The tape was still running, in a sense, when the song was abandoned. That is the strange thing about the record that would become one of Aretha Franklin’s most quietly radical performances: it began as an unfinished sketch in a small Alabama studio, it was left behind when a session collapsed, and it was finished weeks later, hundreds of miles away, by a singer who had not yet learned it properly when the band first played it. Most great records arrive with a story of inspiration, a moment when everything clicks. This one arrives with a story of interruption, of a bridge written in a closet while another song was being cut, of a songwriter singing a guide vocal in a register too high for him because the singer herself had not yet had time to learn the words, and of a group of sisters gathered around a microphone in New York to supply the warmth that the Alabama room had lost. It is a story about how a song can be rescued, and about how rescue can sometimes be the whole point, because the finished record sounds like patience itself, like a voice that refuses to hurry a difficult truth.
This is the story of “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” the slow, gospel-steeped ballad that Aretha Franklin released in February 1967 as the other side of her breakthrough single, and that has lived ever since in the shadow of the hits that surrounded it. It was not a chart-topper in its own right. It never reached the pop chart on its own, and its highest position on the rhythm-and-blues chart was modest by the standards of the run that followed. Yet musicians, critics, and other singers have returned to it again and again, and its co-writer Dan Penn later called the finished record, in his own account, the best record Franklin ever made. That judgement is worth pausing over, because Penn was not a neutral observer. He had written the song, he had sung its first rough vocal, and he had heard it when it was little more than a skeleton. When he heard it finished, with Franklin and her sisters singing together, he was, by his own telling, knocked down by it. Something had happened between the sketch and the finished record, and that something is what this article tries to describe: not just a session history, but the transformation of a song about fairness in love into a statement about dignity, delivered by a singer who understood, from gospel and from life, that dignity is not a slogan but a discipline.
The singer before the song
To understand why this particular song mattered, it helps to remember where Aretha Franklin stood at the start of 1967. She was twenty-four years old, and she had already been recording for more than a decade, first as a gospel singer in her father’s Detroit church, then as a secular artist for Columbia Records, where she had made nine albums without finding a consistent commercial identity. Columbia had presented her, at different times, as a jazz singer, a pop singer, a blues singer, and a standards singer, and she had sung all of those styles beautifully without ever quite being allowed to sound like herself. The gospel fire that had made her a child prodigy in church was still there, but it was often smoothed over by arrangements that treated her as a versatile vocalist rather than as a force. She was respected, she was admired by musicians, and she was, in commercial terms, stuck. When her Columbia contract expired in November 1966, she was free to choose a different path, and the man who offered her that path was Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic Records producer who had spent years listening to her and believing that the right setting would release something Columbia had not found.
Wexler’s idea was simple, and it was radical in its simplicity. He did not want to remake Franklin as a pop star. He wanted to put her in a room with a great Southern rhythm section, let her play piano, let her sing the way she sang in church, and record what happened. That idea led him, in January 1967, to FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a small studio run by Rick Hall that had already produced hits for Percy Sledge and Wilson Pickett with its house band, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. The band was white, the singer was Black, the studio was in Alabama in 1967, and none of that was incidental to the story. Wexler was betting that music made in that room, by musicians who understood Southern soul from the inside, would do something that a New York or Los Angeles session with studio professionals could not do. He was also betting on Franklin herself, on her piano playing as much as her singing, and on her ability to lead a band she had never met. The first day in Muscle Shoals would test every part of that bet, and it would produce, in a few hours, the two songs that changed her career, one finished and one not.
Two men, a hotel room, and a cheating song
The song Franklin was to finish, and then abandon, and then finish again, had been written by two men who knew Muscle Shoals and Memphis from the inside. Dan Penn was a singer, songwriter, and producer from the Muscle Shoals world, a man whose voice and writing carried the grain of Southern soul. Lincoln Wayne Moman, known as Chips Moman, was a guitarist, producer, and songwriter who would later run American Sound Studio in Memphis and work with Elvis Presley, among many others. Together they had written songs that understood the moral weather of Southern relationships, songs in which desire and loyalty and betrayal were not abstractions but daily facts. The story of how they wrote this particular song, as it has been retold, begins at a disc jockeys’ convention in Memphis in 1966, where the two men set themselves the task of writing the finest song about infidelity they could manage, and then found themselves, in a hotel room borrowed from a record man, working out a song that turned the usual cheating song inside out.
