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What’s Wrong with Hypocrisy?

One of the biggest stories in the run-up to the U.S. election in November has been Trump’s choice of running-mate, JD Vance. The choice surprised many, given that Vance has previously been very upfront about his dislike for Trump, calling him “morally reprehensible” and even going so far as to refer to him as “America’s Hitler.” While some Trump supporters have held up Vance as an exemplar of a reasonable person who can change their minds, others have called him a hypocrite.

While it’s common to hear politicians exchanging barbs by accusing each other of lying, cheating, and other nefarious acts, hypocrisy is a charge that seems to cut particularly deep. But what’s wrong with hypocrisy, anyway?

Let’s first think about what it means to be a hypocrite. One intuitive characterization is that the hypocrite doesn’t “practice what they preach,” in one way or another – think about the vegan who chastises others for eating animals while ordering a hamburger, or the priest who sermonizes about the sanctity of marriage but is then caught cheating. Cases like these involve a kind of mismatch, one between the hypocrite’s actions and their beliefs, judgments, or other attitudes.

But now we have something of a puzzle: what’s so bad about one’s actions failing to align with their attitudes? We could, of course, judge the hypocrite based on the actions they perform: we might chastise the hypocritical priest for their infidelity, or the vegan for supporting an industry that harms animals. But the moral status of the actions the hypocrite performs doesn’t tell us what’s wrong with hypocrisy itself.

As philosopher R. Jay Wallace notes, the puzzle deepens when we recognize that some amount of hypocrisy is a common, even necessary part of our everyday lives. After all, we often act in ways that are not reflective of our attitudes in order to navigate social and professional situations: you might complain in private that someone is a bore but hang out with them anyway, for example, or tell a young family member that they should never drink alcohol before grabbing a beer once they’ve gone to bed. There are plenty of relatively harmless cases where we tell others to do as we say but not as we do. So why do some cases of hypocrisy seem so much worse than others?

One aspect that seems to be common throughout many cases of hypocrisy is deception. By acting in a way that doesn’t reflect their stated beliefs, the hypocrite seems to be misleading you in some way: after all, if they really believed something then they would act like it. So maybe what’s wrong with hypocrisy is that by being a hypocrite one is also a liar.

But this also doesn’t seem to be the whole story, since there are plausible cases of hypocrisy that don’t involve attempts at deception. Wallace considers a politician who unrepentantly criticizes behaviors of others that they themselves have performed: for example, a politician might have a platform that is centered on fighting corruption, but is open about their own history of shady business dealings; or perhaps they march in a protest among environmental activists despite their public involvement with oil companies. There is not necessarily any deception occurring in these cases: the hypocrite isn’t trying to fool you into thinking they haven’t done the things they’ve done, they’re just saying one thing and doing another.

We can also see how cases of genuine hypocrisy can sometimes be difficult to distinguish from cases of changing one’s mind. Of course, if someone has legitimately updated their beliefs, it seems unfair to call them a hypocrite when their actions don’t align with views they no longer hold. Indeed, in response to charges that his support of Trump constitutes hypocrisy, JD Vance has maintained that he has simply changed his mind.

Whether this is a satisfying explanation is up for debate. Some have argued that since Vance’s past comments were so extreme it is difficult to believe that he now genuinely supports a person he explicitly despised. But even if we grant that he has changed his mind, we might still feel that something is not quite right with Vance’s actions: if you’ve spent so long being so openly critical of someone, then joining their campaign and telling others that you should vote for them might still feel hypocritical.

The explanation as to why this might be the case can help us locate why hypocrisy seems to be such a significant moral failing: in failing to practice what they preach, the hypocrite holds others to a standard that they themselves do not adhere to. As Wallace argues, the mismatch between a hypocrite’s attitudes and their actions shows that they consider their interests to be more important than those of others, and that they ascribe themselves a moral standing they are not willing to extend to those they may be critical of. Hypocrisy, then, may seem so morally reprehensible because the hypocrite takes themselves to be exempt from certain rules that they expect others to adhere to.

