Episode 8: The Golden Rule

This Is The Way: Chinese Philosophy Podcast

Across different religious and moral traditions we often find some version of the Golden Rule. In this episode we explore the Golden Rule as formulated in the Analects and explore questions such as how fundamental it is to the Confucian ethical framework, how it is supposed to work in actual practice, and how it connects with issues about self-centeredness. We also examine how it might apply differently to ordinary people and sages, focusing on Analects 15.24 and Analects 6.30.
Many thanks to The Hong Kong Ethics Lab for sponsoring this podcast series.
Want to continue the discussion? Need links to some of the sources mentioned? Go to the support page for this episode on Warp, Weft, and Way.
We thank Lena Li (LI La 李拉 ) for her expert editing and sound engineering. We also thank the blog Warp, Weft & Way for hosting the discussion for this episode.

Co-hosts:
Richard Kim's website
Justin Tiwald's website

Chapters

1. Part I -- Introduction (00:00:00)

2. • Preface to today’s topic (00:15:08)

3. Part II -- Empathy and the Golden Rule (00:25:25)

4. • "Empathy": perspective-taking + care (00:25:26)

5. • Introducing the Golden Rule passages (00:29:10)

6. • The classic formulation of the Golden Rule (Analects 15.24) (00:31:31)

7. • The Golden Rule for sages (Analects 6.30) (00:34:46)

8. • Does the Golden Rule really require perspective-taking? (00:39:46)

9. • Is the Golden Rule supposed to provide us with specific rules of behavior? (00:42:31)

10. • How much idealization of the desirer does the Golden Rule presuppose? (00:45:28)

11. • How empathy distances us from our own desires and emotions (00:54:00)

12. • Deliberate and effortful empathy vs. automatic empathy (01:00:12)

13. • Automatic empathy vs. empathy done out of a sense of duty ("imperative") (01:03:18)

14. • How later "close readings" of Confucian classics gave rise to these fine-grained analyses of different types of empathy (01:04:38)

15. • Are there cases in which it is better or more virtuous to act out of a sense of duty? (01:09:39)

16. • Self-focused vs. other-focused empathy (01:12:24)

17. • Why Zhu Xi thinks other-focused empathy is more virtuous (some arguments) (01:19:41)

18. • Why Dai Zhen characterized fully virtuous empathy as self-focused (01:33:22)