Just because something has a long history (secular or otherwise) doesn't give it any merit by itself.
If we need some standard to judge against what is morally acceptable in the case I presented (no this doesn't apply if you like to hurt yourself and others) then you are back to defining a standard which cannot inherently be neutral.
No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business.
There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.
Anyone who doesn't agree with your "reasonable assumptions" has bad morals can be twisted to mean any moral values based on what you mean by reasonable. For example, the church can say it is reasonable assumptions to burn witches and then twist reason itself to make it morally good as well. In that case how can we trust this system itself? If the answer is by using your own eyes and thinking for yourself, then why do we need to follow a specific fixed rule?
How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.
The take-home being, as long as peoples preferences are different, the rule has some failure states based upon that.
And the wider example that this points to is that as long as everyone's values are different.. the rule loses a lot of it's luster. The more different another person's values are, the less you can rely on projecting your own values as a method to gainfully interact with them.
In place of that biblical aphorism (born from a monoculture no less), there is a lot of room available for us to build something more robust and sophisticated and the AI alignment problem offers a fine excuse to get cracking and try to formalize something already! ;)
If you understand and accept the reciprocal intent of the golden rule, via the above mentioned reasonable assumptions, not to mention the hundreds of years of examples and explanations, then it doesn’t really have a “failure state”. And, again, this so-called rule is not law, isn’t specific, and doesn’t cover all situations or all behaviors. It seems very silly to be nit picking this aphorism to death like this. It’s very simply a good faith suggestion to be kind.
The notion of fairness and reciprocity is not a religious idea, it’s common sense.
2. Regardless, if basing rules on whether someone would want those rules to apply to them does not have merit, is there some better basis you'd recommend?
2. Yes, this is where I would push back because one can also assume there is no "better" basis in the strict sense that you can intellectualize morality/virtue only to a certain extent. And it is possible to argue that morality/virtue is often as much a psychological process as a purely intellectual one. So the idea isn't that the golden rule doesn't make sense or that it is objectively weak, but it doesn't map to the idea of actual morality in action. For example, a person may logically believe in the golden rule but that doesn't mean we should ignore the fact that the agent is not fully logical and will not always strictly adhere to a rule just because it is aware of it and aware of it as being Good. In that sense, what use is the golden rule if we are free to ignore it at all (which we often do)? That doesn't mean I'm saying the golden rule is objectively wrong again, but in ranking morality and deciding on very abstract ideas of what Good and Bad are, we ignore the actual psychological forces that are extremely relevant when it comes to the execution of morality in action. So to answer the question, the better basis would be to understand the psychological forces behind why we feel the golden rule is objectively a good and then examine them to understand if we are following the golden rule because we actually think it is good or because we live in a society where it is good and we will be shamed if we don't believe it. One might say it doesn't matter as long as people actually follow the golden rule but another interpretation is that the golden rule by itself doesn't tell us anything (or very little) about the moral character of the person applying it. So just expecting people to follow that rule after knowing it is placing too much trust in the human animal who is often wild and not thinking logically. It is then upon the animal to tame itself and it may do so out of servitude or out of independence and both might lead to equivalent surface values and match the basis perfectly as being morally good while in reality, both have very different meanings for their morals.
2 is, of course, mainly inspired by Nietzsche. I'm working on a short story where he and Plato debate whether a painting is objectively good or bad called A Canvas Called Virtue.
There's an obvious asymmetry in your rephrasing. The parents quote says "do unto others as they do unto you", not as you do to yourself. If you treat yourself terrible and hurt yourself, is it okay for others to hurt you too?