Philosophers Jessica Isserow and Colin Klein argue along similar lines: in their view, the hypocrite has “undermined any claim they have to act as a moral authority” by virtue of the mismatch between their judgments and their actions. This is perhaps why the most egregious cases of hypocrisy seem to be those that come from people who take themselves to be in a position to cast moral judgments on others – the meat-eating vegan, for example, or cheating priest. Or vice-presidential candidate.

We can see why the charge of hypocrisy is levied with such opprobrium towards politicians: in virtue of being public figures in privileged positions, it is a serious indictment of character to fail to live up to the standards of moral authority that they are ascribed.

Whether Vance is a hypocrite is up for debate. Regardless, given how many times he’s reportedly changed his mind over social and political issues, the accusations aren’t likely to go away any time soon.

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Hypocrisy and Credibility in U.S. Foreign Policy

Wide-angle photo of a tattered American flag

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine enters its second week, much of the world appears to be united in opposition to Russian aggression and support for an economic blockade that has already caused the value of the Russian ruble to drop by thirty percent. Although Putin is still capable of snuffing out Ukrainian resistance, it appears that he underestimated both Ukraine’s willingness to fight and the world’s willingness to punish Russia for violating its neighbor’s sovereignty. Ultimately, Putin’s geopolitical gamble, which is aimed at resurrecting something like the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, may backfire spectacularly, leading Eastern European nations to embrace the West more fervently than ever before.

Of course, the United States has been among the leaders of efforts to sanction Putin for his war of aggression. In the diplomatic negotiations leading up to the war, it rejected Russia’s demand that NATO retreat from Eastern Europe. The United States plausibly believes that Putin’s objections to NATO expansion are pretextual. The man who famously said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century would have waged war on Russia’s neighbors even without NATO expansion if they demonstrated a desire to align themselves with the West politically, economically, and culturally. According to this narrative, Putin’s aim is not, as he claims, to maintain a neutral buffer zone between Russia and expansionist Western powers, but to throttle the democratic aspirations of small nations. And U.S. support for these nations reflects its longstanding commitment to national self-determination.

Again, this is a plausible story, but when the United States tells it, its past actions undermine its standing as the storyteller. For over two hundred years, the United States pursued a policy of zero tolerance of other major powers’ involvement in the political affairs of the Western hemisphere, or even the political alignment of countries in the Americas and the Caribbean with other major powers. Thus, the so-called “Banana Wars” of the early twentieth century saw successive administrations invade various Caribbean and Central American nations, often to deter foreign meddling. For example, the Wilson administration sent the U.S. Marines to invade Haiti in 1915 because, among other things, he feared German influence over Haitian affairs and even a possible German invasion of Haiti.

During the Cold War, the U.S. acted aggressively to isolate and, if possible, overthrow Marxist or socialist governments in the Americas, seeing them as potential Soviet allies or proxies. In 1954, for example, the CIA toppled a socialist government in Guatemala and attempted to justify the coup by producing evidence of Soviet meddling in the country’s affairs. When Fidel Castro established a pro-Soviet regime in Cuba in 1959, the U.S. responded with an economic blockade, an attempted invasion, and numerous plots to assassinate him. The U.S. covertly backed a coup against a social democratic government in Brazil in 1964, and in 1965 it invaded the Dominican Republic in order to prevent what the Johnson administration believed to be a second Cuban revolution. In 1973, the CIA helped overthrow the Soviet-friendly democratic socialist government of Chile and install a pro-American dictator. When the Soviet-aligned Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979, the Reagan administration, fearing that they might export Marxist revolution to other Central American countries, backed the Contras’ bid to overthrow them through the use of brutal terroristic violence. And in 1983, the Reagan administration launched an invasion of Grenada, which it justified on the grounds that its non-aligned Marxist government was aiding a Soviet-Cuban military buildup in the Caribbean.

