The Golden Rule, 'Do unto others as you would have others do to you', is really not a rule at all. Unlike the Commandment, 'Do not kill', the Golden Rule does not specify what you should or should not do. Rather it tells you, in what spirit, with what attitude you should do anything unto others. Rather than being an ordinary moral rule, one might conceive of the Golden Rule as the rule of all rules, somewhat as sportmanship is the rule of all sports. As Kant says, it is "an objective principle from which as a supreme practical law all laws of the will must be capable of being deduced. ''1 Or more recently and more clearly, Kurt Baier states: "When we teach children the moral point of view, we try to explain it to them by getting them to put themselves in another person's place: 'How would you like to have that done to you."2 Whether you are a utilitarian or a deontologist, whether a rationalist in ethics or an irrationalist, the Golden Rule establishes the moral point of view; even someone like Hobbes finds a place for "enlightened" self-interest.
If it is true that the Golden Rule is the rule of all moral rules, I wonder, then, whether one could not say that in a similar sense and with similar implications, the Golden Rule also establishes, what one might call, the artistic point of view. As in the case of the moral point of view, it is out of the artistic point of view that traditional ways and theories of art are generated; yet like the Golden Rule of ethics, the Golden Rule of art does not itself constitute a way or theory, since it allows for the possibility of various ways and theories. As the Golden Rule of ethics states 'Do unto others...', the Golden Rule of art states 'Make for others as you would have others make for you.'
Although one can draw a distinction between 'Do unto others...' and 'Make for others...', the distinction is accidental rather than essential, linguistic rather than logical. It so happens that in English, unlike in many Western European languages, we have two words where, for instance, the French or the Germans have one; we use 'do' and 'make'; the French use 'faire'; the Germans, 'machen'. In Latin, if one says 'Fac aliis', it is impossible to know, out of context, whether this expresses the moral or the artistic point of view. Perhaps to the ordinary Frenchman, German, or ancient Roman, the two points of view are inseparable. To speak as if