A recent chat about the plausibility of the Golden Rule has given me pause to consider the dynamics of a Utopian society whose participants would govern themselves solely by that paradigm. It was proposed that such a society could not possibly exist, for there would be certain people who would not care whether others were nice to them and who would use that rationale to be indifferent, or worse, downright mean to others. I find fault with that proposition on multiple levels:

Chiefly, while there might be some in such a society whose values are so obscure as to lead them to mistreat other people, it is unreasonable to suppose that this would be the condition of a majority of people in that society. First, the closer the number of people with obscure values approach to a majority, the less of a problem it would actually be, as their values would no longer be obscure. Second, that proposition cannot include the many rotten people in present society who simply don’t want to observe the Golden Rule. These people are prone to self-justify by saying they wouldn’t care if someone treated them the way they treat others. The premise of the Golden Rule is not whether or not you care about how you’re treated, but how you want to be treated. These rotten people may very well justify their rotten actions in order to avoid having to actually observe the Golden Rule, but it’s self-evident folly to mistake their self-justification for the truth of their values. These people, given a choice, would choose to be treated the same way as most other people in present society would choose. And, in any event, the premise of the society is that the participants do observe the Golden Rule.

Additionally, the society that would operate in such a way would not have to completely eliminate all injustice in order to exist. It could exist simply through socialization. Societies have bred contempt among their participants, as well as camaraderie, patriotism, racism, and laissez faire pacifism. It’s unreasonable to think that a society could not, then, socially accept the Golden Rule as the primary principle of human interaction.

Were it to occur in a free market society, where competition thrives, there would be achieved a level of peacefulness, equity, and fairness that would almost certainly be unlike anything present society has yet experienced.