The usual cheating song, in country and soul alike, was often told from the point of view of a man excusing himself, or a woman pleading, or a narrator observing someone else’s trouble. Penn and Moman’s song did something different. It addressed the man directly, and it insisted on reciprocity: if a man wanted loyalty, tenderness, and respect at home, he had to offer the same in return. It was not a scolding song, and it was not a sentimental song. It was a song built on a simple moral equation, stated calmly, and the calmness was the point. The singer was not begging. She was laying down terms, and the terms were fair. That fairness gave the song its title, its structure, and its lasting power, because it allowed Franklin, when she finally sang it, to sound not like a victim and not like an avenger but like an adult setting out how a relationship should work. The song’s gospel colouring, the way its melody rose and fell like a sermon and its piano part moved like a church accompaniment, made that calmness sound earned rather than performed, as if the singer had learned the lesson in a harder school than the recording studio.
Penn and Moman’s original intention, according to the accounts that have survived, was to offer the song to James Carr, a great deep-soul singer, and the hotel-room story, with its borrowed room and its convention setting, has the ring of a working songwriters’ anecdote rather than a polished legend. What matters for Franklin’s story is not the first intended singer but the fact that the song arrived at FAME Studios unfinished in one crucial respect. It had verses, it had a feeling, and it had a melody that Penn could demonstrate, but it did not yet have a bridge, the middle section that would lift the song out of its verses and give it a shape. Wexler, who had heard the song and wanted Franklin to record it, told Penn and Moman that he liked it but that it needed that bridge. That conversation, and the work that followed, would become one of the most vivid small scenes in soul history, because the bridge was written, in part, while the session was already under way.
A day in Muscle Shoals
The session at FAME Studios began on 24 January 1967, and the first song cut that day was not the song this article is about. It was “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” a slow blues written by Ronnie Shannon that Wexler had chosen as Franklin’s first Atlantic single, and it was recorded, by every account, with astonishing speed and confidence. Franklin sat at the piano, the Muscle Shoals band found the groove, and a singer who had spent years being arranged into different shapes suddenly sounded, for the first time on record, like herself: gospel-rooted, blues-wise, and utterly in command. The musicians, who had never worked with her before, responded to her piano playing and her direction, and the room, which had produced hits for other singers, produced something different for Franklin, something that felt less like a session and more like a church service that happened to be recorded. That first triumph matters for the story of the second song, because it set a standard and a mood. The band was warm, the singer was confident, and the next song should have been a formality.
It was not a formality, because the next song was not ready. Spooner Oldham, the FAME keyboard player whose recollections have become central to this history, later described what happened in plain terms: the band cut a skeletal track for the song that would become “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” but the song itself was not finished. It had, in Oldham’s account, two verses and no bridge. While the band was recording the first song, Penn was, in Oldham’s memorable image, in a closet trying to write that bridge, and the process of finishing the song became a group effort, with Franklin offering a line and Wexler offering a line as the work went on. Penn, who had to show the band how the song went, sang a guide vocal himself, in a range that was high for him, because Franklin had not yet learned the song. The image is almost comic, a songwriter straining to sing a song written for a great female voice, in a small room, while a historic session unfolded around him, but it is also revealing. It shows a song being built in public, in real time, by people who believed in it enough to keep working on it even when it was not ready, and it shows a producer, Wexler, who was willing to let a session become a workshop rather than insisting on a finished product.
The workshop was interrupted, and the interruption has become famous, though the details differ from account to account and this article does not pretend to settle them. What is consistent across the accounts is the outline: during or after the first day’s work, a dispute involving Franklin’s husband and manager, Ted White, and a member of the studio world escalated, first in the studio and then at the motel where Franklin and White were staying, where Rick Hall went to try to smooth things over and the meeting went badly wrong. Some accounts describe a fight, some describe raised voices and a brawl, and some mention gunshots, while Franklin herself, in later years, said she remembered little of the motel incident. The one fact on which the accounts agree is the outcome: Franklin and White left Muscle Shoals the next morning, the session was abandoned, and Wexler would never again cut a record at FAME Studios. The song that had been started, with its half-written bridge and its guide vocal, was left unfinished on tape, and the singer who was to make it her own disappeared, in the words of one account, for several weeks.
