The Golden Rule and Religious Freedom

The Golden Rule appears in cultures around the world, including in religious traditions. Versions appear in Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and many other religions.

Greg Epstein points out that while the Golden Rule appears in all major religions, it does not depend on God in any of them.

In some sense, the Golden Rule seems to be a pre-religious, non-supernatural moral rule that is almost universal across very different cultures and historical periods. That’s remarkable when you think about it.

The Golden Rule is also similar in content and intent to Hobbes’s Social Contract and Rawls’s idea of Justice as Fairness.

In the Bible version I learned as a child, the Golden Rule says:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

 In other words, treat people as you would like to be treated.

This is, of course, excellent moral and practical advice. Morally, being empathetic towards others and imaging how we would feel and what we would want in their circumstances, is a reliable guide to how we should treat those others. Practically, when we do not treat others as we would want to be treated, they get angry at us, resist us, work against us, so we are more likely to get what we want by treating others as we would want to be treated.

Treating others worse than we would expect to be treated is patronizing, oppressive, hypocritical. Treating others by the same standards we want applied to us is simple psychology, everything else aside. That’s why we mock people with, “Oh, so you are a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ sort of person?”

One thing that each of us expects is to have the freedom to believe what we believe about religion, and to practice our religion as we think best for ourselves. We are extremely resentful when anyone tells us our religious beliefs are wrong, or that our ways of worshipping are not allowed, and especially when it is made illegal to follow our religion.

This resentment of being interfered with when it comes to religious belief derives partly from the fact that each of us holds our religious beliefs sacred—they are important to us because they help us understand the world and give life meaning—and partly from the fact that we feel that we do not voluntarily choose them. These beliefs just strike us as true and we couldn’t disbelieve them if we wanted to. (Well, until we do disbelieve them, but then the new belief has this character; let’s defer this point to another time.)

Frankly, we are resentful when anyone interferes with any of our beliefs or our actions based on those beliefs, whether the beliefs are religious or anything else. To paraphrase Descartes, common sense must be the most equally distributed quality, since every person thinks they have exactly the right amount of it. To have a belief is to think it true, so of course we think our own beliefs are true. (We can accept that at the same time as we accept the point that we probably have many false beliefs. Hopefully when we discover that we were wrong about something, we are willing to change our opinions.)

Knowing that everyone believes what they believe, and that everyone takes it as a harm to be coerced to change their belief, forced to keep those beliefs hidden, or forbidden to act on those beliefs, we should apply the Golden Rule. I do not want anyone else to interfere with my religious beliefs, so I shouldn’t interfere in their religious beliefs either.

This isn’t to rule out conversation or criticism of the beliefs of others. We should be allowed to discuss these things, even to tell others that we think they are wrong. Though the Golden Rule should govern how we do that, too.

The Golden Rule route to religious freedom and toleration is not, however, a free pass to believe anything at all or to do anything at all. Since none of us want to be harmed by others, there is a built in restriction on freedom of belief: You can believe anything you want, and act on it, unless doing so causes a harm to someone else. Those harms to others are infringements of their freedom, so by the Golden Rule you ought not to do them. This applies even if you strongly believe that you are right and they are wrong.

In another post coming soon, I explain how I think the Golden Rule route to religious freedom and toleration shapes the way governments should treat matters of conscience, and how to balance the claims of conscience against harms to others.