Golden rule
Do to others only what you would have done to yourself.
What it commits you to
The golden rule appears in nearly every tradition, in both its positive and negative forms, and always with the same limitation: it presupposes that other people are much like you. That is why it cannot ground a principle about beings with different interests, such as digital minds. Its strength is that it requires no theory of the good to state.
Which realms lean on this
Philosophy carries the arguments the other four kinds are downstream of — what an agent is, what a person owes, what a rule is for.
philosophy · 8 realms — The Care Weft, The Contractual Court, The Existential Wilds, The Kantian Citadel, The Longview Foundry, The Middle Kingdom, The Pragmatic Wharf, The Sangha Terraces.
Canon that discusses this
primary · 1789
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
Written largely between 1776 and 1780 and published in 1789, opening with a satirical catechism that asks whether any rule of utility could ever be used to justify anything at all. The phrase that outlived the book is the one in the title page: the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
primary · 1274
Summa Theologiae
A systematic theology in three parts, of which the second — law, justice, and the common good — is the part that enters every later argument about legitimate authority. Its claim that an unjust law is not a law at all makes legitimacy a property of the rule's structure rather than of the body that enacted it.
primary · 1863
Utilitarianism
Mill defends the intuitions Bentham's calculus was meant to replace: higher and lower pleasures, the justice principle that each person counts as one, and the liberty principle against the tyranny of the majority. Published the year after the Origin of Species, and much of the argument is a reply to the comparison.
See also
Shu
philosophyReciprocity: consider others from their perspective, as you would want to be considered.
Symmetry
philosophyThe assumption that no being's interests matter more than another's merely as a matter of fact.
Reciprocity
ethicsThe expectation that benefits received will be returned, which grounds obligation in relationship.
Care ethics
ethicsObligations arise inside relationships, are partial, and resist general principles.