The golden rule appears in many religions in different ways, but can be summed up as “treat others how you want to be treated”. However, I’ve seen it misused in some extreme ways in the past. What’s the most out-of-left-field way you’ve seen it used?
I’m going to use Kant’s categorical imperative, because I think that it’s written a little more-rigorously than most forms of the Golden Rule, so it’s easier to reason about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative
— Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
The problem here is that I’m pretty sure that you can always rewrite a rule that doesn’t conform to the categorical imperative to a form such that it does.
For example, take gay marriage. Some people who are upset about it have argued that not allowing gay marriage does treat everyone in the same way: anyone, homosexual or not, can marry someone of the other sex.
You could have a law “Someone who wants to do so can marry an adult that they are attracted to. This law does not apply to homosexuals.” That won’t pass the categorical imperative; it doesn’t apply to homosexuals. You can rewrite that to be “Anyone may marry someone of the other sex”, and now it does, though the effect is the same.
Maybe it’s not legal to prevent blacks from voting, but for a while, under Jim Crow laws, literacy tests were used – exploiting the fact that literacy among blacks was lower – to partially disenfranchise blacks in the US.
That is, I get the idea behind the Golden Rule. But I have a hard time seeing how you can come up with some kind of a legalistic, mechanical test that can’t be gamed. I can always make the conditions for some rule that contains no group-specific restrictions sufficiently restrictive in other ways that in effect, they apply only to that group.
That wasn’t the exploit. The exploit was twofold: