Is the ‘Golden Rule’ really that perfect?

The Golden Rule is basically "Doing unto others as you would want them to do unto you." This ethical system sounds perfectly undeniable, but actually, it carries its own flaws in many cases.

First, it does not take others' autonomy into account, in general. A person cannot just do whatever s/he thinks is right to others without their consent. Everyone in my family thinks that anyone who has a fever must be coined to get better. When my grandfather has a fever, he always asks my mom, or aunt, to coin his back and chest. To them, coining is a right thing to do though it hurts. Thus whenever I have a fever, they coin me, forcibly. According to the Golden Rule, they are ethical; however, they clearly violate my autonomy to be free from coining and to just take some medication.

The Golden Rule involves putting a person in someone else's shoes, and this creates paradox. In the case of abortion, for example, if a person pretends to be in the raped mother's position, she will regard the abortion as an ethical act because it is her body. She has the right to do whatever she needs to do with it. Conversely, thinking from the baby's point of view, she will definitely say that the abortion is wrong because she does not want to get killed. Whose shoes to be in?

Like some other ethical principles, the Golden Rule is anthropocentric. It cannot be applied to cases that involve non-human living beings and physical environment. This is because they—animals and especially non-living things such as mountains, rivers, trees and the entire ecosystem—are excluded in the Golden Rule. People cannot place themselves their positions. If one person tries to use the Golden Rule in those cases, s/he will end up feeling guilty about having pets, eating meat, slapping mosquitoes, killing flees and lice, and even mowing the lawn and cutting trees for housing.

The Golden Rule, in addition, denies the distinction between good and evil. It would work perfectly well if there was no evil people. Unfortunately, this world is full of them. If in a society good people always treated bad people the way they want to be treated, there would be no jails, no punishment, and criminals would walk around freely committing crimes all over the place.

The Golden Rule also fails to take into account people with personality disorder. A sadist wants violence to and from others, but that is never ethical. A person with Dependent Personality Disorder always at least needs to depend on others but never even thinks to be the one that others would depend on. A person with Paranoid Personality Disorder always fines fault but all these are never her/his fault to begin with.