The Golden Rule Revisited

Let me return to a topic that I have discussed in the past -- the so-called golden rule.  It goes something along this line:  "treat others as you would want to be treated."  I won't go so far as to say it is a universal, but when we speak of a conscience, and behaving conscientiously, we have something like it in mind.  My conscience, for example, wouldn't allow me to rob and steal from others because I can easily enough imagine what it would be for them to rob and steal from me. This is not a guarantee that conscience will prevail, and the temptation to steal may be altogether too great to resist, and I may go through some mental machinations to "justify" the theft to myself, but at fundament, because I have simple empathy, I will know that I have treated another badly because I wouldn't want them to treat me in the same way.

From there, it might make some sense to call the basic social contract, as it were, an extended codification of the golden rule.  If we draw a veil of ignorance (in Rawl's sense) over a group of more or less rational human beings, and ask, "Should we have laws against "theft?" the answer is likely to be "yes" because few would want to be the prey of thieves.  From there, we develop the coercive power of the collective or state.   Laws without enforcement are, of course, empty, and so too the basic social contract always implies some coercive power for its enforcement.  If the law against theft is broken, we put people in jail.  We might mitigate those penalties based on the perpetrator or severity of the crime (an adolescent shoplifting a pack of gum) or extenuating circumstances (stealing food for a hungry child) but the consensus would still likely be a "wrong more or less excused."

From there, it might make some sense to talk about our "duty" to the social contract as a duty to conscience.  If we enjoy the protection of the state against thievery, then we have a reciprocal duty or obligation to avoid thieving ourselves.  This duty and obligation exist independently of the coercive power.  Again, if we draw the veil of ignorance over a group of more less rational human beings, and ask, "if there is absolutely no danger of being discovered, should one break the law and steal?" the consensus is still likely to be "no, one still should not steal."  The absence of enforcement, for whatever reason, is not a mitigating factor.   The absence of enforcement is not a guarantee that conscience will fail, but it does magnify the temptation.  As I've indicated elsewhere, I have a rather low, rather Hobbesian opinion of mankind in general, and it doesn't take much in the way of magnification to make a temptation against the dictates of conscience to great to resist.

If we enjoy the protection of the state against thievery, we also have a duty or obligation in another sense as well.  We must, as it were, pay our taxes to provide the state with the means to provide that protection.  The "justice system," as it were, does not come free.  The codification of the golden rule, so to speak, always exacts a corresponding tax for its enforcement.  A tax, without the coercive power of its collection, is likewise empty.  And so on ...

So there you have it.  Well, almost.  From there, of course, it grows almost infinitely more complex.  The first level of complication is the notion of freedom.  There are, of course, two types of freedom -- the positive "freedom to" and the negative "freedom from."  The social contract, as it is described above, is the abnegation of positive freedom.  We give up, to one extent or another, our freedom to commit thievery and subject ourselves to the coercive power of the state in order to achieve a freedom from the fear of thievery.    At the one extreme, absolute positive freedom, giving up none of one's freedom to act, is the war of all against all.  Assuming that, in the war of all against all, the strongest will prevail, the vast majority will want nothing more than negative freedom -- that is to say, freedom from the coercive power of the strongest.  At the other extreme, there are enough dystopian novels to suggest that absolute negative freedom, the complete abnegation of positive freedom in order to free one's self from everything, is death.