That disappearance has often been told as a dramatic flourish, but it is better understood as a practical and human pause. A singer who had just had a bruising first day with a new label, in an unfamiliar town, with a husband and manager whose temper had helped end the session, needed time before she could return to a studio. Wexler, meanwhile, had a single to release, and he had, in the first song cut that day, a record he believed in. He pressed ahead with “I Never Loved a Man” as a single, and he began planning how to finish the album and the unfinished song in New York, where he could control the room and where Franklin could work with musicians she trusted and with her sisters. The unfinished song, in that plan, was not discarded. It was to be completed first, quickly, and released as the other side of the single, because Wexler wanted the world to hear, on the very first Franklin single for Atlantic, both sides of the new singer: the passionate declaration of the A-side and the calm, principled statement of the B-side.
Finishing it in New York
The New York sessions, at Atlantic Studios, were different in every way that mattered. The Muscle Shoals band, minus the trumpeter at the centre of the dispute, travelled north for some of the work, but the room was Atlantic’s own, the city was Franklin’s professional home ground, and the singer was no longer a stranger leading an unfamiliar band. More importantly, she was no longer alone at the microphone. When the unfinished song was finally completed, Franklin brought her sisters Carolyn and Erma Franklin to sing backing vocals, and, in some accounts, Cissy Houston as well, and the effect of those voices together is one of the defining sounds of the finished record. The sisters did not merely harmonise. They surrounded the lead vocal with a family sound, a church sound, a sound that made the song’s message feel communal rather than solitary. A woman singing alone about fairness in love can sound like a plea. A woman singing with her sisters behind her sounds like a standard being set, and that is how the finished record feels: not lonely, but supported, not fragile, but firm.
Penn’s reaction when he first heard the finished record has been retold so often that it risks sounding like a press release, but the detail that makes it believable is its specificity. He had last heard the song as his own strained guide vocal over a skeletal track. He was called into the Atlantic control room by Wexler, and he heard Franklin, with her sisters, singing the song he had helped write, now complete, now shaped by a voice he could not have imagined when he wrote it. By his own account, the experience knocked him down, and he later described the finished record as the best record Franklin ever made. That is a large claim, made by a man who knew Franklin’s catalogue and who had a writer’s interest in his own song, and it should be read as a writer’s astonishment rather than as a ranking that can be proved. What it captures, though, is the distance between sketch and finished work. The sketch had been a good song. The finished record was something else: a performance that made the song’s moral argument feel inevitable, as if the words had always belonged to that voice.
The single was released on 10 February 1967, with “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You)” on one side and “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” on the other, and the album that contained both, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” followed on 10 March 1967. The A-side became Franklin’s first major hit, reaching the top of the rhythm-and-blues chart and the top ten of the pop chart, and it announced her, at last, as a commercial force. The B-side did not chart on the pop chart in its own right, in the United States, Canada, or Britain, but it did reach number 37 on the rhythm-and-blues chart, a respectable showing for a B-side and a sign that radio programmers and listeners were flipping the record over. That modest chart position is, in a way, the perfect emblem of the song’s career. It was never the headline. It was the other side, the song you found when you turned the record over, the song that rewarded the listener who stayed past the hit. Its influence would grow not through a chart run but through repetition, through other singers learning it, through critics citing it, and through listeners discovering that the most interesting thing on a historic single was sometimes on the side you were not supposed to play first.
What the record actually sounds like
It is worth slowing down to describe the finished record, because its power is not in volume or in display. It is in restraint. The arrangement is sparse by the standards of the soul records that would follow, with piano at the centre, a rhythm section that leaves space, and horns used sparingly rather than as a wall. Franklin’s piano playing, often overlooked in discussions that focus only on her voice, sets the temperature of the record. She plays with the touch of a church musician, not showing off, not filling every gap, but placing chords where they will support the vocal and then getting out of the way. Her singing, in turn, is a study in control. She does not push the song toward a climax in the way a later soul ballad might. She lets the melody unfold, she phrases behind and ahead of the beat in the way gospel singers do when they are testifying rather than performing, and she saves her greatest intensity for the moments when the song’s argument is at its clearest. The backing vocals, from her sisters, do not compete with her. They answer her, they affirm her, and they give the record its feeling of a community witnessing a statement.
