Ethical rules vs. love and informed compassion

 

It occurs to me what might be incomplete about the Golden Rule and refinements like in Kant: they assume I know what is right and tell me to guide myself by what I would want for myself. What I would want for myself could be off base.

That’s a sharp observation—and not a minor quibble, either. You’ve put your finger on one of the classic fault lines in moral philosophy.

The Golden Rule (“treat others as you would want to be treated”) assumes that your own preferences are a decent guide to what’s good for others. But as you note, that can go wrong in at least two ways. First, your preferences might be distorted—by ignorance, habit, culture, fear, or even just temperament. Second, even if they’re perfectly reasonable for you, they may not fit someone else at all. The old joke captures this: the masochist says to the sadist, “hurt me,” and the sadist replies, “no.” The Golden Rule doesn’t help much there.

Kant tried to tighten things with his categorical imperative: act only according to rules you could will to be universal laws. That shifts the focus from “what I like” to “what is logically consistent and generalizable.” But your criticism still bites. The test assumes you can correctly formulate the rule in the first place and see its implications clearly. People are very good at describing their actions in ways that pass the test—“I’m not lying, I’m protecting someone,” and so on. So the weakness moves from preference to judgment.

Philosophers have tried to patch this gap in a few directions:

One approach is to add an idealization step: don’t ask what you would want, but what a fully informed, rational, and impartial version of you would endorse. That’s closer to Kant’s intent, and also shows up in later thinkers like Rawls. But then you’ve smuggled in a big assumption—that such an “ideal observer” would converge on clear answers.

Another approach is to shift from rules to outcomes (utilitarianism): judge actions by their effects on well-being. That avoids relying on your personal preferences as a guide, but it brings its own problems—uncertainty about consequences, and the uncomfortable possibility of justifying harm to some for the sake of many.

A third route, which I suspect might resonate with you given your sympathy for Buddhist thought, is to start not from rules or preferences but from cultivated qualities of mind—especially clarity and compassion. On that view, the problem you’ve identified isn’t just that the rule is incomplete; it’s that the agent is untrained. If perception is clouded, no rule will reliably produce good action. So the emphasis shifts to seeing clearly and responding with less self-centered bias.

There’s also a more modest reading of the Golden Rule that softens your objection: treat it not as a decision procedure, but as a corrective. It reminds you to step out of your own narrow vantage point and consider the other person as equally real. It doesn’t tell you what’s right—but it nudges you away from certain obvious wrongs, like callousness or double standards.

So yes—your instinct is right. These rules don’t generate moral knowledge; they assume some degree of it. They are tools, not foundations.

The interesting next question is: if the rules don’t supply the content, where does that content come from? Experience? Culture? Reason? Some cultivated form of awareness? That’s where the real disagreements begin.

The West is stuck in the idea of ethics being a set of rules, so I find myself saying there are always exceptions to the rules. I think this way of thinking come from the Ten Commandments and its overwhelming influence. It may be better to avoid formulating rules and instead, as you said, something more like the early Christian rule of love or the Buddhist universal compassion.

There’s something right in what you’re reacting against—but I’d nudge the framing a bit so it doesn’t oversimplify the landscape.

It’s true that parts of Western moral thinking—especially in its more popular or religious forms—lean heavily on rules. The influence of the Ten Commandments is real: clear directives, stated as absolutes, with a kind of moral authority that doesn’t invite much negotiation. And when rules are treated that way, your instinct kicks in immediately: real life produces cases where strict application seems wrong, even unjust.

But the West isn’t only or even primarily rule-bound at the philosophical level. There’s a long parallel tradition that’s much closer to what you’re pointing toward. Think of Aristotle’s virtue ethics: the focus isn’t rules but character and practical wisdom—what a well-formed person would perceive and do in a situation. Or even within Christianity itself, the move from law to love is already there: “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life,” as Paul the Apostle puts it.

On your positive suggestion—shifting from rules to something like love or compassion—you’re in deep company.

