The Grand Coherence, Chapter 11. The Golden Rule
This post is part of the book The Grand Coherence: A Modern Defense of Christianity. For all the links in the book, see this introductory post.
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We next turn to sexual ethics, as the other great stumbling block for a modern mind considering Christianity. But we'll have to come to it a long way round, for the whole basis of ethics has been thrown into confusion in a peculiar way since the Enlightenment, as the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre showed in his 1981 classic After Virtue. Modern readers have so little in common when it comes to reasoning about ethics that we need to start at the beginning. We need to start with "meta-ethics," the study of what moral rules are, before we can apply the principles to the ethical rules surrounding sex.
The Enlightenment philosopher David Hume encapsulated the modern challenge of ethics when he argued that you can't derive an "ought" from an "is," that is, a statement of ethics from a statement of fact. That's counterintuitive because we derive "ought" from "is" every day. I borrowed ten dollars from him, so there is a debt that I owe, and I ought to pay it back. She is feeling depressed, so I ought to cheer her up. But there's always a tacit claim of moral principle helping us get from "is" to "ought." I should repay the $10 because I borrowed it (a fact) and people ought to pay their debts (a moral principle). I should cheer her up because she's feeling depressed (a fact) and people should help those in need (a moral principle). Normally, we don't state the moral principles because we assume them. But for a philosopher, the moral principles themselves need justification. And if we want to settle a disputed point, such as whether chastity is morally meritorious or morally irrelevant, then we need to uncover and critique the moral principles that underlie the various opinions, and see which of them stands up to scrutiny.
Already in chapter 9, we argued from the reality of moral principles to the falsity of scientific materialism. Moral principles are real, but they are clearly not reducible to matter and energy, therefore the scientific materialist picture of the universe cannot be complete. And inasmuch as it claims to be complete, it cannot be true. Some philosophers have reversed this reasoning, arguing that because scientific materialism is true, and a scientific materialist universe has no room for moral principles, therefore, moral principles are not real. (Fortunately, I don't think they practice what they preach.) But it's not clear why we should reject something so urgently and pervasively experiential as our feelings about right and wrong, in favor of something so tenuous, and in some ways so remote, as the scientific materialist picture of the universe. Still, ethics does need a place to begin. We should be able to rationalize ethics more than just to say we feel strongly that some things are right and some are wrong.
And so I'll offer two entry points into a more robust and rational ethics.
First, I, and no doubt all of us, have strong, ineradicable feelings about how I ought to be treated by others. I feel indignant, not merely disliking but morally condemning the turn of events, if I am gratuitously assaulted, or if I am cheated or lied to. I have reason to think that others are like me, members of a human category, differing in some ways but the same in essentials, making us capable of mutual sympathy. I can notice all sorts of similarities between myself and them in their expressed thoughts and feelings, in the kinds of impressions they experience and the powers of reasoning they exhibit. It's reasonable to extrapolate a more comprehensive similarity, including a faculty of moral indignation, and strong intuitions on their part that they ought to be treated in certain ways. And I should therefore grant the same authority to those feelings in others as I must regard my own as having. The word "conscience" comes from "with" (con) and "knowledge" (science): think of it as knowing that one is among others like oneself, and therefore constrained to respect their rights and accommodate their desires. You may see that this points to the Golden Rule, but one may not have the insight or willingness to go as far as that, and yet still learn and accept much from it. Conscience, the recognition of other people and their rights and desires and needs, is one point of entry into the realm of ethics.