The point of this recitation is not to defend Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. When a blamer is accused of hypocrisy for acting in the same manner as the person she blames, the accusation does nothing to justify the behavior of the blame’s target. Instead, it calls into question the sincerity of the blamer’s commitment to the principle she blames others for violating. The accusation goes to the blamer’s standing as a blamer, and as a result, it has a tendency to affect others’ willingness to take the blamer seriously and to accept the blamer as a moral leader.

Thus, the U.S.’s actions in the Western hemisphere genuinely undermine its standing to blame Russia for waging aggressive war aimed at establishing dominance over its immediate neighbors. Of course, Putin makes just this point at every opportunity. As of now, most countries appear to accept the U.S.’s leadership. But how many politically-engaged people with a little knowledge of history have been led to sympathize with Putin’s agenda, or at least doubt the validity of the liberal international order, by their awareness of this hypocrisy? According to reports, many Chinese citizens, conditioned by years of Chinese propaganda harping on American hypocrisy in foreign affairs, appear to be largely sympathetic to the invasion.

Again, Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine is wrong. Indeed, I believe that it is my generation’s Spanish Civil War: a canary in the coal mine, a prelude to a larger conflict between the world’s rising illiberal powers and its floundering liberal democracies. I know what side I’m on. But for the sake of the liberal international order, the U.S. must take more seriously its responsibility to act in accordance with the principles it avows.

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Boris Johnson and the Hypocrisy of Lawmakers

photograph of Boris Johnson making a face

There is something ridiculous about the idea that Boris Johnson might have to resign for hosting a few parties. You might think that it is his policies, or his saying he’d rather “let the bodies pile high” than institute further lockdowns, that should see him go. But parties?

The problem with these gatherings is that they violated COVID regulations, regulations set by Johnson and his party. And the fact that he violated his own decrees (nobody takes seriously his claim that the parties were, in fact, work events) raises an interesting question: what’s so wrong about lawmakers breaking the law?

The first obvious, but bland, answer is that – in a fair legal system – breaking the law simply is wrong, and it’s wrong for lawmakers to break the law in just the same way that it is wrong for anybody to break the law.

This might be a reasonable explanation for why it is wrong for lawmakers to break some laws. For instance, if a lawmaker breaks the speed limit, that seems bad in the same way as if an ordinary member of the public breaks the speed limit. This isn’t just because it is a minor offense. If a member of parliament went and murdered someone, it would be a grave moral wrong, but I don’t think there would be anything especially wrong about it.

In these cases, the wrongness involved is simply the (appalling or minor) wrongness of breaking the law. But there seems to be something especially bad about Johnson’s behavior.

What I think is key is that there is something more involved when a lawmaker breaks a law they have set. Gideon Yaffe has an interesting argument that could lead to this conclusion. He thinks that, since the law is created by citizens in communities, we are complicit in the creation of these laws. But some people are more complicit than others. For instance, kids aren’t very complicit at all in creating the law (since they can’t vote). Yaffe thinks that the more (or less) complicit one is in creating a law, the stronger (or weaker) that law’s reasons apply to you, and the more strongly (or weakly) you should be punished for violating it. And someone like Johnson was maximally complicit in setting England’s COVID laws.

But I’m not sure I’m persuaded. I simply do not buy Yaffe’s “complicity” argument: I don’t see why we need to suppose that the more say someone has over the law, the more it binds them. And I think there is something to be said for the idea that we are all equal before the law: politicians should be punished, but they shouldn’t face any harsher legal punishment than Joe Bloggs.

It’s also important to note that there isn’t really a push for Johnson to see legal punishment. Although some people want to see that, the real focus is on him facing a political punishment. They want him to resign in disgrace. And I think that what explains this pressure is that Johnson has shown that he cannot take his own laws seriously – and taking the law seriously is the point of being a politician.