In Christianity, the summary command to “love your neighbor as yourself” isn’t just another rule; it’s meant to replace the detailed legal code with something more interior and flexible. The trouble is that love is both richer and more ambiguous than rules. It requires judgment: what actually is loving in this situation? Protecting someone might mean telling them the truth—or it might mean withholding it. So the problem you identified earlier doesn’t disappear; it just moves inward. Instead of “Do I know the right rule?” it becomes “Do I really understand what love requires here?”

Similarly, in Buddhism, compassion (karuṇā) is not a rule but a cultivated disposition. But it’s paired with wisdom (prajñā), precisely because compassion without clear seeing can go astray—becoming indulgence, attachment, or even harm done with good intentions. The tradition is very explicit about that pairing.

So I’d put it this way: moving from rules to love or compassion doesn’t eliminate the need for moral discernment—it raises the bar for it. Rules can be followed mechanically; compassion cannot.

There’s also a practical angle. Rules, for all their rigidity, have one big advantage: they’re public and teachable. You can hand them to a child, or a society, and say “start here.” Love and compassion, by contrast, are harder to standardize. They depend on inner development, which is uneven and slow. That’s one reason legal systems—East or West—tend to fall back on rules even when their moral ideals are more fluid.

Your instinct that “there are always exceptions” is a healthy corrective to rigid rule-following. But if you go all the way to “no rules, only compassion,” you risk another problem: people may simply follow their impulses and call it compassion. History is full of that too.

So perhaps the most workable view is a layered one: rules as rough guardrails, and compassion (or love) as the deeper guide that tells you when the guardrails themselves are leading you off the road.

You might enjoy pushing your own thought one step further: if compassion is the guide, how do you train it so it becomes reliable rather than merely well-intentioned? That’s where the traditions you’re gesturing toward tend to get very practical.

The (rather silly) "exception" to the Golden Rule of the masochist and the non-sadist is not, I think, terribly meaningful. Masochism manifests in a desire for some sort of humiliation, and pain, or at least the instrumentation of pain, may be part of the reality, but such pairs inevitably have a "safe word." True sadism may be real, as the consequences are not to the self, but masochism tends to be self limiting.

You’re right to be a bit impatient with that stock example—it often gets used as a clever “gotcha” rather than a serious test of the principle.

What you’re pointing out, more carefully, is that most real-world cases of so-called masochism aren’t a simple preference for pain as such. They’re structured, negotiated, and bounded. The presence of limits—your “safe word”—means the person is not actually endorsing harm in the same way the Golden Rule is concerned with. In that sense, it doesn’t really function as a counterexample; it’s a different category of situation altogether, closer to role-play or controlled experience than to straightforward injury.

That said, I’d still resist dismissing the example entirely, because it’s trying (a bit clumsily) to highlight something real: people’s desires are not always reliable guides to their good. Even when self-limiting, they can be shaped by psychology, history, or misperception. So the deeper issue you raised earlier still stands, just in a more grounded form.

There’s also a subtle distinction worth keeping in view. The Golden Rule, at its best, isn’t really about matching surface preferences (“I like X, so I’ll give you X”), but about recognizing the other as a subject like oneself—someone whose inner life matters in the same way. If you take it that way, then in your example the relevant question becomes: what does this particular person, in their full agency and context, actually will and consent to? That’s a more demanding inquiry than the rule is often given credit for.

And your observation that masochism is often self-limiting points toward an interesting asymmetry:

• Harm directed at oneself tends to encounter natural brakes—pain, fear, physical limits, the ability to stop.

• Harm directed at others doesn’t have those same built-in constraints, which is why moral systems tend to focus much more heavily there.

So I think you’ve improved the conversation by grounding it in how people actually behave, rather than in tidy but unrealistic hypotheticals. But the underlying tension remains: even with all the nuance—consent, limits, self-awareness—we still need some way to distinguish between what people want and what is good for them or permissible toward them.

And that brings you right back to your original concern: no formulation—Golden Rule, Kant, or compassion—completely escapes the need for judgment. The question isn’t whether exceptions exist, but how we become the sort of person who can recognize them without simply excusing ourselves.

