An oft-repeated principle of morality is: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." This may sound nice but I have come to dislike it. What if I can plainly see that the situation and the needs of others are very different from mine? Notions of dignity, respect, and fairness vary from person to person. Consider, for instance, this household maid we had in India. Indian society has huge class barriers between maids and employers. I may well think it polite and inclusive to ask the maid to join me and my family for lunch on the same table, but this in tantamount to making improper demands on her; it reveals my bumbling naivete and callousness. The situation here, as almost everywhere else, calls for a different response than "what I would have others do unto me."
A vast improvement on this moral precept would be: "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you, if you were in their shoes." This requires that we expend the time and effort to understand the situation of others and imagine being in their shoes. What might be their needs and expectations, seen from their vantage point? What might be just and reasonable to us, if we were in their shoes? A name we give to this exercise is empathy – a better basis for moral action than the lazy and faulty assumption that others want to be treated exactly as I myself want to be treated.
Perhaps most people already understand the original precept in this more nuanced way, though I doubt it. I thought of emphasizing the point, just for the record.
I've always seen it in the "modified" way you have proposed.
To do something "as you would have done to you" already implies that you are putting yourself in a hypothetical situation, or in the other person's shoes.
Posted by: Yohan | January 23, 2007 at 08:40 AM