0. Might makes right.
Yeah, it sucks. Violence is always the bottom line. And human history shows that there’s always someone willing to employ it, too! But just because this is the foundational rule of all ethics, the starting point from which all other rules derive, doesn’t mean this is the ending point. In fact, all it’s here for is to provide motivation for creating the rest of the rules.
Our purpose is to create a peaceful, civilized society, one fit for conscious beings to live, enjoy, and thrive. So, just like the law of gravity must be recognized and dealt with and is the constraint within which we must work if we ever want to take flight, so we recognize that violence will always be with us, and that we will deal with it, and that we will determine when employing it will help us accomplish our goals for a peaceful society. We call it rule #0, then, and having acknowledged it, we now begin to construct civilization with rule #1:
1. Don’t do to others as they don’t want, as you don’t want others to do what you don’t want to you.
The positive version of the ethic of reciprocity (“Do unto others”) is of course good to the extent you can follow it, but on a planet with 7.1 billion people, it doesn’t scale well. For our interactions with most of the people we will never meet, simply refraining from harming them is sufficient to fulfill our obligations to them, and to permit the construction of peaceful society.
You may notice that this is also a further modification of the ethic of reciprocity as voiced by Epicurus, Confucius, Jesus, and kindergarten teachers around the world: it turns out “as you would have them [not] do unto you” varies, as different people may have different tastes about how they prefer to be treated. So take as your guide not what you wouldn’t want, but what others decide they don’t want for themselves.
1.1. Don’t force others to associate with you in any way.
The following corollaries are examples of instances where this rule comes into play, but a general guideline is, if you find yourself wondering if an action “forces others to associate with you,” take the safe route and don’t perform that action.
1.1.1. Don’t commit violence against them physically.
You may offer physical contact, but if it is declined, your interaction ends.
1.1.2. Don’t hold others responsible for meeting your biological needs.
Except for parents: parents accepted responsibility for their offspring’s needs when they chose to reproduce.
1.1.3. Don’t pollute.
Don’t force others to see you, smell you, or hear you.
1.2. Only hold others responsible for things they had the right to choose.
Skin color, country of origin, sex, sexual orientation, birth defects, and ancestry are not chosen.
Becoming a parent, taking a job, joining a church or civic organization, and voting are chosen.
Speaking a language, practicing a religion, or propagating a culture are not chosen by children, but are chosen by adults.
1.2.1. Don’t grant or withhold legal rights based on how or where one is born.
1.2.2. Don’t discriminate in business on unchosen bases.
Unless a physical characteristic is required for the business purpose. For example, it is ethical to hire only females for testing female reproductive health products, or only black actors to portray a black historical figure.
1.3. Do not create information asymmetries with others to benefit yourself at their expense.
Information asymmetries exist by the nature of the fact that people have different life experiences and communicate with different people. They are not bad in themselves, but they become bad when they are created intentionally, for the purpose of deceiving or defrauding.
1.3.1. Do not lie.
Always take responsibility for your actions, and ensure that if you speak about the actions or responsibilities of others, that your words are accurate.
1.3.2. Disclose fully and in good faith all conditions in contracts and agreements.
In some parts of the United States, someone selling a home is required to disclose damages the home has sustained prior to sale, and lenders require buyers to pay for a professional home inspection before a mortgage loan will be granted. You can use this as a guideline for other contracts as well: other types of sales, business agreements, employment contracts, marriage prenuptials, etc. Ask yourself whether your offering would stand up to a professional inspection.
1.3.3. Honor all contracts and agreements entered willfully.
Sometimes we may be unable to fulfill promises due to circumstances beyond our control. In such cases, communicate openly and honestly with those to whom you’ve made commitments, and make it your goal not to harm them through your shortfalls.
2. “Property” is for negotiation of access to scarce resources without violence.
Scarce resources include real estate, water and mineral rights, electromagnetic spectrum, physical objects, and time.
It cannot be applied to data about the real world, emotions, opinions, and ideas.
2.1. Do not steal or damage the property of others.
Doing so deprives them of the use of what they have sacrificed to attain.
2.2. If you accidentally damage others’ property, compensate them for it.
“Insurance” is a societal construct whose purpose is to help us meet this obligation, even if we cannot afford such compensation on our own.
2.3. If you soil or move others’ property, clean or replace it.
Failure to do so is theft of their time.
3. Breaking rule #1 obligates others to do the same, to mitigate the damage one’s lack of ethics would otherwise cause.
If one breaks the ethic of reciprocity, one implicitly declares oneself an outlaw from it, and may not expect its protections for themselves. Peaceful society is best served when the larger number of its participants commits to following the ethic of reciprocity quite strictly toward those who share such commitment, and abandon it quickly toward those who make no such commitment.
Yes, this means that “who started it” is an important consideration. If no one starts any violence, there won’t be any violence.
3.1. Responses to unethical behavior must be similar in type to the unethical behavior itself.
This means physical violence may only be used in response to the commission of physical violence; it may not, for example, be used in response to mere name-calling.
Similarly, it is feasible to deprive one of property rights when that one has deprived another of their property first.
If someone states an opinion that you dislike, you may in turn express an opinion they’d dislike, but you may not escalate to deprivation of property or to physical violence.
3.2. Accused offenders are innocent until proven guilty.
The great Enlightenment-era political theorists constructed elaborate systems of rules of evidence, juries to try to mitigate corruption or bias in centralized governments, and deliberative processes to ensure that the ethic of reciprocity would never be breeched unnecessarily or by mistake against an innocent person. In our day-to-day lives, we do not have the convenience of using this expensive and time-consuming process to vet everyone’s fitness to participate in the mutual web of reciprocal ethics, but we must do the best we can in good faith: we must not rush impatiently to destroy this delicate web, nor lash out hurriedly at imagined slights. If there are some doubts, we should seek to eliminate our biases in determining the guilt of others, striving for impartiality and invoking the complicated mechanisms of legal justice when time and resources permit.
3.3. Breech rule #1 only against those individuals who have breeched it first.
None of us is wired into a mind-reading hive-mind collective. We cannot hold one individual responsible for the actions of another, so the violence we employ in policing these ethics must be carefully targeted only at the individual perpetrators of violence.
Thus this rule is a reiteration of rule 1.2, with special emphasis because here we are actually outlining when it is acceptable to perpetrate violence, and we may never be too emphatic in our caution to use it only under rule #3, and never in initiating the subversion of rule #1.