The second entry point is that with respect to all sorts of things, we have intuitions about what makes them good or bad. We like a beautiful, blooming flower better than a wilted or crushed one. We like a red, round, sweet apple better than a knobbly, bitter one with bruises and worm holes. In the same way, we like a brave soldier better than a cowardly one, and an honest, hard-working businessman better than a lazy cheat. These feelings about what is good do not mean merely what is useful to us. In an important sense, we like, or recognize the excellence of, a healthy, strong tiger better than a sick, weak one, even though the healthy tiger is more dangerous. And we may admire the courage of an enemy soldier, though it's likely to defeat or kill us, and the hard work and honesty of a business competitor, though it's likely to drive us out of business. This feeling might be called aesthetic, if you like, and beauty often serves as a kind of first shock of recognition of goodness and excellence. But moderns are prone to seeing beauty as merely subjective, less serious than reason, so it must be stressed that our whole faculty of pattern recognition, without which science couldn't begin, is indelibly indebted to our capacity to categorize things according to the ideas they instantiate, and most categories are defined by their excellence, and can't be understood in their basics without being understood, at least to some extent, at their best. And as there is a peculiar excellence to be sought in flowers and apples, bears and tigers, soldiers and businessmen, and there is also peculiar excellence to be found in human beings as such. Ethics consists in the realization of that idea.
Now, I am very confident that all cultures share these two starting points for ethics, feeling constrained by the rights and desires of others and perceiving and admiring and aspiring to human excellence. That confidence is partly empirical. I've had some exposure to the deeds and writings and customs of many different nations and cultures and civilizations and races and peoples, and I've always perceived these ethical basics to be present. And others who have had more exposure than me, and whose judgment I trust, say the same. And yet it would be a misunderstanding to call this moral universalism a mere extrapolation from the data. I know by introspection that conscience and admiration of human excellence are propensities inherent and essential in human nature. I can't acknowledge the humanity of other nations and cultures and civilizations and races and peoples without assuming that those propensities are in them as they are in me. And it is only by making the assumption of common humanity, and giving epistemic authority to my own introspection and sympathy, that I'm able to learn about other cultures from the usually patchy and cryptic clues that history and archeology provide.
But while some moral similarity inheres in our common human nature, there is room for tremendous difference as well. My impression is that beyond the reach of Christianity, conscience is generally heeded, at least up to a point, with respect to some but not all other people. People act with at least some justice and mercy to members of their family or tribe or club, but much less or not at all towards barbarians, outsiders, strangers or enemies. And the notion of human excellence that people imaginatively embrace, admire in others and aspire to for themselves, mingles properly moral admiration with the mere appeasement of instincts. The Iliad of Homer captures pre-Christian and pre-philosophical human nature very well, and its characters have great virtues, especially courage and eloquence, but they have very underdeveloped consciences, a point perhaps best illustrated by the way they take military rape for granted and have no qualms about it at all. Instincts urge it too strongly to be overridden. The primitive imagination couldn't imagine a human ideal without including such natural aspects of high prosperity as military rape. Fortunately, Christianity has enhanced and perfected conscience, and morally purified our perceptions of human excellence, so that it is now easy for us to condemn military rape and exclude it rigorously from our perceptions of human excellence. All Westerners are the heirs of that, with a figure like Nietzsche, who tried desperately to unlearn the moral influence of Christianity and was driven mad by the effort, serving as a kind of exception that proves the rule. Since I am more concerned to persuade post-Christians than pre-Christians, I can use the Golden Rule as a starting place, and expect to be well understood, and to benefit from a lot of initial sympathy.
Most people know the Golden Rule. "Therefore," Jesus taught, "all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets" (Matthew 7:12). Or again:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments. That's a very large claim. We should bear in mind both the "love" and the "do" forms, for they reinforce and elucidate each other. The Golden Rule is a mandate for active love. I doubt that many will deny the Golden Rule, at least not until I show them how difficult it is, and thereby give them a reason to look for an exit. The immediate danger, rather, is that because the Golden Rule lends itself to such casual, everyday use, we might underestimate it. But the central place which Jesus gives to the Golden Rule—on it hangs all the law and the prophets—should help us to avoid the trap of treating it as a trivial truism. We should not be surprised that a rule so exalted by Jesus Himself turns out to lead us up into a kind of philosophical perplexity that calls on all our faculties to meet it.
