What I’m presenting here, is a code of ethics with one Rule. It’s not an easy code but at least it’s a code that is easy to remember.
The Rule itself doesn’t look complicated, although to understand it clearly will require a bit of explanation.
Here it is.
Do not harm anything
unless you really have to.
You’ve probably heard similar injunctions. The Hippocratic Oath springs to mind, which is popularly (and falsely) believed to include, “First, do no harm.” Well, it does say something like that and “First, do no harm,” is well embedded in medical ethics, but it is usually meant to mean something more like, “Try to do more good than harm,” or, less controversially, “Don’t use your medical skills to do evil.” It’s also aimed squarely at things you do to people. It has a very limited scope.
The Rule above is not meant to be taken in either of those senses. It really does mean, do not harm anything. Closer to what we mean is the ahimsa doctrine that you find in several religions, including Buddhism and Hinduism. That doctrine literally means, “do not injure” but, generally, it is understood to mean, “Do not harm any living thing.” Being a religious notion, it’s backed by convoluted theological arguments about divine “spiritual energy” and the interconnectedness of all things, but, nevertheless, its a sound principle.
There are also a couple of guys in the States who promote the term, “Do no harm,” and will even send you a free bumper sticker. Their website is a bit thin on information, so they don’t really explain what they mean, but clearly they have a very similar idea to the ahimsa folk.
Probably the closest we get to what The Rule means in the West, is the common exhortation, “Don’t be a dick.”
What no-one else seems to have in their philosophies is the get-out clause, “unless you really have to.” Without it, “Do no harm” and its variants, are just more impossible ethical rules to beat yourself up with. You know when you hear these absolute rules that you’ll never be able to achieve what they demand. You will be caught in the supermarket without your shopping bag and you will let the check-out person give you a plastic bag, even though you know it will end up killing some poor sea bird or fish one day. After a while, you will come to accept that, while “Do no harm” is a great ideal, you might as well stop trying so hard because you’ll never live up to it. It becomes like all moral and ethical codes: great on paper but, out here in the real world, so impractical that they just add to your guilt and sense of failure, and, anyway, you’d have to be a fanatic to live like that, right?
Right.
But don’t worry, The Rule does have a get-out clause. It’s not a stick to beat yourself with; it’s a friend to guide you on life’s journey. Besides, The Rule is not primarily about being a “good” person, it is about behaving in a way that will lead to a better life for all of us. Trying to be “good” has driven people round the bend for millennia. It’s an abstraction that means so many different things to different groups that it is almost worthless. Instead, just don’t harm anything, unless you really have to, and you’ll find the moral questions seem far more manageable. And leave “good” and “bad” to the theologians and moral philosophers.
The rest of my posts on this subject will be about getting to grips with what The Rule really means. Hopefully, this can be done in a pretty straightforward way, without dredging up the whole of Western philosophy, invoking any deities, or defining and refining terms in ever decreasing circles until we disappear in a puff of semantics.
Hopefully.
Well, you will be the judge of that.
First we’ll look at every word and phrase in The Rule. There aren’t many of them but they are all very important. By the time that’s over, you’ll probably agree we needed to look more closely at some of those words and to tease out some of the implications. The Rule itself doesn’t say much about how to live your life until you have a good grasp of what words like “harm” and “anything” are intended to mean. And, even then, you’ll probably find you have a million questions. So, the next few posts will be about that.
You’ve probably already started asking yourself just how you might apply a rule like this to some of the day-to-day problems of life, and maybe to the bigger ethical issues. In particular, you’re probably asking yourself how and when that get-out clause applies. So, in the second batch of posts we’ll focus on some of the big ethical issues of our time and see if The Rule helps us at all.
Finally, we’ll take a look at how The Rule fits in with life as we know it. How does The Rule fit with the law of the land, with religion, with family life, and so on.
And that’s all there is.
Ready?