We can get to this idea by thinking about hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is problematic in politics because it undermines how seriously we take someone. During the 1990s, John Major’s government had a campaign called “Back to Basics,” which aimed to underscore the importance of traditional values like “neighbourliness, decency, courtesy.” Inevitably, Major’s cabinet was then beset by scandal.

The behavior of Major’s cabinet suggested that they did not take these values very seriously. But this was a moral campaign, the difference that compounds Johnson’s case is that his hypocrisy involves the laws he set.

Johnson was not just a hypocrite, he was a hypocrite about the laws he set, laws which are supposed to protect the public. To return to an earlier example, there might not be anything especially wrong if an ordinary lawmaker speeds, but a lawmaker elected on a platform of making the roads safer might do something especially wrong because they are being a hypocrite. By being a hypocrite, this lawmaker shows that she does not – despite her claims – really take speeding laws seriously, she does not act as though they are important. Likewise, by attending parties, Johnson showed that he did not take these laws seriously, and – if the purpose of the laws is to protect the public – he showed that he did not care about protecting the public.

(Alternatively, he showed that he thinks he is special, different from the rest of us: that he can party whilst his laws stop grieving relatives from saying goodbye to their loved ones. I’ll set aside this possibility.)

Johnson (as well as the hypocritical speedster) demonstrated a lack of care about the underlying issues: protecting the public (or keeping to the speed limit) is not important to him. But it also strikes at the strength of this law. Our system of law is not supposed to be simply a matter of force, where the most powerful get the least powerful to comply with what they want. Rather, the law is supposed to provide us with genuine reasons to act, that are somehow linked to the good of others in our community. Nowhere is this more clear than with attempts to curb the ravages of COVID-19.

Everywhere, there is skepticism about COVID-19 laws. They inherently curb our freedoms. By not taking COVID-19 laws seriously, Johnson suggested that the laws are not to be taken seriously. But it is only by taking good laws seriously that they remain good laws, laws which govern us as rational agents rather than as those merely fearful of greater power.

That is why Johnson is under political pressure to resign: Johnson has shown himself incapable of taking seriously the laws he creates, which is the entire point of being Prime Minister. His behavior undermined the justification of the laws he set.

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What Hypocrisy Tells Us

photograph of the lighted front of the Metropolitan museum of art at night

On September 13th, 2021, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attended the 2021 MET Gala wearing a white ball gown emblazoned with the phrase “Tax the Rich” in bright red lettering. The command on the dress was a reference to Ocasio-Cortez’s fiscal platform policy of increasing the tax burden on the wealthiest 1% of U.S. earners. Wearing (literal) statement pieces to the red-carpet Hollywood events is nothing new; celebrities such as Megan Rapinoe and Cara Delevingne have both attended the MET Gala in pieces protesting various social injustices, and Lady Gaga famously attended the MTV’s VMAs in a dress made of meat to protest the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Predictably, Ocasio-Cortez’s look immediately received a flood of attention, some positive, and some quite negative. The most prominent thread of criticism, however, was not criticism of the political position itself. Rather, critics on both sides of the aisle took issue with Ocasio-Cortez advocating for increasing taxes on the rich while attending a tax-payer subsidized event that costs a minimum of $30,000 per ticket. In other words, people were upset that someone would perform (what they took to be) a criticism of extreme wealth while attending an event that indicated they themselves had access to, and benefited from, extreme wealth. That is to say, people accused Ocasio-Cortez of being a hypocrite.

Accusations of political hypocrisy are a fairly standard complaint to make, not only of politicians and public figures, but sometimes also of a movement as a whole. Consider this critique of anti-abortion politicians by a group called Pro-Choice America. Herein, Pro-Choice America accuses politically conservative people who are against legalized abortion of being hypocrites in virtue of rejecting other policy proposals. The other policy proposals in question include: nationalized healthcare, subsidized higher education, affordable housing, eased immigration restrictions, and so on. Their insinuated argument is something like the following: if you are against abortion because you are “pro-life”, then consistency demands you also favor other political positions that would help people live better lives.

