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The Journal of Value Inquiry (2005) 39: 155168DOI: 10.1007/s10790-006-8363-y C
The Golden Rule and the Requirement of Universalizability
JOUNI REINIKAINENDepartment of Political Science, Stockholm University, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden; e-mail: [email protected]
The golden rule, the principle that we should do to others what we want others to do to us, has continued to attract philosophical attention at least ever since Thomas Hobbes offered a secular form of it in two passages in Leviathan.1 One strand of the debate on the rule concerns its adequacy for moral validation, which was rst called into question by Immanuel Kant as he claimed the golden rule to be inferior to the requirement of universalizability in this regard.2 We
will consider that claim by exploring what the golden rule and the requirement of universalizability implicitly entail as validating procedures. The golden rule should not be seen as inferior to the universalisability requirement. Both, instead, tacitly come down to a common publicity test requiring that we try out what would be acceptable from the imagined perspective of everyone affected.
There are many formulations of the golden rule in different religions and moral theories, and this has occasioned a protracted debate on the conceptual unity of the rule.3 One particularly persistent dispute concerns an alleged difference between negative formulations, such as that we are not to do to others what we do not want others to do to us, and positive formulations, such as that we are to do to others what we want others to do to us.4 But the negative and positive formulations of the rule are similar in terms of the normative conclusions that may accurately be drawn from them. This similarity justies treating the differences between positive and the negative formulations as philosophically insignicant. Implicitly, moreover, it also provides an answer to a question posed by Alan Gewirth about which of the different formulations of the golden rule we should properly proceed from.5 Using the golden rule as a meta-test on a proposed use of the rule allows us to proceed from a standard formulation of the rule such as that we are to do to others what we want others to do to us and still avoid the difculties that Gewirth mistakenly presumes to necessitate a...