To see what I mean, notice first that the Golden Rule really means, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were in their place." That raises two immediate difficulties. First, how can you know what it would be like to be in their place? And second, if you were in their place, in what sense would you still be you? In other words: what characteristics of yourself should you import into the alternative "you" whose desires you are supposed to imagine, in order to do unto them as you, in their place, would wish? If you were in their place, how would you be different, but also, how would you be the same?
Whether and how we can know that other minds even exist, let alone anything about their experiences, is a hard philosophical problem. Solipsism, the position that denies the existence of minds other than one’s own, is as hard to refute as skepticism, yet as with skepticism, no one believes it. But never mind. We just have to insist, unsatisfying as it feels to do so, that we do know that there are other minds, and something about their experiences, through the faculty of sympathy. Yet it’s difficult to bridge the imaginative gulf between selves, to put oneself in someone else’s place, and discern how to do unto them as you would have them do unto you if you were in their place, especially if the person is very different from you. It's possible to challenge the Golden Rule as impractical, on the grounds that we can't imagine what we would want in the place of others. And when we fail to practice the Golden Rule, that's often because of lack of imagination. Fundamentally, our epistemic right to generalize from our own experience in order to imaginatively enter into the situations of others so as to apply the Golden Rule depends on a belief in some robust human nature that we all share.
I’ve heard it suggested that there’s a “Platinum Rule” which is better than the Golden Rule, namely, do unto others as they would have you do unto them. That simplifies things somewhat. It avoids the problem of importing some hard-to-define part of yourself into their situation. It mitigates the need to define a robust human nature that we all share. Yet Jesus didn’t say that, and I think we can glimpse why if we consider the case of a parent making a child study, when the child would rather play. By the Platinum Rule, the parent would let the child play, since that’s what the child wants. But by the Golden Rule, the parent who hypothetically enters the child’s situation is still somehow himself, and in imagining himself into the child’s place so as to do to the child as he would be done by, he can yet still be himself, with the benefit of the mature perspective that understands the value of knowledge and foresees that studying will contribute more than playing to the child’s long-term happiness. In this way, living by the Golden Rule leads to a richer, fuller kind of love.
Of all ethical notions, the Golden Rule best lends itself, I think, to something close to rational proof. If (a) I am a self, (b) I recognize there are other selves like me, and (c) I make moral claims against others, it seems to follow that they can make moral claims against me, whose validity I am bound to acknowledge. No doubt that argument would require some logical tightening, but it’s fairly lucid and capable of great generality.
Again, the Golden Rule is easy to underestimate. It has so many simple, commonsensical applications, that we might be tricked into thinking that that's its only job. Two examples, property rights and occupational choice, can help us start to glimpse the true reach and radicalism of the Golden Rule.
Most people respect other people’s property rights. Don’t steal from me, and I won’t steal from you. I can live by that principle and feel quite innocent as a man who is poor through no fault of mine starves on my doorstep. That’s troubling. What does the Golden Rule say about it? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If I were poor, needy, desperate, surely I would want people to help me out. How much? Well, if I love my neighbor as myself, it’s not clear why I should want myself to be at all better off than he is.
This logic suggests that living by the Golden Rule would lead to spontaneous redistribution of all economic resources, and in fact, many Christian saints have given away all their property to the poor. But the Church has never insisted on that as a general duty of rich Christians, and I think I see why, for it’s actually possible to be rich while living by the Golden Rule. You might justifiably believe you’re good at managing property, so your best way to serve others is to retain control and share the profits, rather than to dissipate your capital. You might not even give to charity. You might share the profits through job creation and innovation and quality products for low prices. A casual observer might not know that you have a service motive rather than a profit motive. But your attitude towards your property would be one of stewardship. And if you became convinced that you weren’t the best manager of so much property, you’d give it away.
