The Golden Rule and Interpersonal Care: From a Confucian Perspective

Abstract

One's own desires as to how others should treat one should serve, by analogy, as a guide for how one should treat others. This idea has played a key role in the Christian morality of the West for some two thousand years, and for longer than that in the Confucian morality of the East.' It has been called the meaning that it should be regarded as the first principle or the basic way of human moral conduct. However, in the past two hundred years the Rule seems to have lost its original golden color in the West: it is no longer either golden or a rule. The downplaying or outright rejection of the Golden Rule by many major Western moral philosophers can be seen in the various attempts at universalizing it. For example, in his Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant rejected the idea that the Golden Rule might be on the same level of importance as his Universal Law Imperative, and claimed that the former can only be derived from the latter on the condition that its many problems and limitations be rectified.2 John Stuart Mill, another major moral philosopher in the modern West, though he did not directly reject the idea of the Golden Rule, nonetheless suggested that it could be replaced or better reformulated through his own utilitarian Greatest Happiness Principle.3 In what follows I would like to suggest that the decline of the Golden Rule in modern times has been caused by an inevitable conflict between the two internal elements of the Rule-universal impartiality and interpersonal love/care. The conflict starts in the West from the fall of the authority of God, who had been thought to have fashioned a perfect harmony out of these two elements under the name of divine benevolent love. The result of this conflict is that the balance between the two