A universal ethics

I was inspired by a conversation I had with a very religious friend of mine. He stated that the world would be a much better place if everyone was Christian. This statement bothered me. Not because I desire to desecrate his savior in effigy but because I felt it was a relatively close-minded, non-empathetic, "my way is the highway, rest shall burn" type of assertion. I was a Christian for a very very long time. I went to a very conservative Christian college. However, the idea of universal Christian dogma doesn't sit right with me. The idea of universal dogma from any camp doesn't sit right with me, I don't think that any religion or belief has all of the answers, or even most of them. I do believe that there is some objective truth that exists outside of ourselves that we can work towards discovering. I really believe that we should embrace a type of moral/ethical relativism that informs our decisions based on the lived experiences of both ourselves and others.<br><br>Immanuel Kant was a philosopher who believed that moral statements didn't have descriptive truth value (they didn't describe the world around us) but instead prescriptive truth value (they prescribed the way the world *should* be). He came up with the "categorical imperative," which is his universal moral law. There are multiple different iterations of the categorical imperative but the more common, easier to understand one is:<br><br>"I am never to act otherwise than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law."<br><br>Essentially this is just Kant's more articulate way of saying "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" or "treat others the way you would like to be treated." If you can imagine your actions as a universal law for everyone to act in the same way, than your actions are ethical. So if you lie, you should be okay with everyone lying. If you steal, you should be okay with people stealing from you. This is all well and good and I believe that Kant was onto something with this thought experiment, but there is still an inherent selfishness in this line of thinking, and doesn't take into account the experiences of others in the way that it should.<br><br>But what if instead of "do to (or not do to) others as you would have them (not) do to you," we instead said "do to (or not do to) others as they would have you (not) do to them"? You should treat others the way in which they want to be treated instead of the way in which you want to be treated. I think that this small semantic shift in Kantian ethics reveals a more empathetic, less "me-centric" way of viewing the world. Humans have innate individual differences, universal law will never be able to account for the differences in desires, preferences, and boundaries that we all have. Even if you believe in some sort of objective ethical law, it won't do much good for anyone if you can't properly interact with the subject that that law is to be applied to. I think if this universal ethic was applied in a more conscious way, it would (fr)acture the clean lines that exist between us by incorporating more individualistic considerations. Even if you believe in some sort of objective moral law, the law itself can't be applied unless you have a certain grasp on subjectivity.<br><br>This is all just a massive oversimplification of a deep, deep issue. If anyone is interested, I can probably respond with a few books/papers/journals to better describe this concept. I'm by no means a clean thinker and there *are* a lot of flaws in this line of thinking but I believe it's a working start towards a more universalist ethical theory.