"A better, but more difficult moral rule, would be to treat others the way they want to be treated."

That one is incredibly dangerous because it puts your actions subservient to another's (often unknown) desires. This is at the heart of the current gender confusion laws that are now criminalizing (even absent intent) calling someone by anything other than their desired "gender".

“Trade” is the word that popped into my mind. But that word leads to “Capitalism”, which the radical left have been programmed to feel is the cause of all problems.

Your point about how the lot of the poor in this country has dramatically improved is deliberately omitted from mainstream media, and is rarely pointed out even in the alternate news sources. It really hit home with me, as I can remember being a child in a lower middle class home (not poor). We had no dishwasher, my mother hung clothes on a line to dry. We felt privileged, as we could afford a single line phone, without the hassle of a party line. We had a single older car, and were the first on the block to have a gas powered lawn mower.

Today the poor have cell phones, dishwashers, clothes dryers, big televisions, and access to many "social justice" services that provide so much more to them than our middle class could have imagined. Class envy is just one more weapon used to tear our society apart.

I have liberal relatives who are well off, but seething with anger over the lot of conservative billionaires. They fall all over themselves to support wealthy liberals, because they claim to support "the people." When I bring up statistics and point to the fact that the conservatives do more to support charities and help the poor, they attribute that as an attempt to improve their otherwise "evil" image. I sadly have to conclude that as is often said, liberalism is a mental illness.

That’s why it is more difficult. There are always outliers. If they choose to be spoiled children or criminal, treat them the way the deserve to be treated.

Imagine over 50% of the country thinking they are entitled to other peoples wealth while they sit back and relax, and applying their wants to golden rule collectively.

Solver: you quoted- "In an age where ... "
I was going to mention that but you beat me by 20hours!
I doubt that statistics bear out that statement. The implied criticism does not consider:
1) the new mega fortunes are largely the result of creativity and effort (and luck) producing goods and services that are purchased by people, voluntarily, people who think the purchase benefits them. The purchasers are often the poorest.
2) Whether the statement is true or not, the poor are much richer than they were, and the poorest are numerically in decline as they rise economically.
3) There is evidence that the efforts of those new mega-onaires helps lift the poor economically.
So, that New Atlas article has low cred.

As for reciprocal altruism, I suggest that ideology prevents the authors from using a better term, trade.

The reasons that I treat people the way I want to be treated rather than the way that they want to be treated are as follows:

1) I will have nothing to apologize for if I treat people the way I want to be treated. If I treat a person like crap because he/she deserves it, then that is beneath my dignity. I would rather, as Roark says, "not think of" them.

2) Sometimes people want to be treated so much better than anyone has a right to be treated that it would require sacrifice on my part. See CBJ's comment regarding "I want to be subsidized so I don't have to work".

Good solution, but it's not really treating them the way they want to be treated.

Ignore them or teach them the errors of their ways.

I assume the 60 societies the anthropologists studied did not include any communist dictatorships, which generally do not adhere to any of the alleged "moral rules" the anthropologists supposedly saw in every culture.

Including the first three?

So how would you treat someone who says, "I want to be subsidized so I don't have to work"?

“Treat others like you would want to be treated is a reasonable moral rule”
I always thought that this idea had a slight collectivist bent. We are all individuals. The way others want to be treated is not necessarily the way you would want to be treated, and vice versa. A better, but more difficult moral rule, would be to treat others the way they want to be treated.

Sounds like someone needs to reread the Ten Commandments!

agreed.

That part definitely ran up a red flag for me. It smacks of political ideology of the sort percolating in the decaying Democrat party, with the emphasis on "inequality" of wealth, rather than inequality of opportunity.

There is this gem,
“In an age where the world is plummeting towards a giant division between those in poverty and multibillionaires, Pigliucci asks whether it is morally good to respect the rights of those who hoard massive volumes of resources.

"But surely we should respect other people's property," Pigliucci writes. "Well, it depends. If it is acquired unethically, even if legally, no, I don't think there is any such moral requirement. If your wealth is both disproportionate and arrived at by exploiting others (and let's be frank, if it is the former, it can hardly not be the latter), then it is just and fair to pass laws to relieve you of much of that burden, through proportional taxation, for instance.”

Reciprocal altruism - That is the wrong term for it. Treat others like you would want to be treated is a reasonable moral rule, but it does not require altruism.

This part may get some Objectivists talking,
“Another example comes with the moral rule of social reciprocation. This moral foundation underpins the idea of reciprocal altruism, or simply put, treating others how you would like to be treated.”