A cause of many problems in modern society is that a core ethical code we’re taught since childhood is flawed. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” might be an acceptable ethical maxim to teach kindergarteners, but it’s fundamentally egocentric, and adults should be able to do better.
“How is it egocentric?” I hear you ask. Allow me to answer by repeating it with emphasis on the problem.
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Or, paraphrased:
“Treat others how you wish to be treated.”
See now? The focus is entirely on one’s own preferences, not others’. Luckily, there’s a solution nearly as simple as the problem itself: swap second-person pronouns to third-person and vice versa.
“Do unto others as they would have you do unto them.”
The fix for the paraphrase is even simpler:
“Treat others how they wish to be treated.”
This formation, called the Platinum Rule, is necessary because, put simply, not everyone prefers the same things. Treating someone with different preferences from ours in the way we prefer to be treated is likely to mildly annoy them if we’re lucky and to openly offend them if we’re not.
As an example, imagine two people with different preferences who use the Golden Rule as their ethical compass. Bob, assuming Alice shares his preferences, treats her in a way that annoys her. When she voices displeasure with his actions, Bob in turn is offended: after all, he was simply treating her the way he’d want to be treated! Alice, meanwhile, doesn’t understand why her actions upset Bob: after all, she’d want to know if she was doing something that upset him, too. But Bob, for his part, would’ve preferred to be told one-on-one, and he starts thinking she was trying to embarrass him in front of his friends. And so on. After this interaction, unless a third party intervenes, each of the two will probably end up thinking the other is a colossal jerkwad.
Granted, we don’t always know others’ preferences, so asking when we’re unsure is a good habit – and unless we’ve been explicitly told, we don’t know for certain. Certain populations (e.g., autistic people) don’t naturally share others’ nonverbal communication (e.g., body language, tone of voice), and while many can learn to mirror it, doing so can be a major source of stress, and sufficiently stressed autistic people are very often incapable of mirroring. For this and many other reasons, nonverbal cues are insufficient indicators of others’ preferences.
Now imagine, instead, that Alice and Bob interact using the Platinum Rule. If Bob doesn’t know for sure that Alice shares his preferences, he will be more inclined to ask if a given action is OK before he does it, in all likelihood preventing the entire misunderstanding from occurring in the first place.
A corollary: we describe two very different concepts as ignorance. In Ancient Greek terms:
Agnoia is innocent; amathia isn’t. Applying this principle to the Platinum Rule: we begin not knowing others’ preferences (agnoia); assuming we know what they want without being told is willful ignorance (amathia).
You may have heard Hanlon’s Razor:
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
Plugging in the Ancient Greek terms provides us an even better principle:
“Never attribute to amathia that which is adequately explained by agnoia.”
For those who want further information, I wrote a brief overview of amathia and agnoia last year. It, in turn, links to resources that provide even further context.
—Aaron Freed
Tallahassee, FL
2026-09-11