The Golden Rule, Part 1: <i>Primum non nocere</i>

Thanks to all of you who voted in the Golden Rule poll. As of this writing:

65 total votes

80% prefer the positive formulation

20% prefer the negative formulation

Those who preferred the positive formulation tended to cite its relative activity over the passivity of the negative formulation.

Okay, why the poll? Well, I, like 80% of you, have tended to favor the positive formulation. I've favored it because it is the Christian formulation and, like many of you, see its active nature as essential to Jesus' vision of aiding the stranger (e.g., the parable of the Good Samaritan).

But I've also been intrigued by the negative formulation. The negative formulation is more common in Eastern religions:

Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.
--Confucius, Analects 15:23

My personal favorite example of the negative formulation comes from the Buddhist tradition:

All beings tremble before violence. All fear death. All love life. See yourself in others. Then whom can you hurt?
--from the Dhammapada (my favorite Buddhist text)

An easy way to phrase the negative formulation is the famous ethical dictum: Primum non nocere.

Primum non nocere means "First, do no harm." In Eastern religions this idea is captured by the notion of ahimsa (non-harming). Mahatma Gandhi was the foremost modern prophet of ahimsa:

An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.

There are many causes I am prepared to die for, but no causes that I am prepared to kill for.

In my opinion, noncooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. But in the past, noncooperation has been deliberately expressed in violence to the evildoer. I am endeavoring to show to my countrymen that violent noncooperation only multiplies evil, and that as evil can only be sustained by violence, withdrawal of support of evil requires complete abstention from violence.

So, here are my questions for this Part 1 (of 2) in this series:

Has the Christian witness been hampered by not pounding away more forcefully about the negative formulation?

Is there a moral hazard to the skewed 80% of the poll? (And remember, I cast the first vote in the poll for the positive formulation.)

Should we instill more deeply into the bones of church-going folk the idea that our first obligation to others is to do no harm? For example, should children in church first be reared on "First, do no harm" before graduating to the practices of the positive formulation? Would this training be an improvement over our strict adherence to the positive formulation in Christian churches?