Golden Rule is flawed in the sense that it justifies imposing unpleasant situations on others as long as you are willing to bear them yourself. Thus it justifies murder to a man with a deathwish and fascism to the rich and powerful.

Should a law be based on either of the moral rules, the Silver Rule; Do not do to others as you would not have them do to you; works better, but is flawed as well. Is not free market capitalism by definition the uinterrupted violation of this rule? Is not the act of defeating someone in sports the same?

The only one of these that carries any real, realistic value The Platinum Rule; that people should treat others as those others would like to be treated. Interpreted literally though, it reads as an imperative. An order. Interpreting literally is the way of laws, as it is.

My conclusion is that while all these rules contain important lessons, valuable as guidelines, none of them are appropriate as laws.

19

btc: a lot to respond to. But coordination can mean pervasive aggression.

Keyser: that’s not what the golden rule is about - it’s a legalistic perversion of it.

20

It does not matter what you or others have interpreted the golden rule to be about. Once you bring it into the realm of law, it can and will be interpreted in this fashion.