From the other side of the aisle, since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, republicans have been accusing democrat politicians of hypocrisy for instances of failing to abide by the masking and social distancing rules they have signed into law. Such failures include instances of gathering indoors without masks, patronizing salons and restaurants, and hosting birthday parties with long guest lists.

But what is the purpose of pointing out apparent ideological hypocrisy of individuals or groups? If Nancy Pelosi acts hypocritically in failing to conform to mask mandates that she endorsed, does this indicate that mask mandates are not a good policy after all? There is no obvious connection between a person’s failure to act consistently in accordance with their beliefs, and the falseness of those beliefs. That is, hypocrisy on the part of advocates is not straightforward evidence against the policies they are advocating for. It may be that the policies themselves are the correct ones to implement — the advocates may be merely weak-willed. Yet, charges of hypocrisy are often brought forth as evidence against the beliefs of the would-be hypocrite. Is pointing out hypocrisy a legitimate way of critiquing someone’s beliefs or policy positions?

A common response to perceived hypocrisy is that, in acting hypocritically, we lose the right to advocate for certain beliefs or policies. For example, a politician who advocates against legal abortion may be accused of lacking the right to an opinion on the matter if it is revealed that he once procured an abortion for a pregnant mistress. Are hypocrites doing something wrong by speaking out of turn? It is hard to see exactly how one may lose a “right” to speak to an issue merely by failing to live up to their own standards. There is no commonly-recognized moral duty to only speak up in favor of behaviors that you yourself follow. Additionally, if consequences are what matter morally, then one ought to advocate for correct policies even if they are so weak-willed that they cannot follow their own prescriptions. Of course, it would be better if one could, as they say, take their own medicine, but it would still maximize the good to encourage other people to act well/implement good policies, regardless of whether they act consistently in their private life. For example, if mask mandates maximized well-being for the country as a whole, then politicians who refused to wear a mask would still (according to utilitarianism) do best to advocate for mask mandates.

On the other hand, a virtue ethicist like Aristotle might say that behaving hypocritically, either by failing to act on your convictions or by advocating for positions you do not truly accept, is a sign of vice — that is, bad character. And having bad character may incline one to believe, or advocate for, bad positions and policies. At least, we are probably more confident in the judgments of people with good character than the judgments of people with bad character. And so, if hypocrisy is a sign of bad character, this could provide some indirect evidence against the views or policies in question.

From a psychological perspective, we may infer from an act of hypocrisy that the person in question is being dishonest about what they say they believe. For example, we may suspect that someone’s true reasons for opposing legal abortion is misogynistic in nature rather than related to the inherent value of life if they advocate for other policies that fail to adequately value life. But even if someone is lying or being misleading about their true beliefs, this should not upset any additional evidence we have in favor of those beliefs or policies. Someone who thinks abortion is wrong on the basis of arguments would not be dissuaded merely because some politician lied about his desire to protect all life. Someone who believes, for social and economic reasons, that the tax burden on the top 1% of U.S. earners should be increased, would not be dissuaded from this belief even if Ocasio-Cortez acted hypocritically in attending the MET Gala.

In conclusion, charges of hypocrisy hit hard, but it is not clear exactly whether, or how, the charges constitute a criticism of the positions of the supposed hypocrite. Regardless, we would likely do better to focus more on the beliefs and policies themselves than on the fallible humans endorsing them.

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Do Politicians Have a Right to Privacy?

photograph of Matt Hancock delivering press briefing

On Friday, June 25th, 2021, British tabloid The Sun dropped a bombshell: leaked CCTV images of (then) UK Health Secretary, MP Matt Hancock, kissing a political aide in his office. Video footage of the pair intimately embracing rapidly circulated on social media. Notably, the ensuing outrage centered not on the fact that Hancock was cheating on his wife (lest we forget, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is himself a serial offender), but on the hypocrisy of Hancock breaching his own social distancing guidelines. By the next day, with his position looking increasingly untenable, Hancock resigned. Thus, the man who had headed up the UK’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic over the past 18 months was toppled by a single smooch.

