“How Would You Like to be Him?”: The Golden Rule, Third Person Descriptions, and Virtue Ethics

In order to attain the ethical point of view, an individual must shift perspectives in a way that moves beyond egoism. Thomas Nagel once suggested that the moral point of view can be arrived at by asking the simple question, “How would you like it if someone did that to you?” (Nagel 82). This is a useful heuristic. But I would like to suggest another. We should also ask a different question: “How would you like to be him (or her)?”¹ Nagel’s question is another way of formulating the Golden Rule: it provides a path toward altruism. The question “How would you like to be him?” leads us toward the standpoint of virtue ethics. It also reminds us of the ideal of character that is typical of the virtue account. The Golden Rule leads us from the first person perspective toward concern for the “second person”; that is, from “I” to “you” (or perhaps toward “thou” in Buber’s sense). The question of virtue ethics moves from the first person to the “third person” in a way that emphasizes biography, history, and narrative identity. My goal here is to show some of the difficulties of relying on the Golden Rule and to defend the entry into virtue ethics that is provided by the third person standpoint. I do not intend to claim that we should replace Nagel’s question with mine. Indeed, the virtue approach may include altruism. But my goal is to motivate us to think more carefully about the sorts of persons we’d like to become.

The Difficulty of the Golden Rule

The Golden Rule is a time-honored staple of moral discourse, handed down as a principle of morality in a variety of traditions (see Wattles). Greek philosophers such as Thales and Epicurus offered it as a basic moral principle. Confucius offered us a version of it. We find it in Buddhism. Rabbi Hillel claimed that the whole of the law could be summed up in the Golden Rule. Jesus claimed that the basis of morality was to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself. And psychologists such as Piaget and Kohlberg recognize that normal human development moves toward what might be called a “Golden Rule stage” in which a child learns to adopt the standpoint of the other.

Philosophers have not been as fond of the Golden Rule as have religious and popular moralists. But the basic ideal of the Golden Rule is important both for utilitarianism and for Kantian deontology. An important feature of both of these approaches to ethics is a basic commitment to altruism and to the equality of persons. Egoism is rejected by both approaches. Moreover, we are not supposed to privilege any one person over any other. The Golden Rule states, “Love your neighbor as yourself” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In either formulation, the goal is to achieve a standpoint in which we imagine a sort of equality between “I and you”: I could be you and you could be me. Each person whose proper name can be a replacement value for “I” or “you” should be treated equally.

Both Mill and Kant share this idea of treating persons equally, from the standpoint of a disinterested, impartial, and benevolent spectator. Indeed, each admits that his ethical theory can be understood as developing the basic idea of the Golden Rule. Mill claims that the utilitarian principle of “The greatest happiness for the greatest number” is a variant of the Golden Rule that asks us to generalize our concern for the interests of others. In chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, Mill writes, “As between his own happiness and that of others, utilitarianism requires him to be as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator. In the Golden Rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. ‘To do as you would be done by’ and ‘To love your neighbor as yourself’ constitute the ideal perfection of the utilitarian morality” (22).

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