“Treat others as you would expect others to treat you.” This seemingly simple and benign imperative is, according to several world religions, the “Golden Rule”, the cornerstone one morality. But others claim it is in fact deeply misguided, unrealistic, and even undesirable as a guide to ethics. At HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, Peter Singer, one of the most celebrated contemporary ethicists, defended the value of this universal moral principle against strong critique from professor of law at Yale Law School Daniel Markovits, and renowned feminist, ethicist, and psychologist Carol Gilligan.

The question of how to build any moral system is inherently vexed. Friedrich Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil proclaimed that ‘systems of morals are only a sign-language of the emotions’. And ‘with a philosopher nothing is at all impersonal’.

The objection that the moral systems of philosophers derived from reason and reflection were subject to the very same biases they claimed to be free from, was profoundly devastating. Whether it be the Stoics, Immanuel Kant, Rene Descartes or any system of ethical law that claimed to be totalizing and universal, they would always at some level reflect the prejudices and worldview of those who constructed them.

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A century and a half later though, in the philosophy departments of many universities, some still believe themselves to be impervious to this critique. The great moral philosophers from Derek Parfitt to Henry Sidgwick, and now the influential Peter Singer, argue that they can maintain an objective system of moral principles, true for all times and places.

One of these principles being stubbornly defended is the Golden Rule. Found in almost every world religion, uniting everyone from the late Christopher Hitchens to evangelical Christians and 92% of the American population, ‘do unto others as they would unto you’ is one of the most profound and far-reaching moral laws to have entered humanity’s consciousness. As John Locke famously put, the Golden Rule is ‘the most unshaken law of morality’.

But recently the legitimacy of the Golden Rule has been put into question. First, it has been suggested that people with a sense of extremely low self-worth, of which there are surprisingly many, should not treat others as they would wish to be treated, as this would result in these individuals valuing others in the same, lowly way that they value themselves.

But far more importantly, in a study conducted by Kirsten Corrazini and others in care settings, they concluded that ‘it is unrealistic to assume that you could truly understand an individual's wishes, needs, interests or preferences’. Thus, the application of the Golden Rule is sometimes harmful as it results in individuals imposing their own preferences on others regardless of whether they would want that.

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The Golden Rule applied literally has the potential to lead to unintended harm.

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For instance, in health economics, it is very common to defer to Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALY), which multiplies years to live by ‘Quality of Life’ to determine who should be allocated medical resources in times of scarcity. A common complaint that is now being taken extremely seriously is that disabled individuals are often assigned a lower quality of life than they subjectively feel. This primarily is because those who assign non-abled bodied individuals with a lower quality of life often fail to understand their experience, and shoehorn their own conception of what such a condition would mean to them. Therefore, the Golden Rule applied literally has the potential to lead to unintended harm.