That restraint is what makes the song’s message land. The argument of the song, paraphrased rather than quoted, is that a man who wants a woman’s full devotion, tenderness, and loyalty must offer the same devotion, tenderness, and loyalty in return, and that a woman is not a plaything but a person, flesh and blood like the man himself. Stated baldly, that sounds like a slogan. Sung by Franklin, over that piano and with those sisters behind her, it sounds like lived knowledge. The song does not threaten, and it does not beg. It states a condition, calmly, and the calmness is more powerful than anger would have been, because it implies that the singer has already decided what she will accept and is simply informing the listener. In 1967, when the song was released, that calmness had a cultural charge that is easy to miss from a later vantage point. The women’s movement was gathering force, the civil rights movement had already shown what disciplined, nonviolent moral argument could do, and a Black woman singing, on a hit record, that she expected fairness as a matter of course was not merely a love song. It was a public statement, made in the language of romance, about dignity.
It is important not to overstate that reading, and not to turn Franklin into a spokesperson for a movement she did not claim to lead in that moment. She was, first and foremost, a singer interpreting a song written by two men, and the song’s feminism, if that word is used, is implicit rather than programmatic. It does not name a movement, it does not cite a theory, and it does not ask the listener to join anything. It asks a man to behave well. That modesty is part of its strength, because it allows the song to be heard, fifty years later, not as a period piece but as a standard that still applies. A listener in any decade can understand the bargain it proposes, and can hear, in Franklin’s delivery, a woman who is not asking for something extraordinary but for something ordinary: to be treated as a person. The song’s endurance, then, is not a matter of fashion. It is a matter of the argument being so plain, and the performance so complete, that later generations do not need a history lesson to feel why it matters.
The B-side that outlived the chart
The most interesting part of this song’s afterlife is not its own chart position but the way other singers have used it to measure themselves. The list of artists who have recorded it is long and varied, and it tells a story about the song’s range. Etta James, whose voice could match Franklin’s for raw power, recorded it as a soul test. Joan Baez, whose folk background was very different, recorded a version inspired by Franklin’s, showing that the song could travel outside soul. The Flying Burrito Brothers, in 1969, turned it into what critics have described as a country-soul waltz, a reading that steered clear of trying to copy Franklin and instead found a different rhythm and feeling inside the same words. Barbara Mandrell took it to number 17 on the country chart in the early 1970s, proving that the song’s argument worked in country as well as soul. Willie Nelson, Cher, Dionne Warwick, Joe Cocker, Phoebe Snow, and many others have recorded it, and each version, whether it succeeds or not, is in effect an homage to Franklin’s original, because no singer approaches this song without knowing that Franklin sang it first and best.
That pattern, of a song becoming a standard through other singers’ attempts, is familiar in American music, but it has a particular poignancy here because the song was never a major hit in its own right. Standards are usually created by hits. This one was created by a B-side, by a performance that musicians heard and remembered even when the public at large was focused on the A-side and on the even bigger hits that followed, from the same album and from the albums after it. The song’s reputation, in other words, was built by professionals and by serious listeners, by people who flipped records over and who listened to albums all the way through, rather than by a chart campaign. That is why Penn’s judgement, that it was Franklin’s best record, has carried weight even though the public might name other songs first. Penn was speaking as a musician who had heard the song at its weakest and at its strongest, and who knew what had been added between those two states: not just a bridge, but a voice, a family, and a room in New York where a singer could finally finish what Alabama had interrupted.
The song also lived on in film and in live performance, where its slow tempo and its moral clarity made it a natural choice for scenes about relationships under pressure. Its appearance in the 1995 film “Dead Presidents” is one example of how a 1967 B-side can find a new audience decades later, not as nostalgia but as atmosphere, as a sound that tells a viewer, without exposition, what kind of world the characters inhabit. Franklin herself returned to the song throughout her career, and live versions, where they survive, show her treating it not as a museum piece but as a living part of her repertoire, a song she could still shape with phrasing and dynamics even when her voice changed with age. A song that can survive that kind of long use, that can be sung by its originator for decades and by other singers in other genres, has proved something that a chart position cannot prove: that its structure is sound, that its argument is durable, and that its melody can carry different voices without breaking.