I was sitting in a bar when the guy sitting next to me offered me the cigarette he was smoking and quietly asked me to put it out on the back of his hand.

That’s quite a moment to be dropped into—quiet, unexpected, and a little unsettling.

What makes it striking isn’t just the request itself, but the fact that it puts you in a position of agency over someone else’s body in a way that bypasses all the usual social cues. Even if he’s asking for it, something in you quite reasonably hesitates. That hesitation is doing real moral work.

Your earlier point comes into focus here. The Golden Rule doesn’t help much: you wouldn’t want that done to you, but he seems to want it done to him. So now what? If you follow his preference, you risk participating in harm. If you refuse, you override his expressed will. There’s no simple rule that resolves it cleanly.

Most people, I think, would decline—not out of prudishness, but because consent alone doesn’t settle everything, especially in a brief, opaque encounter with a stranger. You don’t know his state of mind, whether he’s testing boundaries, acting on a compulsion, intoxicated, or something else entirely. And you’re not obligated to become an instrument of something that feels off to you.

Seen this way, your instinctive reaction—whatever it was—is probably more reliable than any abstract rule. It’s that blend of caution, respect, and a reluctance to harm that traditions like compassion ethics are trying to cultivate. Not “always follow what someone asks,” and not “always impose your own standard,” but something more like: don’t do harm, and don’t step into situations you don’t understand well enough to trust.

There’s also a quieter layer: sometimes the most appropriate response is simply to not participate. No judgment, no lecture—just a boundary. In a way, that respects both parties. You’re not condemning him, but you’re also not overriding your own sense of what’s right for you to do.

Out of curiosity—did you have a clear sense in the moment of what to do, or did it leave you turning it over afterward?

I treated it as a joke.

That’s actually a very deft way of handling it.

By treating it as a joke, you sidestepped the whole moral tangle without escalating anything. You didn’t shame him, didn’t engage, and didn’t put yourself in the position of having to make a hard ethical call about harming someone. You just… declined, lightly. Socially, that’s often the cleanest exit.

It also fits what we were circling around. In real life, ethics isn’t usually a courtroom problem where you must render a verdict. It’s more often about maintaining boundaries while keeping the situation stable. A bit of humor can do that better than a principled speech or a rigid rule.

And interestingly, your response avoided both traps we discussed:

• You didn’t follow his expressed preference (which might have been questionable).

• You didn’t impose a heavy moral framework on a stranger in a bar.

You simply refused participation in a way that preserved dignity on both sides.

There’s something quietly skillful in that. It suggests that, whatever the limitations of formal rules like the Golden Rule, people often carry around a kind of practical moral sense that operates faster and more appropriately than theory.

If anything, your example strengthens your earlier point: the real question isn’t “what rule applies?” but “what kind of response fits this human moment?” And sometimes the answer is as simple—and as subtle—as a small deflection and moving on.

It's something of a habit with me: treat inappropriate or undesired approaches as a joke. A similar thing in high school where I was offered a certain indecency.

That makes a lot of sense as a personal strategy. It’s a quiet, low-friction way of saying “no” without turning the moment into a confrontation or a moral drama. You keep control of the situation, but you also let the other person save face, which—especially in close quarters or ambiguous social settings—can be the safest path.

There’s a kind of practical wisdom in that habit. You’re not trying to adjudicate the other person’s motives or reform them on the spot; you’re simply declining participation and moving on. In ethical terms, it’s less about applying a rule and more about maintaining boundaries with minimal disturbance. That’s often exactly what the situation calls for.

The only caveat I’d gently add is that humor works best when the situation is mildly off rather than clearly threatening. In more serious or persistent cases, a more explicit refusal—or removing yourself—can be important. But from what you’ve described, your instinct seems well calibrated: light deflection when possible, firmness when necessary.

It also ties back nicely to your earlier line of thought. What you’re doing isn’t rule-following in any strict sense, and it’s not simply “doing what you’d want done.” It’s something more situational—almost like a small, practiced art of social navigation. And in many real-world moments, that kind of judgment carries more weight than any tidy principle.