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What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way? Just because something has a long history (secular

What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It's okay for me to treat others that way? Just because something has a long history (secular or otherwise) doesn't give it any merit by itself. If we need some standard to judge against what is morally acceptable in the case I presented (no this doesn't apply if you like to hurt yourself and others) then you are back to defining a standard which cannot inherently be neutral.

no-name-here 2mo ago
1. I believe GP was suggesting "golden rule" as the basis for governmental-wide rules to be enacted, not that each person should use unique rules based on their own "do unto me" preferences. (If actually applied, "What if this were done to me" also helps to get around the issue of people enacting rules only on other groups, as they wouldn't actually want to be personally treated the way they're proposing.) 2. Regardless, if basing rules on whether someone would want those rules to apply to them does not have merit, is there some better basis you'd recommend?
- altmanaltman 2mo ago
  1. Yes, fair enough. 2. Yes, this is where I would push back because one can also assume there is no "better" basis in the strict sense that you can intellectualize morality/virtue only to a certain extent. And it is possible to argue that morality/virtue is often as much a psychological process as a purely intellectual one. So the idea isn't that the golden rule doesn't make sense or that it is objectively weak, but it doesn't map to the idea of actual morality in action. For example, a person may logically believe in the golden rule but that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that the agent is not fully logical and will not always strictly adhere to a rule just because it is aware of it and aware of it as being Good. In that sense, what use is the golden rule if we are free to ignore it at all (which we often do)? That doesn't mean I'm saying the golden rule is objectively wrong again, but in ranking morality and deciding on very abstract ideas of what Good and Bad are, we ignore the actual psychological forces that are extremely relevant when it comes to the execution of morality in action. So to answer the question, the better basis would be to understand the psychological forces behind why we feel the golden rule is objectively a good and then examine them to understand if we are following the golden rule because we actually think it is good or because we live in a society where it is good and we will be shamed if we don't believe it. One might say it doesn't matter as long as people actually follow the golden rule but another interpretation is that the golden rule by itself doesn't tell us anything (or very little) about the moral character of the person applying it. So just expecting people to follow that rule after knowing it is placing too much trust in the human animal who is often wild and not thinking logically. It is then upon the animal to tame itself and it may do so out of servitude or out of independence and both might lead to equivalent surface values and match the basis perfectly as being morally good while in reality, both have very different meanings for their morals. 2 is, of course, mainly inspired by Nietzsche. I'm working on a short story where he and Plato debate whether a painting is objectively good or bad called A Canvas Called Virtue.
tremon 2mo ago
> What if [..] treat myself [vs] treat others? There's an obvious asymmetry in your rephrasing. The parents quote says "do unto others as they do unto you", not as you do to yourself. If you treat yourself terrible and hurt yourself, is it okay for others to hurt you too?
- altmanaltman 2mo ago
  By logic, yes, if the hypothetical I likes getting hurt, they can also have a tendency to like getting hurt by others surely no? The problem is assuming these types of thinking doesn't exist and we only need to know the good to follow it and hence treating morality and values as a thing that stays beyond humanity itself in the form of eternal truths like the golden rule. But we don't think of morals on an intellectual plane purely. We think it is bad to hurt others because we want a good world where nobody is hurt, but that in itself is a stance where we assume everyone wants the same thing and if they don't, they just lack the reason and rationality to understand the obviously good values. But the mistake is assuming only reason rules how we see and execute morals in actual life.
dahart 2mo ago
> What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It’s okay for me to treat others that way? No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business. There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.
- altmanaltman 2mo ago
  Yes, reasonable assumptions! But according to whom? The golden rule can be reasonable to you but not to me. But does that make me bad and you good? Not really. It just means we disagree on what it means to be a moral person. Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reasonable assumptions to burn witches and then twist reason itself to make it morally good as well. In that case how can we trust this system itself? If the answer is by using your own eyes and thinking for yourself, then why do we need to follow a specific fixed rule?
  - dahart 2mo ago
    The reasonable assumption I was referring to is what the words in the golden rule mean, not what actions are moral or not. The golden rule is almost as far as it gets from a “specific fixed rule”, despite the name, and it doesn’t prescribe what’s bad or good or moral, and nobody upthread said anything about what makes you bad or good. It’s nothing more than a rule of thumb, an aphorism, a (perhaps extremely obvious) reminder that you shouldn’t treat other people in ways you wouldn’t like yourself, at a minimum. Is this hard to understand or something? The aphorism is already completely relative and subjective, there’s really no need to belabor that point, it’s built in. How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.

