The ethical principle of the golden rule: between care of yourself and responsibility by the other

Abstract

The paper aims to think about the relationship between the Gold Rule disseminated by the Christianity tradition and the possibility of the formulation of an ethical principle that conciliates the autonomy of the agent in the project of making oneself with the need of respect and responsibility for the other, emphasizing the process of assimilation and interpretation of the Rule by the history of Western thought. Once the formulation of the Golden Rule in the Christian tradition has been examined, it is sought to understand how this tradition influenced the constitution of the societies of the Western world and the formulation of the doctrine of the State in Modernity. At the end of the study, the Rule is broken down into its smaller parts in order to delve deeper into the formulation of self-love as the first condition which underlies the possibility of loving and caring for others. Such a breakup seeks in Michel Foucault's ethical philosophy on Self-Care and on Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of otherness, both of the second half of the twentieth century, ways of updating the postulate of the Golden Rule that are capable of responding to the ethical yearning of 21st century man.