It struck me this morning how deep down practical the Golden Rule is as a guide to knowing right from wrong. We know it in its familiar form from the Bible:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
But it’s a commonplace in many cultures, even if often stated in its negative form:
Do not do to others what you do not want them to do to you.
Now, I’ve usually thought about the Golden Rule in terms of my duties toward others. But turn it around; and for this the negative form is more useful. What things shouldn’t others do to me?
I might not have a problem with stealing; but I don’t want others stealing from me.
I might not have a problem with sleeping around; but I don’t want others to sleep with my wife.
I might not have a problem killing people who are inconvenient to me; but I certainly don’t want anyone killing me.
It’s easy to rationalize the things I want to do. (For the record: the three things listed above are not among them.) But I’m always pretty certain about when I’ve been ill-used.
It’s commonplace these days to talk about how social mores very from culture to culture; it’s less common to point out, as C.S. Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, how much they are the same from culture to culture. But in fact, they are—in terms of one’s responsibilities to real people. The culture determines just who is considered to be a real person: a member of my family, a member of my ethnicity, a fellow citizen of my country. This can mask the moral similarity. But when you look at what other people are allowed to do to me, well…things look a lot simpler.
The View from the Foothills 
But even that gets tricky when you change the qualifiers, doesn’t it? By relegating killing to offing inconvenient people, you make it a little too easy.
Would you be willing to die to save someone else’s life? Or for your God or your religion? How do you feel about killing someone to save oneself or another’s life? Or killing in the name of your God or your religion — or nation, or ideals, or principles, and so on?
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“By relegating killing to offing inconvenient people, you make it a little too easy.”
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, here. Certainly I didn’t intend any deep analysis of when it is permissible or not permissible to take a life. My point, which evidently I didn’t make, was this: I had always interpreted the Golden Rule in a proactive way: what should I be doing for person X that I’m not doing. This is kind of fuzzy, given that there are a multitude of things that I could possibly be doing.
Instead, suppose I’m considering doing action A which will affect person X. What I should be asking myself is whether I would like some other person to do A to me. And if not, I probably shouldn’t do it.
So…do I want to be murdered? Then I shouldn’t murder anyone.
Now, take killing in self-defense as an example. If I were bent on murdering someone, would I want them to kill me in self-defense? In that state, of course not, but looking at it cooly, in a state in which I don’t want to murder anyone…yes, I would. Better to die than to murder someone.
But anyway, I wasn’t intending any sophisticated analysis of particular moral questions; I was simply commenting that moral offenses against oneself are easier to diagnose as moral offenses than moral offenses I might want to commit myself.
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