(June 19, 2024 at 10:22 am)h311inac311 Wrote: I like this topic because I believe that moral standards can actually be fairly simple to apply.
"Treat others as you would want to be treated." If you can feel pain then you can understand why inflicting pain on someone else without a cause is bad. Because if you punch someone for a reason which doesn't make good sense then what is preventing someone else from punching you?
What about emotional pain? Should you feel comfortable bullying someone but then be upset when it happens to you?
Lying is another easy example to justify, if you lie too much then no one will trust you.
So if we don't want to watch our society descend into a chaos where people inflict pain on each other, steal from each other and lie one to another then we have every reason to live as though these virtues of fairness matter.
It also gives us a good reason to establish a Justice system which punishes behavior that is far outside the accepted norm.
The Golden Rule really is golden. Not to be forgotten. And it's often pointed out these days that most societies seem to have evolved their own version of it.
The problem, I think, is how quickly people get away from the Golden Rule. How easy it is to justify switching it off.
The main example I know of is the belief that how you treat me will determine how I treat you. It's very common to hear someone say that if you treat me with less than the respect I deserve (in my own opinion) then I am justified in treating you just as badly. (I have cleaned up the language here. What people really say is "If you give me shit I'll give it right back to you asshole.") This ethical belief seems to be very widely accepted, at least in America. Many people find it unquestionably justified.
The desire seems to be that I should WIN every interaction that I enter in to. And that if the other person treats me badly, then I have lost -- lost face, or lost my self-image as a person who wins. Every movie teaches us that the hero is the one who ends the conversation with a snappy one-liner, thereby putting the enemy in his place.
No doubt many religious people hold this belief as well. Although I would think that, ideally, if God is judging you then it doesn't mean you have maintain your superiority in the eyes of the people who are treating you badly. God will know you've been a good person, even if the people who want to belittle you feel that they've made you small. There are lots of Christian stories like this.
Anyway, I think this kind of justification is so widespread that it forms an unspoken moral rule over-riding the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule really isn't the main way we judge any more. It switches off immediately if someone is rude to you, or stubbornly refuses to agree with you -- then you are allowed to treat them badly. Or if your social habits fall outside of the accepted social habits of the local group, then the self-appointed conformity enforcers have free rein to whip the non-conformist into shape.
So "if you're an asshole to me I'll be an asshole to you," is an extremely common moral code. The trouble is that at the end of the day, it means that both people are assholes.
If you refuse to be an asshole when someone treats you like an asshole you may feel that you've lost. But I think real morality doesn't switch off due to other people's behavior. Even if they show they are jerks, even if they are declaring victory and laughing as you walk out the door, it doesn't give me the right to be an asshole.