Why it is not just a Muscle Shoals story
There is a temptation, when telling this story, to make it entirely about Muscle Shoals: the small studio, the great band, the fight, the flight, the legend. That temptation should be resisted, because the most important part of the song’s creation did not happen in Muscle Shoals. It happened in New York, in a room where Franklin was surrounded by family and by musicians who understood her, and where a sketch became a finished record. Muscle Shoals gave the song its first groove, its first skeletal track, and its first dramatic interruption, but New York gave it its voice. If the story is told only as a Muscle Shoals story, Franklin risks becoming a visitor in her own record, a singer who happened to pass through Alabama and left with a hit. If it is told as a two-city story, with Alabama providing the beginning and New York providing the completion, Franklin becomes what she was: the author of the performance, the pianist who shaped the groove, the singer who chose her sisters as her chorus, and the artist who decided, after a bruising experience, to finish a song on her own terms.
That distinction matters for another reason. The existing story of the Muscle Shoals session, as it is usually told, centres on the other song cut that day, the title track of the album, and on the fight that ended the session. That story is dramatic, and it is true in outline, but it can make the session sound like a single event with a single outcome. The story of this song shows that the session had two outcomes, not one, and that the second outcome took weeks to arrive. A listener who only knows the fight story might think that Franklin left Alabama with one great record and nothing else. A listener who knows this song’s story knows that she left with one great record and half of another, and that the half-record, finished later, became one of the most respected performances of her career. That is a more accurate picture of how recording careers actually work: not as a series of clean breakthroughs, but as a series of interrupted, resumed, and rescued efforts, in which a song can be left behind and then, with patience, brought home.
It also matters because it clarifies Franklin’s relationship with her husband and manager at that moment, a relationship that has often been simplified in retellings. Ted White was, by many accounts, a difficult and controlling figure, and his role in the Muscle Shoals dispute is part of why the session ended. But the finished record is not, in any simple sense, a song about White, and it should not be reduced to a biography of a marriage. The song was written by Penn and Moman before Franklin met it, its argument was general before it was personal, and Franklin’s performance universalises it rather than confining it to one relationship. To hear the song only as a message to one man is to miss its point, which is that the message applies to any man, in any relationship, and that its power comes from its generality. Franklin, who lived a complicated personal life and who guarded her privacy fiercely, was not in the habit of turning her records into diary entries. She turned them into statements that other people could use, and this song is one of the clearest examples of that gift.
The album around it
The album that contains the song, “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” deserves a brief word here, because the song’s position on it tells us how Wexler and Franklin understood it. The album is short by later standards, a collection of songs recorded in a hurry after the Muscle Shoals interruption, with the New York sessions supplying most of its tracks. It contains, alongside the title track and this song, a version of Otis Redding’s song that would become Franklin’s signature, a version of Sam Cooke’s song that would become a civil rights anthem in her hands, and originals and covers that show her range. In that company, a slow B-side ballad could easily have been overlooked, and for many years, by the public, it was. Critics and musicians, however, have consistently singled it out, and the album’s reputation as one of the great debuts for a new label rests, in part, on the fact that it contains not just hits but depth, not just a breakthrough single but a B-side that could stand beside the hits without embarrassment. An album that can do that is not a singles collection with filler. It is a statement, and this song is part of why that statement holds together.
The album’s success, in turn, changed Franklin’s career in ways that are hard to overstate. After years at Columbia, she was suddenly, in the spring of 1967, a star, with a top-ten pop single, a number-one rhythm-and-blues single, and an album that critics praised and that sold. The run that followed, through 1967 and 1968, produced a string of hits that made her the Queen of Soul, a title that was not a marketing invention but a recognition by audiences, by musicians, and by the press that she had become the defining female voice of soul music. In that run, this song is easy to miss, because it was not one of the run’s chart-toppers. But it is part of the foundation of that run, because it showed, on Franklin’s very first Atlantic single, that she could do more than deliver a passionate hit. She could deliver a quiet, principled, gospel-rooted performance that asked the listener to think as well as feel, and that range, between fire and restraint, would become the signature of her Atlantic years. A singer who can only shout is a limited singer. A singer who can shout and can also whisper a moral argument, with her sisters behind her, is a complete singer, and this record was the first proof, on Atlantic, of that completeness.
