Utilitarianism Wins Outright Part 36: The Golden Rule

And why it implies utilitarianism

Lots of people seem to like the golden rule, which is, to quote wikipedia, “the principle of treating others as one wants to be treated.” However, this rule is incredibly ambiguous — with many plain readings being plainly false. I would like if people went up to me and said “I read your blog Bentham’s bulldog — it’s awesome man!” yet the golden rule doesn’t seem to demand that I go up to random people and make that precise utterance.

Thus, it seems that the correct version of the golden rule would be able to govern counterfactuals. So, while I would like if people went up to me and said “I read your blog Bentham’s bulldog — it’s awesome man,” this is only true because I have a blog called Bentham’s bulldog, the blog is in fact awesome, and I am a man. Thus, we can improve the golden rule to the following

Updated golden rule: “the principle of treating others as one would rationally want to be treated if they had the properties of the other.”

The rational clause was added for obvious reasons — if you’d want to be treated a particular way because of foolishness and error, that shouldn’t govern how you treat others.

However, this entails

Other regarding welfarism: Treat others in ways that most maximize their welfare — where welfare is defined as that which makes them well off. After all, you would want to be treated, if you were them, in the ways that make their life go best.

If we accept other regarding welfarism and the updated golden rule, then you treat your welfare as equal to others — for you treat them as you’d want to be treated. This means you maximize overall welfare. However, this is the statement of utilitarianism.

The golden rule as a model of ethics is hard to deny — it’s sufficiently intuitive to have been parroted by great thinkers from many different civilizations; even the bible seems to endorse it! However, the golden rule seems to entail utilitarianism. This is another, very plausible way to derive utilitarianism.