Again, consider the question that adults often ask children to make conversation: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” The premise of the question seems to be that life is a menu, all occupations are on the menu, and the child will choose according to preference. But one who lives by the Golden Rule would not choose an occupation that way. Career satisfaction is good for you, but there are many others in the world, and if you love them as yourself, the service that you might do to them is far more important than your own career satisfaction. So occupational choice shouldn’t be guided by what you want but by how you can serve. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” might still be an innocent question if it means, “Surely you want to serve others, so how do you deem that you can be of most service to your fellow human beings, and best practice active love towards them? How do you plan to do unto others, through your occupational choice, as you would have them do unto you if you were in their place?” And I think most young people do have at least some aspiration to be useful and of service to others mixed in with their plans for their futures. But the general attitude of American culture at least to occupational choice is that you can be whatever you want to be, and that's at odds with the Golden Rule, which if taken seriously in this aspect of life, would lean into self-sacrifice and minimize selfish personal fulfillment.
By this time, I hope I have begun to open many readers' eyes to the difficulty of the Golden Rule so much that they doubt they could possibly live by it. The Golden Rule might be a helpful nudge towards achieving such politeness and consideration for others as really serves one's own enlightened self-interest, but if it is really allowed to invade and conquer our whole lives, the conclusions to which it drives us seem intolerable. We just want to be more selfish than that. And who would have enough willpower to suppress our natural selfishness as much as the Golden Rule demands?
To get us out of this impasse, let me approach ethics from another angle, namely, the tradition of the virtues.
Alisdair MacIntyre, in his book After Virtue, has elucidated how modern man became peculiarly confused about ethics because of an abortive attempt, starting in the Enlightenment, to reject tradition in favor of reason. As a result, various theoretical schemas were proposed by moral philosophers, who tried to use them as a foundation for ethics, usually to justify the old rules, for the philosophers were rather conservative in their view of the good society they wanted to uphold, even as they were dangerously innovative as thinkers. But there was never consensus about these new moral philosophies, and MacIntyre shows how none of them are really successful as arguments. So the West fell into a great confusion. Ethics has always been debatable, but this rationalistic subversion of the grounds of ethics is distinctively modern.
As a way to cut through modern confusions and build ethics on a firmer foundation, MacIntyre looks past the Enlightenment to a lost tradition of the virtues that he traces back as far as Homer and other heroic poets, and in which he identifies Aristotle as the most eminent champion. The tragedy of modern ethics began when Enlightenment rationalism, in its zeal to ground everything on reason, jettisoned the Aristotelian idea of telos, of purposes and ends that inhere in all sorts of things and define their good. The reality to which the Enlightenment made itself willfully blind is that humans have a telos, a peculiar natural flourishing. Ethics should start with an understanding of human telos and an ordering of things towards its fulfillment. But when the Enlightenment first doubted and then forgot about telos, and cultivated an environment of discourse inhospitable to the recovery or rediscovery of it, it deprived ethics of its proper starting point, so that it became unmoored and went adrift, leaving people unable to account for their moral attitudes. Modern moral philosophy attempted to shore up morality by providing a new basis for it, but it failed, and left moral discourse shrill and confused, borrowing what limited consensus it can find from traditions which it lacks the intellectual resources to understand or robustly believe in.
Yet I don't want to endorse MacIntyre too much, because he's a little too subversive, and blinds himself to, or ignores or downplays, some important ethical realities, such as rights, rules, and conscience, in his zeal to outflank modernity. In particular, he wrongly dismisses the concept of natural rights as an erroneous modern innovation. Actually, natural rights are real, as Western man began to see clearly in the Middle Ages, with the roots of the concept going much deeper than that, and everyone’s conscience bears witness to their reality. After Virtue is a masterpiece, yet it is a serious shortcoming of the book that if a reader thought that MacIntyre endorses Aristotle, and Aristotle endorsed slavery, so MacIntyre's philosophy must endorse slavery, nothing in the book would particularly refute this conclusion. Natural rights are the reason why slavery is wrong, and the reason why it was abolished, and in general, moral progress for centuries has consisted largely in increasing recognition of and respect for natural rights. So it's necessary to mingle MacIntyre's wisdom with modern moral progress and the ideas that have underpinned it.