no-name-here 2mo ago

1. I believe GP was suggesting "golden rule" as the basis for governmental-wide rules to be enacted, not that each person should use unique rules based on their own "do unto me" preferences. (If actually applied, "What if this were done to me" also helps to get around the issue of people enacting rules only on other groups, as they wouldn't actually want to be personally treated the way they're proposing.) 2. Regardless, if basing rules on whether someone would want those rules to apply to them does not have merit, is there some better basis you'd recommend?

altmanaltman 2mo ago
1. Yes, fair enough. 2. Yes, this is where I would push back because one can also assume there is no "better" basis in the strict sense that you can intellectualize morality/virtue only to a certain extent. And it is possible to argue that morality/virtue is often as much a psychological process as a purely intellectual one. So the idea isn't that the golden rule doesn't make sense or that it is objectively weak, but it doesn't map to the idea of actual morality in action. For example, a person may logically believe in the golden rule but that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that the agent is not fully logical and will not always strictly adhere to a rule just because it is aware of it and aware of it as being Good. In that sense, what use is the golden rule if we are free to ignore it at all (which we often do)? That doesn't mean I'm saying the golden rule is objectively wrong again, but in ranking morality and deciding on very abstract ideas of what Good and Bad are, we ignore the actual psychological forces that are extremely relevant when it comes to the execution of morality in action. So to answer the question, the better basis would be to understand the psychological forces behind why we feel the golden rule is objectively a good and then examine them to understand if we are following the golden rule because we actually think it is good or because we live in a society where it is good and we will be shamed if we don't believe it. One might say it doesn't matter as long as people actually follow the golden rule but another interpretation is that the golden rule by itself doesn't tell us anything (or very little) about the moral character of the person applying it. So just expecting people to follow that rule after knowing it is placing too much trust in the human animal who is often wild and not thinking logically. It is then upon the animal to tame itself and it may do so out of servitude or out of independence and both might lead to equivalent surface values and match the basis perfectly as being morally good while in reality, both have very different meanings for their morals. 2 is, of course, mainly inspired by Nietzsche. I'm working on a short story where he and Plato debate whether a painting is objectively good or bad called A Canvas Called Virtue.

tremon 2mo ago

> What if [..] treat myself [vs] treat others? There's an obvious asymmetry in your rephrasing. The parents quote says "do unto others as they do unto you", not as you do to yourself. If you treat yourself terrible and hurt yourself, is it okay for others to hurt you too?

altmanaltman 2mo ago
By logic, yes, if the hypothetical I likes getting hurt, they can also have a tendency to like getting hurt by others surely no? The problem is assuming these types of thinking doesn't exist and we only need to know the good to follow it and hence treating morality and values as a thing that stays beyond humanity itself in the form of eternal truths like the golden rule. But we don't think of morals on an intellectual plane purely. We think it is bad to hurt others because we want a good world where nobody is hurt, but that in itself is a stance where we assume everyone wants the same thing and if they don't, they just lack the reason and rationality to understand the obviously good values. But the mistake is assuming only reason rules how we see and execute morals in actual life.

dahart 2mo ago

> What if I like to treat myself terrible and hurt myself everyday? It’s okay for me to treat others that way? No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business. There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.

altmanaltman 2mo ago
Yes, reasonable assumptions! But according to whom? The golden rule can be reasonable to you but not to me. But does that make me bad and you good? Not really. It just means we disagree on what it means to be a moral person. Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reasonable assumptions to burn witches and then twist reason itself to make it morally good as well. In that case how can we trust this system itself? If the answer is by using your own eyes and thinking for yourself, then why do we need to follow a specific fixed rule?
- dahart 2mo ago
  The reasonable assumption I was referring to is what the words in the golden rule mean, not what actions are moral or not. The golden rule is almost as far as it gets from a “specific fixed rule”, despite the name, and it doesn’t prescribe what’s bad or good or moral, and nobody upthread said anything about what makes you bad or good. It’s nothing more than a rule of thumb, an aphorism, a (perhaps extremely obvious) reminder that you shouldn’t treat other people in ways you wouldn’t like yourself, at a minimum. Is this hard to understand or something? The aphorism is already completely relative and subjective, there’s really no need to belabor that point, it’s built in. How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.