The Golden Rule, Part 2: The Glitch

The thing that got me thinking about the positive and negative formulations of the Golden Rule was a passage from Kwame Anthony Appiah's excellent book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Here's the passage:

...But even though some version or other of the rule has broad scriptural sanction, the Golden Rule is not as helpful as it might at first seem.

To see why, notice first that when you do something to someone, what you do can be truly described in infinitely many ways. When it's described in some of those ways, the person you did it to may be glad you did it; when it's described in other ways, he may not. Suppose you are a doctor considering saving the life of a Jehovah's Witness by giving her a blood transfusion. What you want to do is: save her life. That, of course, is exactly what you would want done unto you, if your medical situation was the same as hers. It is also, we may suppose, what she wants done unto her. But you also want to do this: give her a blood transfusion. That, too, is what you would want done to you. Unfortunately, it is not what your patient wants. Most Witnesses, you see, interpret Leviticus 3:17--which says, "An everlasting statue for your generations in all your dwelling places, no fat and no blood shall you eat"--as prohibiting blood transfusions. Since obeying the Lord's commands is more important to her than this earthly life, under this description she's vehemently opposed to what you want to do. She'd literally rather be dead. The first problem with the Golden Rule, in any of its versions, in practice, is that to apply it I have to know not just why I am doing what I am doing unto others--the descriptions of the act that matters to me--but also how the act will strike others.

So what should you do?

This passage gave me pause. It struck me that inside the positive formulation of the Golden Rule there is this odd little quirk that can quickly lead us astray. Specifically, once I identify what I would like done to me I can too quickly assume that you'd like the same done to you.

Don't you think Christians have made this mistake time and time again?

For example, try this:

If God considered me to be an abomination I'd want someone to tell me about it. Thus, I'm loving these people by informing them that God hates them.

If I was going to hell I sure wish someone would tell me that I was going to burn in hell for all eternity. Telling people they are going to hell is loving them.

If I was a pagan and going to hell I would wish for some Christian nation to invade my country so I could have access to the gospel.

I'm really not trying to be political in these examples (as you might tell from my blog I detest politics and rarely speak about it). I'm just pointing out that the positive formulation of the Golden Rule (the one 80% of us preferred) is kind of, well, glitchy, morally speaking.

Which again makes we warm to the negative formulation. True, it is very passive. But it seems less glitchy to me, less susceptible to abuse.