“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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