re: #113 engineer cat

in about 80 BC or so, as the old story goes, a pagan king visited rabbi hillel and told him he would convert to judaism if hillel could explain it while standing on one foot

the rabbi stood on one foot and said:

“don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have done unto yourself. that is the whole of the law and the prophets.

the rest is commentary”

good enough for me

I would like to point out this is a terrible moral rule, unless you get really meta with it, and even then it’s non-functional as an ethical rule.

For example, I wake up at five or five-thirty and I’m immediately happy and filled with energy. I’m a morning person beyond morning persons. So what I like first thing in the day is conversation, working out, energetic things.

My wife wakes up, if she wakes up early, painfully and grumpily. The last thing she wants is conversation and activity. She needs coffee, food, and to wake up slowly.

If I treated her the way I want to be treated, or her me, it’d be bad for both of us.

So maybe we can broaden it to “Do unto others as they would have done unto them”? But then we run into the problem that some people’s desires are greedy, unethical, or bad for them. A heroin addict wants another hit, they don’t want to get clean. So in order to really make the golden rule work there, we either have to argue that it’s not about what people want, but what they really need, or that we all really want to be treated in our best interests and ignore the current ‘want’ in favor of the larger assumed ‘want’ of getting over heroin.