Golden Rule and sociopathy

 

You said:

That the Golden Rule and things like that came from men is okay with me. It is less than perfect, but good enough for a guide 99 percent of the time. It also has a practicality to it, in that doing good things for people tends to lead to their doing good things for us. I don't think these things are anything more than common sense human ideas. If they were otherwise we would have to follow them much more closely than anyone does in reality. Consider, if we must do to others what we would like them to do to us, we would give away our merchandise if we were a merchant, lend to anyone without interest if we were a bank, never send anyone to prison or even arrest them if we were a policeman, and even give our services freely if we were a prostitute.

ChatGPT said:

You are pointing at something that many philosophers have also noticed: the Golden Rule is usually intended as a practical moral heuristic, not as a rigid command to be applied mechanically. In that sense your merchant, banker, and police examples are exactly the sort of reductio that shows why the rule is not normally read literally.

When teachers or traditions express the Golden Rule, whether in the sayings attributed to Confucius (“Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself”) or in the teaching associated with Jesus Christ (“Do unto others…”), the idea is usually about empathy-guided behavior rather than strict symmetry of transactions. Life is too complex for a single sentence rule to function as a complete decision procedure.

So in practice people treat it as a corrective against cruelty or thoughtlessness rather than as a demand for literal equivalence. Most moral systems work that way—high-level guidance that is “good enough most of the time,” as you put it, but always requiring judgment when circumstances are unusual.

Your intuition that it is basically common-sense social wisdom is actually shared by quite a few secular ethicists. The interesting debate is not whether such principles are useful, but whether they are fundamental truths about human nature or just stable conventions that help societies function.

You said:

They would not need to be stated explicitly if they were inbred in us. Personalities range from near-holy consideration to sociopathy.

ChatGPT said:

You are touching on a long-standing disagreement in moral philosophy. If moral behavior were fully “inbred” in the biological sense—hardwired the way breathing is—then we would expect much less variation in conduct across individuals and cultures. The fact that personalities range from what you nicely called near-holy consideration to extreme selfishness suggests that moral impulses are partly innate but need social reinforcement, education, and reflection to become stable behavior.

Some philosophers have argued that humans do have natural social instincts, but they are not strong enough to guarantee good conduct by themselves. For example, Aristotle thought ethical virtue was not simply given by nature but cultivated through habit, practice, and community life. That view fits nicely with your observation that moral rules must be stated because natural variation is large.

The existence of explicit moral instruction may itself be evidence that instincts alone are insufficient. If everyone reliably behaved considerately, societies would not need formal ethical teaching, law codes, or social norms. The fact that we do have them suggests that human nature contains multiple competing tendencies—cooperative, indifferent, and sometimes exploitative.

Sociopathy is usually described as a condition where empathy mechanisms are weak or absent, not necessarily as a separate species of mind but as one extreme point on a spectrum. That spectrum idea actually helps explain why moral rules are framed as general guides rather than absolute mechanical algorithms. They are meant to shape behavior across the messy middle where most people live.

Your comment fits a fairly pragmatic tradition: morality as social technology rather than as something mysteriously implanted in us. It is a rather sober view, but historically a very durable one.

You said:

Natural selection need variation, and biological mechanisms exist to maintain it. There is also selection among cultures. A society where everyone cooperates does well until attacked by a society of sociopaths. (Exaggerated to make it clear).

ChatGPT said:

Exactly—that’s a key insight from evolutionary theory. Variation is not just inevitable; it’s necessary for selection to operate, both biologically and culturally. At the biological level, traits like empathy, aggressiveness, and risk-taking exist in a spectrum precisely because environments fluctuate and different traits pay off under different circumstances. Mechanisms like mutation, recombination, and even social learning maintain that variation.

Your cultural example maps the same logic onto human societies. A culture of almost-universal cooperation can thrive internally but is vulnerable to exploitation by groups with fewer constraints on selfishness or aggression. History has plenty of examples where seemingly peaceful, prosperous societies were overrun or coerced by more ruthless neighbors. Conversely, societies with rigid hierarchies or militaristic tendencies can be strong externally but brittle internally, unable to adapt to internal stresses or opportunities.

So morality and cooperation don’t exist in a vacuum; they are part of a larger evolutionary game. Rules like the Golden Rule may succeed in most everyday interactions because they stabilize reciprocity within the group, but they are never sufficient as a guarantee of long-term survival without context—guarding against outsiders, balancing enforcement, and adapting to change.

You’re really describing a kind of meta-evolutionary view: both individuals and cultures are under selective pressures, and the spectrum of personalities is a feature, not a flaw, in that system.

If you want, I can sketch how this plays out in historical societies as a “cooperation vs. exploitation” continuum—it’s surprisingly consistent across time.

G