Charles R. Lightner

Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton, distinguished scholars and prolific authors, edited a volume of papers prepared for a conference on the Golden Rule in 2008. Fourteen papers were collected in a book titled “The Golden Rule: The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions”, which is impressive in both breadth and depth of analysis. I will address a number of issues raised in several of th...

Dr. Harry J. Gensler is a Jesuit priest, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University and author of over a dozen books including “Ethics and the Golden Rule” published in 2013 (Routledge). Gensler Is one of the few true golden rule scholars, having written his doctoral dissertation on the rule in 1977; one of only two dissertations (in English) that have been written on the rule. ...

This is just a brief note on terminology. There are many who term the Golden Rule an ethic of reciprocity. In fact, one of the few books written in English that is devoted to Golden Rule study and analysis is subtitled “The Ethics of Reciprocity in World Religions” (edited by Neusner and Chilton, 2008). Both Jeffrey Wattles and Harry J. Gensler (whose book I’ll write more on soon) ...

I continue to work through “The Golden Rule” by Jeffrey Wattles (Oxford University Press, 1996), which is one of the few works acknowledged as a truly comprehensive scholarly treatment of the subject. There’s no question that it is thoroughly researched and representative of a deeply thought engagement with the topic. I want to stop here to make a couple of interim points that I think...

Having spent some time now studying the work of the secular philosophers, I'm now going to spend some time on the work of those scholars who have made specific study of the golden rule; its place in world religious and ethical study; its strengths and weaknesses as a universal ethic; and, proposals to cure the weaknesses observed. It could be argued that I should have started at this ...

In an earlier post on the thinking of Immanuel Kant, we found that Kant believed that the measure of the morality of an action was to be found only in the intention of the person acting. He argued that we can never know with certainty what outcome an action will produce and so we cannot be held responsible for outcomes, only intentions. Utilitarians, as we’ve seen, though, are “conseq...