The golden rule is a flawed heuristic (bad moral rule)

in #philosophy5 years ago

The golden rule is practically useless. If you use the golden rule to make me a sandwich then you'd make it the way you like it. It doesn't contribute to my happiness but merely to your own.

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I get your point but maybe it's more the making of the sandwich for someone rather than what kind. Like when you go to a friend's house and they say would you like a sandwich? First you say yes then they say what kind and then you tell them.

They offer you a sandwich because they would wish that you offer them a sandwich.

But good though provoking topic.

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Rarely that I had to read such a nonsense from you.
Obviously in times of low steem value every, even minimal content is right to get upvotes from your autovoters who anyway don´t read posts, right?
Back to the sandwich example. The golden rule says that you should treat others as you would wish to be treated. So to make them a tuna sandwich if you know they don´t eat tuna but just because you like tuna, is just stupid. From such a moronic example to conclude that the rule is flawed is, well, not logical.
Happy to get new insights about a flaw in this rule. But you need to come up with a better example.

Autovoters? I didn't receive much upvotes from this if you didn't look.

The Platinum Rule is more practical heuristic than the Golden Rule. Example:

  • "What kind of sandwich would you like?"

Represents the Platinum Rule. The difference is the Platinum Rule is a data driven decision making paradigm while the Golden Rule is not. The Platinum Rule takes preference data as input in the algorithm while the Golden Rule has no input. The Golden Rule is based on assumptions and guessing. The Golden Rule is about what you would want and how you would think and for this reason it cannot be considered utilitarian because it's not about creating happiness for anyone but yourself.

Back to the sandwich example. The golden rule says that you should treat others as you would wish to be treated. So to make them a tuna sandwich if you know they don´t eat tuna but just because you like tuna, is just stupid. From such a moronic example to conclude that the rule is flawed is, well, not logical.
Happy to get new insights about a flaw in this rule. But you need to come up with a better example.

How you would want to be treated isn't how everyone would want to be treated. Your favorite sandwich isn't everyone's favorite sandwich. What you think is completely irrelevant to satisfying the customer.

You provide the service to the person you create the sandwich for. You go with the Golden Rule and you are serving your own preferences. You go with the Platinum Rule and you are serving their preferences. The customer knows what the customer likes better than you know what they like. You know what you like but you don't know what they like. Please work out the logic.

Golden Rule
The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one's self would wish to be treated. It is a maxim that is found in many religions and cultures.The Golden Rule can be considered an ethic of reciprocity in some religions, although other religions treat it differently. The maxim may appear as either a positive or negative injunction governing conduct:

One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself (positive or directive form).
One should not treat others in ways that one would not like to be treated (negative or prohibitive form).

I was not aware about a platinum rule. I think this differenciation between golden and platinum is kind of artificial and far from daily life experience. Just that some people defined the platinum rule as a contrast to the golden rule, does not make the golden rule "bad", because in reality many people who think they use the golden rule, use - unintentionally - a half platinum as well, as they do take into consideration what the others want.
The definition of golden doesn´t forbid to reflect about what the others want, right?

I explained the differences between them in the next blogpost. The Platinum rule scales with technology while the Golden rule is ancient and wasn't designed for big data. The Platinum rule is a data driven algorithm which gains power as more data is input while the Golden rule is designed to be used when you have almost no data about a complete stranger.

1000 years ago people had far more privacy and far less knowledge about each other compared to today. Today with big data, with so many preferences known, with profiles on Google with all kinds of intimate private details which can be searched through, there now is the ability to begin applying all that data to morality.

So how do I know how to treat Sarah from New York? If I can run a bot which collects all her social media public preference data then an algorithm could tell me right away how she prefers to be treated, what her favorite movies are, favorite foods and so on and so forth. 1000 years ago there was no way to do this so people really had to guess about complete strangers what the complete stranger might prefer because the preference data wasn't collected or stored.

But language was there already, a simple question may have helped. And there were no movies, so no preferences there :) And no data privacy rules as well. I don´t think that in the past it was more complicated to get specifics. And with complete strangers people had anyway not to bother.
Quite in contrary. Today even with applying big data (which is not legal always as we know), you know the public profile, but not what a person real likes. E.g. in countries with no true freedom of speech like North Korea or even Germany, people can´t express their political opinion in open or in social media (if existing, for N.Korea I am not sure).

We have gotten so far away from producing real goods and services and judged not on our willingness to produce those, that we only have talk left... which is empty. We need to return to substance.

Any service is that which creates value in the mind of the customer, Bill Clinton would get paid millions to give lectures. The value is created by the happiness brought into the world from the consumption of the product or service.

For example Alice makes ice cream for Bob and Sue makes ice cream for Bob. Bob prefers Alice's ice cream even though they both have the exact same ingredients because he prefers how Alice prepared it. To Bob Alice's ice cream tasted better and for whatever subjective reason Bob gave a higher rating to Alice's ice cream. This means for Bob's reasons, the ice cream of Alice is more valuable to him and created more happiness in him than the ice cream of Sue.

All behaviors which humans adopt can be said to have potential to impact the emotional states of other human beings. Moral behavior could be defined as behavior which conforms to some community standards put forth by other human beings. If the golden rule is not data driven then the behaviors it reflects are not based on the desires, wants, needs, feedback, preferences, of other people. As a result how can we assume that following the golden rule will produce behaviors which will be perceived as more moral than the behaviors produced by following the platinum rule which can conform exactly to the preferences of the community, or the individuals judging the behavior?

If "good" or "moral" behavior is just a result of the positive emotional state it produces in the minds of those judging it (perception) then how exactly could the golden rule which doesn't take into account other emotional states even be considered a moral heuristic?

Do what you think you'd want done to you? So if you hate yourself then you can treat others as badly as you treat yourself? See how easily the golden rule unwinds?

A moral service or moral services are no different from any other kind of services in a market. People adopt behaviors perceived a moral because there are social rewards for adopting these behaviors and there are social costs for not adopting them. The value of moral behavior is as subjective as the value of two pieces of artwork at an auction. There is no objective value of it in my opinion and it's subjective left up to the perceiver to determine how much a moral behavior is worth (or immoral behavior costs).

So when you say "real goods" you mean tangible? Moral behaviors are real because people value it. People prefer to shop at businesses which they perceive to be moral. People dislike immoral behavior.

The idea that someone made you a sandwich may indeed be the epitome of that golden rule, provided it was made from the kindness of heart, the desire to help another and not to poison of coerce. So it all depends on the intention, quality and consideration of that sandwich. The reality is in the why.

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