I've thought about how to do that for years, and here's what I've come up with.
Think of ethics as a five-storey mountain, starting with rules and ascending to values, then plans, then virtues, and finally stories.
The first storey consists of rules. Brush your teeth. Say your prayers. Don't steal. Turn off the TV if you're not watching it. Drive on the right side of the road, or the left if you're in Britain. Park within 18 inches of the curb. Say please and thank you. Don't touch other people's cars on the street. Don't steal what's not yours. Help people when they're in desperate need. Share dessert with all present. Don't tell lies. Don't kill anyone, except maybe in self-defense or war. Pay your taxes. Vote. Love your neighbor as yourself. Get a job and do what your boss says. Respect people’s natural rights. And so forth. Sometimes the rules are easy to follow. Sometimes they're very difficult, either because they're hard to remember, or hard to understand and apply, or because they go against very strong desires. A large part of moral development consists in simply learning the rules, remembering the rules, applying the rules, obeying the rules, until it becomes habitual, automatic, second nature.
But on any rule, it can be asked: why? Why should you brush your teeth? Why shouldn't you tell lies? The question might come from mere curiosity, or from serious doubt. It might also be provoked by cases where the rules seem to come into conflict with each other. You are conscripted into an unjust war, and your country's laws require you to kill for no good reason. Your boss orders you to tell a lie. Someone is in desperate need, and the only way you can help them is by stealing. Then again, sometimes you're just not sure how to generalize a rule. Questions like these lead us up to the second storey of the mountain, the level of values. Rules are typically justified and explained by values. Say please and thank you, a rule, for the sake of kindness, a value. Share the dessert, a rule, to give pleasure, a value, and maybe also for the sake of fairness, another value. Drive on the right side of the road, a rule, for the sake of safety, a value.
Of course, about values, as about rules, the question "why?" can be asked. But values tend to be more obvious and self-explanatory than rules. Also, values extend the range of ethics. There are situations in which no definite moral rules are at stake, yet moral values can guide your decisions, as when you’re deciding whether to start a conversation with a stranger, or apply for a new job, or take a walk. No rules compel or forbid you to act, but values like sociability, pursuit of knowledge, health, money, or service of others can affect your decisions. Meanwhile, some values, if challenged, turn out to be justified by other values. Safety, for example, is a value, but if challenged, it can be justified as avoidance of pain or damage, another value.
Values are still diverse, and may conflict with each other. If we want to do the right thing all the time, we need a way to settle what that is when rules and/or values conflict. We need some scheme to organize, govern, and harmonize all these values and rules to prevent ethics trapping us into contradictory obligations. That brings us to the third storey of the mountain, the level of plans. Plans can be for individuals or for society. But because the conflicting values are often people—the welfare of A vs. the welfare of B—the social tends to take precedence over the individual at this stage. In modern times, utilitarianism is the most persistent and influential template for societal plans of this kind, but it is perennially unsatisfactory. It substitutes true feelings with hollow jargon, and begs many questions, or kicks them back to the questioner. It reduces ethics to an interminable and impossible calculus. And sometimes it seems to open the door to moral justifications for actions that conscience revolts against as horrific crimes, like those of Bolsheviks murdering millions to achieve utopia for the benefit of posterity. Other plans for societies include a characteristically Anglospheric liberalism that pursues economics and utility within a framework of rights-respecting constitutionalism, and biblical Israel as described in the Mosaic law.
