First, far be it from me to claim that the Golden Rule, followed literally, is a sufficient ethics on its own. Try to treat it logically and it's easy to construct Asimov-esque "Laws of Robotics" situations in which the simple formulations, taken literally, create paradoxes quite easily. It is, in my opinion, clearly a rule that one is more meant to follow the spirit of than the letter of the law.
That said, I'd also observe that your rule,"do unto others as they want done to themselves", is not the same as my point. My point is that "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" itself already encompasses the idea of honoring preferences, on the grounds that you would already like your preferences honored. It isn't a free-floating rule that I would advocate you adding to your ethicals on its own, it's a second-order consequence of the already-existing Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule, while it does not proscribe an exact solution to your hypothetical, at least gives guidance, inasmuch as if you'd like to live in a just world, it implies that you should approach your hypothetical with justice in mind. Presumably you have not encountered a free-floating, context-free fight between two otherwise identical men who are for some mysterious reason asking you and you alone to resolve the fight in favor of one or the other, with no other options permitted.
(I dislike ethical hypotheticals, or at least, I dislike hypotheticals when people lose track of the fact that they are inevitably incredible, massive simplifications of any real situation you might experience. One should either highlight that the hypothetical is deliberately abstracted, in which case math-style logic-chopping is what is called for, or that it is intended to be a real question about a real situation in which case what is called for is almost certainly a logically-complicated set of "if-thens" to flesh out the hypothetical, with general understanding that there is no one "true" answer because there is no one "true" situation being given.)
It is, in my opinion, a very thin and perhaps downright sophmoric interpretation of the Golden Rule to read it hyper-literally and incredible "thinly" and apply it only to your own literal preferences about exactly what you'd like done to you this second. I say this to lay down a marker, not saying that you are necessarily doing that. For instance, it certainly does not mean that if you are hungry right now, your ethical imperative is to go around feeding everybody you see, regardless of their own state. It's deeper and richer than that... again, probably not deep and rich enough to be a full ethical system on its own (I don't think it is), but it's not that thin.
That said, I'd also observe that your rule,"do unto others as they want done to themselves", is not the same as my point. My point is that "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you" itself already encompasses the idea of honoring preferences, on the grounds that you would already like your preferences honored. It isn't a free-floating rule that I would advocate you adding to your ethicals on its own, it's a second-order consequence of the already-existing Golden Rule.
The Golden Rule, while it does not proscribe an exact solution to your hypothetical, at least gives guidance, inasmuch as if you'd like to live in a just world, it implies that you should approach your hypothetical with justice in mind. Presumably you have not encountered a free-floating, context-free fight between two otherwise identical men who are for some mysterious reason asking you and you alone to resolve the fight in favor of one or the other, with no other options permitted.
(I dislike ethical hypotheticals, or at least, I dislike hypotheticals when people lose track of the fact that they are inevitably incredible, massive simplifications of any real situation you might experience. One should either highlight that the hypothetical is deliberately abstracted, in which case math-style logic-chopping is what is called for, or that it is intended to be a real question about a real situation in which case what is called for is almost certainly a logically-complicated set of "if-thens" to flesh out the hypothetical, with general understanding that there is no one "true" answer because there is no one "true" situation being given.)
It is, in my opinion, a very thin and perhaps downright sophmoric interpretation of the Golden Rule to read it hyper-literally and incredible "thinly" and apply it only to your own literal preferences about exactly what you'd like done to you this second. I say this to lay down a marker, not saying that you are necessarily doing that. For instance, it certainly does not mean that if you are hungry right now, your ethical imperative is to go around feeding everybody you see, regardless of their own state. It's deeper and richer than that... again, probably not deep and rich enough to be a full ethical system on its own (I don't think it is), but it's not that thin.