My 14-year-old self also had some funny ideas about his reputation existing in the aether—as some kind of psycho-kinetic phenomenon—it was not my intention to claim much in the way of deep wisdom for my younger self.
It is true that this maxim gets to be brief by unloading complexity into the words “people” and “hurt”—but that seems inevitable—and those words do have commonly-accepted definitions that deal with most cases.
The idea was not to capture what I wanted. It was to capture what I thought was wrong. This was a biblical-style morality—a buch of “thou-shall-not” statements, with the implication that all else was permitted. Though instead of ten commandments, I only had one.
Looking back, one problem I see is there is no hint of utilitarianism. What if all your choices involve hurting people? There is no hint in the maxim of the concept of greater or lesser hurt.
As I recall, within a year or so, I had given up on attempts to reduce my morality to neat axioms. However, I was to return to the idea at about the age of 17 - when I found out how much of my behaviour was explicable by the hypothesis that most of the behaviour of living organisms fits the theory that they act so as to maximise their inclusive fitnesses.
My 14-year-old self also had some funny ideas about his reputation existing in the aether—as some kind of psycho-kinetic phenomenon—it was not my intention to claim much in the way of deep wisdom for my younger self.
It is true that this maxim gets to be brief by unloading complexity into the words “people” and “hurt”—but that seems inevitable—and those words do have commonly-accepted definitions that deal with most cases.
The idea was not to capture what I wanted. It was to capture what I thought was wrong. This was a biblical-style morality—a buch of “thou-shall-not” statements, with the implication that all else was permitted. Though instead of ten commandments, I only had one.
Looking back, one problem I see is there is no hint of utilitarianism. What if all your choices involve hurting people? There is no hint in the maxim of the concept of greater or lesser hurt.
As I recall, within a year or so, I had given up on attempts to reduce my morality to neat axioms. However, I was to return to the idea at about the age of 17 - when I found out how much of my behaviour was explicable by the hypothesis that most of the behaviour of living organisms fits the theory that they act so as to maximise their inclusive fitnesses.