Plans can seem like the climax of ethics, bringing everything together, and settling all questions. But they turn out to be a false summit. Have you ever climbed a mountain? If so, you may have encountered a moment, when, toiling up the trail, you look ahead and see some ridge that seems like the top, as high as you can go, with nothing beyond it except the sky. And you muster your strength for one last, exhausting push, looking forward to the spectacular vistas down the other side. But when you get there, you find only a plateau, followed by another rise. So here. For those suffering chaos and violence, a peaceful, well-ordered state of society can seem like perfection. But as people approach that, we find both that it’s always a bit out of reach, and that it doesn’t satisfy the human spirit. You never quite get to utopia, though in theory it seems feasible, and meanwhile, people get bored with it even before it’s achieved. People can get much of what they said they wanted, much satisfaction of their simpler desires, but something is missing. And at the same time, plans keep breaking down and going awry, not because they didn't make sense, but because people spoil them.
Two discoveries arise from this experience.
First, any happy plan of society depends on certain qualities in the people who comprise it for it to work. People need, for example, to have good habits in order to reliably treat one another fairly (justice), to keep working in the face of fear or discomfort (courage), to control their impulses and manage their desires (temperance), to plan and reason out their courses of action (prudence), at least much of the time (though some spontaneity is good, too), to be at least somewhat consistent over time (faith), to believe in and work towards unrealized possibilities (hope), and to have things they enjoy and admire and dedicate themselves to (love). And no master plan of society can inculcate these special individual qualities, which are called the virtues.
But second, virtue is not only a means, it is also an end. Ultimately, people cannot flourish just because of what they have. It has to come from what they are. Courage, justice, temperance and moderation and self-control, prudence and wisdom and insight, love for people and things and ultimately God, faith to hold us steady on life's road and make us consistent people with integrity, and hope to make us aspire and work, and to give our work meaning, don't just make us useful to others, but are the key to true happiness.
The social engineer needs the virtues but doesn't understand them. He has no idea how to produce them. Nor can he offer us anything as valuable and enjoyable as the virtues through any skillful and successful arrangement of society.
We have now come into MacIntyre's stronghold, and I think he is right to focus on it. The virtues are the highest level of ethics about which much generalization is possible. Studying them is crucial to understanding ethical goodness and human telos. Virtue is good habituation. The more we practice it, the easier it becomes. Virtue lasts. When rules are repealed and plans of society pass away, the courage, justice, prudence, self-control, faith, hope and love that were formed through obeying the rules and working for the plans live on. Virtue is thus a bridge from what is transient to what is eternal. Virtues are more important and general than most of the plans and rules that we live by, and more valuable than the other values we live for, like money or pleasure. And yet even virtue turns out to be a false summit, for in our efforts to define and to achieve the virtues, we glimpse an even higher summit, the fifth storey of the mountain, to which we are led on.
For it is in stories that the virtues shine. Virtues depend on stories. It’s hard to say what it would mean for a man to be brave or just if he had never been a character in any stories. The ultimate end is to have the story of a life well lived, to be the story of a life well lived, or at any rate, to carry it like a name, and virtue is a mere necessary condition for living life well. Even pagan heroes, who thought men were doomed to become gibbering shades in Hades, knew this, and the great Achilles chose a miserable death in battle by the walls of Troy for the sake of eternal fame, against the alternative of a happy, obscure life back home. But Christians know better, for we have been promised that God will tell us "Well done, thou good and faithful servant," and lead us into paradise, and our stories become threads in the tapestry of the divine happiness forever, and God shall still be delighting in our salvation stories long after the scenes in which they took place, the houses and the cities and the galaxies, are no more.
The metaphor of a mountain fails here, for a mountain has a single summit, but ethics has many summits, and lives well lived are glorious in nothing more than their diversity, for every life well lived is like no other. If it were somehow subtracted from the world, the loss would be irreplaceable. Yet as all material objects are made up of the elements in the periodic table, all lives well lived cohere and shine by prudence or reason, temperance or self-control, courage, justice, faith, hope and love.
