There is a universal law found in many cultures at many different times: Treat others as you wish to be treated. It’s sometimes called the Golden Rule because it’s the key to living well for individuals and societies.
One of the world’s great moral teachers, Immanuel Kant, called this law the Categorical Imperative. He said this law has two dimensions. The first can be expressed by the question: Is what I am doing good for everyone and not just for myself? The second question: Will my action treat human beings as ends in themselves and not a means to some other goal?
You can apply this law to many situations. For example, apply it to yourself. Before any course of action ask yourself if what you are considering doing is good for everyone, not just yourself. Then ask if your action treats others as ends in themselves, not as a means to some other goal.
You can also apply this universal principle to larger issues. Take the Russian war in Ukraine as an example. Is Russia conducting a war in Ukraine good for everyone and not just its own national interests? And are the Ukrainian people being treated as ends in themselves and not as a means to some other goal?
Another often abused word for this universal rule might be love, which has some of the qualities Kant expressed in his Categorical Imperative. Love means treating others as ends in themselves, not a means to some other goal. Can this love lead to good for others, not just myself? Another word for this quality of love is justice, meaning fairness for everyone.
Theodore Parker, an abolitionist Boston minister, had a saying about justice that has a long-range hope. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. often cited it. “The moral arm of the universe is long,” Parker said, “but it bends toward justice.” Sometimes it is necessary to act on that hope before it happens.
If we know at least what this universal law requires of us, why don’t we follow it? The answer is another ancient understanding of human limits: selfishness. We often act out of the need to dominate or have power over others, no matter the costs to ourselves. Call this the cause of much suffering in the world, what some call evil, again treating others as a means to some other goal.
You don’t need a map to see what people are doing or why. Judge them not just by what they say but equally by how they act. Acts have consequences for good or ill, for creative or destructive purposes.
Bertrand Russell, a British philosopher best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy, summed up simply later in his life what wisdom he wished to leave behind.
“Love is wise; hatred is foolish,” he said. “In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
John C. Morgan is a teacher and writer whose column appears weekly at readingeagle.com.