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Is the golden rule really good? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by turnerpike20@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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So when I was in school from 2nd to 6th grade in that school there was a sign saying to treat others the way you want to be treated. And yeah the irony with that was teachers at that school were actually quite abusive that I saw no sense in on one hand treating others the way you want to be treated meanwhile being treated badly by teachers. It might sound weird but yeah I was treated slightly better when I finally got out of that school. But yeah to me it's kind of like how I even understand that logic is if someone treats me badly I should have a right to treat them badly. That's basically one flaw I saw with the golden rule. If I'm treated badly what gives them the right to be treated any better? This whole golden rule idea is pretty messed up when you really consider it. If you wrong me do I have the right to wrong you? That's really the one thing I questioned about the golden rule.

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[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

There are a ton of different variations of the golden rule that mostly have slightly different implications. Pretty much every religion has some flavour of it, and there's a good reason for that.

Cooperation has for a long time been a necessary part of human life if one wishes to accomplish much of anything, and the golden rule has long been a building block of cooperation. Of course, it's not particularly scientific and it's precise implementations, as you've noticed, are either vague or not fully correct.

Enter game theory. The prisoner's dilemma problem is a model cooperative game that explores various behaviour patterns between two parties. As it turns out, some of the best strategies to maximize personal gain given other opponents with unknown strategies are called: "forgiving tit-for-tat" strategies.

Basically, cooperate until you're betrayed, punish betrayal, but then return to cooperation. I think if you squint a bit, you can kinda see how there's similarity to the golden rule.

Veritasium has a pretty informative video on the subject: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM

In short, yeah, it's pretty good.