And also– and here we come round to where we began– all lives well lived are full of the practice of the Golden Rule. A life well lived is a prize that one cannot work for directly, because lives well lived are so different. And you are not the author of your life story. Life is not a menu in a restaurant, where you choose what life you want to order. We act amidst a vast array of circumstances and events that both supply and constrain our opportunities. There is no equality of opportunity. Everyone's opportunities are different. You cannot know in advance your life story, and the glory, if all goes well, that will be revealed in you. What you can work for is the Golden Rule, serving the good of others at every opportunity. The virtues, though valuable in themselves, are not quite ends in themselves, but all-purpose means to all manner of good ends. The Golden Rule gives them their work. It’s easy to problematize the Golden Rule with simplified, abstract examples. If you have just one $10 bill and there are two beggars who want it, maybe you can’t do unto both beggar A and beggar B as you would have them do unto you in their place. But we’ve already gotten past thinking that ethics can be reduced to applying rules derived from plans, and life may not present us with such simplified, abstract examples as that. The Golden Rule is an ethical creed fit for a life of adventure, with something to say in all sorts of morally critical situations where we can’t afford to wait for the results of a utilitarian calculus.
Better yet, one of the secrets of virtue is that practicing it makes it not only easier but also more enjoyable to practice it. It may seem too difficult for you to practice the Golden Rule now, but if you try hard, you will begin to acquire the virtues, and they will aid you. The Golden Rule, if attended to properly, sets before you a limitless number of tasks in which you can practice the virtues. And the pursuit of virtue is the highest self-interest, for it makes oneself interesting. The Golden Rule’s quixotic standard fills the world with an agenda of adventures, the pursuit of which can turn your life into a story that will be worth telling in the end.
But your desire to limit your moral liabilities, and your willingness to limit your moral claims on others in return, is a function of privilege. If you were in the desperate position many others find themselves in, you wouldn't be able to sustain this stance of trying not to make claims on others. You'd want others to help you. And so if you, in trouble, would wish for help, you'd better stand ready to help others too.
One way to bring home to us our need to take the Golden Rule seriously and accept its authority even when its prescriptions seem very radical is to remember that the ordinary commonsense morality of any given time, which is the sort of thing that people would want to fall back on as an alternative to the Golden Rule, historically always seems to have had in it an element of what later times, which became more enlightened in some respect or other, recognize in retrospect as appalling evil. Looking back over history, there are so many people who kept slaves, or fought in and glorified unjust wars of conquest, or flattered tyrants, and yet were ordinary decent people by the standards of the times. Karl Marx attacked the English bourgeoisie of the mid-19th century, who had been on the right side of most recent wars, and who to their great credit no longer kept slaves or allowed slavery anywhere in their empire, for neglecting and exploiting the miserable English poor. He had a point, even if he didn’t have a solution. Those exploiting bourgeoisie thought they were ordinary decent people. So, doubtless, did the Athenians who killed Socrates, and the Pharisees and Roman soldiers who killed Jesus, and the Germans in the early 1930s who voted for Hitler as the only way, many thought, to save their country from bloody communist revolution, and the Southerners who upheld segregation to protect white society as they knew it from infiltration by a black element they found sinister and threatening. Doubtless our descendants, too, will look back on us and be horrified by some of our moral blind spots.
And yet there were always some dissenters, some who did not practice slavery, or vote to kill Socrates, or support Nazism or segregation, or fight in or cheer for the unjust wars. Some people held aloof from, or struggled against, the evil practices of their times. That’s who to aspire to be. And in every case, one could have discovered the righteous path, as against the assumptions of the majority, by striving to practice the Golden Rule. Resolve to do unto the slave, the poor, the foreign “enemy,” the Jew, and all your fellow human beings, as you would do unto them, and you will be able to discern, when the time comes, where the moral peril lies, and keep your hands free from slavery, bloodshed, exploitation and pitiless indifference, scorn and hate. That’s how to rise above an evil world and find the moral path.