What the song asks of us now
Listening to the record today, more than half a century after it was finished in New York, the most striking thing is how little it has dated. The production is spare, the piano is clear, the voices are unadorned, and there is no studio trickery to date it. A modern listener does not need to know about Muscle Shoals, about FAME Studios, about Dan Penn’s closet, or about the fight at the motel to understand what the song is saying. The song explains itself, in its title and in its performance, and that self-sufficiency is rare. Many records from 1967 require a history lesson to be appreciated. This one requires only attention. Play it, listen to the piano, listen to the sisters answering the lead, listen to the way Franklin holds a phrase just long enough to make its meaning land, and the argument is clear. It is a song about fairness, and fairness does not go out of date, even when the language around it changes.
That clarity is also why the song has been so useful to other singers. A song that is too tied to its original singer’s personality can be hard to cover, because every version sounds like an imitation. A song that is built on a clear argument and a strong melody can be reinterpreted, because each new singer can bring a different life to the same argument. The Flying Burrito Brothers could turn it into a country waltz because the argument worked at a slower, swaying tempo. Barbara Mandrell could take it to the country chart because the argument worked in a country singer’s voice. Etta James could sing it as a soul test because the argument worked at full power. Each version, in succeeding or failing, proves the same thing: that the song is bigger than any one performance, even Franklin’s, and that its greatness lies in its structure as much as in its first recording. That is the highest compliment a song can receive, and it is a compliment this song has earned without ever topping the pop chart.
There is a final, quiet lesson in the song’s history, and it has to do with unfinished work. The song was unfinished when Franklin first met it, it was unfinished when she left Alabama, and it was finished only when she returned to it, weeks later, with help, in a different city, in a different room. That is a useful story for anyone who has ever left something unfinished and wondered whether it was lost. The song was not lost. It was waiting, on tape, for a singer who had not yet learned it, for a bridge that had not yet been written, for sisters who had not yet been called to the microphone. When those things came together, the result was not a compromise or a salvage job. It was, in its co-writer’s judgement, the best record the singer ever made. Whether that judgement is accepted or not, the fact that it could be made at all, about a B-side that began as a sketch, tells us something important about how art works. It does not always arrive finished. Sometimes it arrives interrupted, and the interruption, handled with patience, becomes part of the finished work’s depth. The voice that sings this song sounds patient because the song itself was made patiently, across two cities and several weeks, by people who refused to throw it away.
Why it endures
“Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” endures, finally, because it is both a great performance and a fair argument, and because those two things are rarer together than they should be. Great performances often overwhelm their material, making a weak song sound strong for three minutes and then fade. Fair arguments often make for dull songs, because moral clarity can sound like lecturing when it is not carried by melody and feeling. This record avoids both traps. Franklin’s performance does not overwhelm the song; it serves it, letting the melody and the words do their work without display. And the song’s argument does not lecture; it invites, it states a condition, and it leaves the listener free to accept or reject it, knowing that the singer has already made her own decision. That combination, of a voice that serves a song and a song that respects its listener, is what makes a record last beyond its chart run, beyond its era, and beyond the story of its troubled birth.
If there is a single image to carry away from this story, it is not the fight in Alabama, and it is not the chart position, and it is not even the famous first day in Muscle Shoals. It is a quieter image: a singer in New York, weeks after a session collapsed, standing with her sisters around a microphone, singing a song she had not yet learned when she first heard it, and finding, in that singing, a calm and a firmness that the sketch had only promised. That image captures what Franklin did best, and what this song does best: it turns a difficult beginning into a steady, dignified ending, not by pretending the difficulty did not happen, but by finishing the work anyway, with family beside her, and with a voice that makes fairness sound not like a demand but like a fact. A woman, the song says, is a person. A man, it says, should act accordingly. Franklin sang that as if it were obvious, and because she sang it that way, for more than fifty years, listeners have heard it as obvious too. That is not a small achievement. It is, in its quiet way, the whole achievement of the record, and it is why a B-side that began unfinished in Alabama still sounds, today, like a finished statement about how people should treat each other.