The Golden Rule is regularly used in ordinary life, across many different cultures, to acquire new moral knowledge. At the same time, the Golden Rule is widely ignored both in ethics and metaethics because it seems to be an implausible normative theory. Most philosophers who have paid it any attention have thought that, at best, it is an initially tempting thought whose appeal should be explained by the ultimately correct normative theory. My aim in this paper is to attend to an alternative possibility: the Golden Rule teaches us something about metaethics, in the form of moral epistemology, rather than normative ethics. I will argue that sentimentalism, the view that the emotions are an essential source of moral knowledge, provides a compelling explanation of the usefulness of the Golden Rule. Before giving the sentimentalist explanation, I explain why proposed alternative sources of moral knowledge provide less compelling explanations of its usefulness.

中文翻译：

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道德黄金法则告诉我们什么


黄金法则在许多不同文化的日常生活中经常被使用，以获取新的道德知识。与此同时，黄金法则在伦理学和元伦理学中都被广泛忽视，因为它似乎是一种令人难以置信的规范理论。大多数关注过它的哲学家都认为，这充其量只是一个最初很诱人的想法，其吸引力应该由最终正确的规范理论来解释。我在本文中的目的是关注另一种可能性：黄金法则以道德认识论的形式，而不是规范伦理学的形式，教会我们一些关于元伦理学的知识。我认为，情感主义，即情感是道德知识的重要来源的观点，为黄金法则的有用性提供了令人信服的解释。在给出感伤主义的解释之前，我解释了为什么所提出的道德知识的替代来源对其有用性提供了不那么令人信服的解释。