Second, on the other hand, the maintenance of such civilization as we possess sometimes demands, and may demand at any moment, deeds of extraordinary virtue for which the everyday practice of basic morality doesn't prepare us, yet which it turns out that society always expected of us, and had to expect of us, in certain desperate contingencies. Courage is an obvious example. If your country were invaded, would you fight for it, even if it meant dying? If everyone’s answer were "no," the first invader would conquer it, though you might last a long time on an undeserved reputation for being willing to fight. Likewise, if you could avoid taxes by paying a bribe, would you? What if you were in desperate financial straits? Or suppose a tyrant were to usurp control of your country. Would you stand up and defy him in the name of justice, truth and freedom—or submit meekly and say whatever flattering words kept you safe? What if you were working in finance during a bubble? Would you try to blow the whistle on it? Or would you keep selling inflated assets to suckers, making a quick, easy buck while fueling the frenzy that’s destined to crash and bring economic devastation? If you were a young academic on the make, would you publish a paper that you knew was shallow and misleading, but was likely to get cited enough to win you tenure? What if you were a judge who sees that the correct application of the law in a particular case will be unpopular or offend a powerful politician? The integrity of all our institutions depends on people doing the right thing in all these cases of unusual temptation.
What good there is in the heritage of civilization depends on people who did the right thing in cases like these in the past, and thereby established norms and institutions that sustain a better civilization than we had before, and a better civilization than we may have in future. Are you worthy of that civilization? When the situations arise in which society expects us and depends on us to do deeds of extraordinary virtue, it regards those who fail as contemptible cowards, traitors or crooks. Here again, the Golden Rule stands ready, if we heed it, to keep us honest and brave, refusing to surrender when our beloved fellow citizens are counting us to fight, refusing to take bribes when our fellow citizens are counting on us to uphold the law, refusing to profit off financial Ponzi schemes that we know will ruin the people we’re selling to and end in a calamitous crash, refusing to flatter tyrants when their victims need someone to rise to their defense. If we’ve set our sights on ordinary morality only, and chosen to say no to the higher vocation of the Golden Rule, then we’ll probably fail when society needs us to do something extraordinary.
So let’s refuse to listen to the siren song of compromise, of keeping our moral ambitions limited and comfortable, and resolve to rise to the challenge of the Golden Rule.
Now, it has been part of my purpose in this chapter to argue for an audience broader than Christians or theists. The Golden Rule evidently has much appeal for agnostics and atheists, so it didn't seem right to make my argument dependent on any claims that they reject. And yet it is a distortion of things to study the Golden Rule, which is the second great commandment, independently of the first great commandment to love God with all our heart, might, mind and strength. The commandments are connected because the best and most general reason why we should love other human beings is that they were made and are loved by God. In loving them, we also love God. I don't doubt that many atheists love their neighbors, and perhaps even their enemies, but I do doubt whether they ultimately have a reason to do so. The Christians love of God is a source of strength for loving fallen men and women.
And so, to foreshadow where the argument is going, the one Man who did perfectly live by the Golden Rule was also the Man whose whole life was most perfectly pervaded by love of and diligent obedience to God– namely, Jesus. I will argue in chapter 15 that Jesus was the only morally perfect person who ever lived, with the possible exception of His mother. That is, of course, a bit more than can be actually proved from the historical record, but a strong case can be made, and the astonishingly pervasive and deep moral shortcomings of all of mankind, apart from Jesus, make Jesus stand out as the more unique, remarkable, strange and significant. If you found this chapter especially interesting, and are especially eager to learn more, it might not be a bad idea to skip ahead to straight to chapter 15, and having studied the Golden Rule and the virtues, while that's fresh in your memory, hurry to find out what their perfect fruit looks like. If you do, don't fail then to go back and read chapter 14, which is almost the keystone of the whole book and should certainly not be skipped. But you needn't come back and read chapters 12 and 13 unless you want a deep dive into sexual ethics. I've given that topic more space than its relative inherent importance deserves, because it is a topic with which the contemporary West is especially obsessed, and about which it is most spectacularly wrong.