Do Unto Others...

I've heard smug critics of the Golden Rule say that better formula would have been, "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them", providing as their test case a masochist. You would not want a masochist doing to you as the masochist would have you do to them.

Such criticism seemed overtly clever and cynical to me to ever take seriously. Still a pithy response felt appropriate, for those who still suffered from the illusion that this was a reasonable argument against the wisdom of Jesus.

A response did not occur to me till recently (after hearing about Russian psychologists who discovered that corporal punishment helped end depression - and some wag commented that they must have been masochist inmates). Basically, it follows the pattern that extreme or 'edge' cases do not make good law, or that a hypothesis is not required to incorporate outlying data (explain, yes -- incorporte, no), or that a reasonable explanation of an event need not respect the ideas or opinions of the insane...

It is simply that, moral codes need not respect the motivations of the mentally ill.