In the wake of this political scandal, it is useful to take a step back and consider the ethical issues which this episode brings to light. Following the release of the video, Hancock pleaded for “privacy for my family on this personal matter.” What is privacy, and why is it valuable? Does a distinct right to privacy exist? Do politicians plausibly waive certain rights to privacy in running for public office? When (if ever) can an individual’s right to privacy be justifiably infringed, and was this the case in the Hancock affair?

It is widely accepted that human beings have a very strong interest in maintaining a hidden interior which they can choose not to share with others. The general contents of this interior will differ widely between cultures; after all, what facts count as ‘private’ is a contingent matter which will vary depending on the social context. Nevertheless, according to the philosophy professor Tom Sorell, this hidden interior can roughly be divided into three constituents (at least, in most Western contexts): the home, the body, and the mind.

There are a plethora of reasons as to why privacy is important to us. For instance, let us briefly consider why we might value a hidden psychological interior. Without the ability to shield one’s inner thoughts from others, individuals would not be able to engage in autonomous self-reflection, and consequently would be a different self altogether. Moreover, according to the philosopher James Rachels, the ability to keep certain aspects of ourselves hidden is essential to our capacity to form a diverse range of interpersonal social relationships. If we were always compelled to reveal our most intimate secrets, then this would not only devalue our most meaningful relationships, but would also make it impossible to form less-intimate relationships such as mere acquaintances (which I take to be valuable in their own right).

There is considerable debate over whether a distinct right to privacy exists. As the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson famously noted, “perhaps the most striking thing about the right to privacy is that nobody seems to have any very clear idea what it is.” According to Thomson, this can be explained by the fact that our seeming ‘right’ to privacy is in fact wholly derivative of a cluster of other rights which we hold, such as rights over our property or our body; put another way, our interest in privacy can be wholly attributed to our interest in other goods which are best served by recognizing a discrete, private realm, such that we have no separate interest in something called ‘privacy’.

Suppose that a right to privacy does in fact exist. Can this right to privacy be (i) waived, (ii) forfeited, or (iii) trumped? Let us go through each in turn. A right is waived if the rights-holder voluntarily forgoes that right. Many people believe that certain rights (for instance, the right not to be enslaved) cannot be voluntarily waived. However, intuitively it would seem that privacy is not such an inalienable right: there are plenty of goods which we may legitimately want to trade privacy off against, such as our ability to communicate with others online. It could be argued that, in choosing to run for public office, politicians waive certain rights to privacy which other members of the public retain, since they do so in the knowledge that a certain degree of media scrutiny is a necessary part of being a public servant. Perhaps, then, Hancock had waived his right to keeping his sexual life private, in virtue of having run for public office.

A right is arguably forfeited if the rights-holder commits certain acts of wrongdoing. For instance, according to the so-called rights forfeiture theory of punishment, “punishment is justified when and because the criminal has forfeited her right not to be subjected to this hard treatment.” For those who endorse this (albeit controversial) view, it could perhaps be thought that Hancock forfeited his right not to have this sexual life publicized, in virtue of having culpably committed the wrongdoing of breaching social distancing guidelines and/or hypocrisy.

Finally, can a right to privacy be trumped? Philosophers disagree about whether it is coherent to talk about rights ‘trumping’ one another. According to the philosopher Hillel Steiner, rights comprise a logically compossible set, meaning that they never conflict with one another. By contrast, philosophers such as Thomson maintain that rights can and do conflict with each other.

Suppose that we think that the latter is true. In an instance where an agent’s right to privacy conflicts with the right of another agent, we must determine whose interests are weightier and give them priority. In the case of the Hancock saga, it could be said that there was a strong public interest in knowing that the Health Secretary had breached his own social distancing guidelines. However, the mere existence of a public interest in knowing this information is not sufficient to generate a right on behalf of the public to find out this information; moreover, even if it did, this would not necessarily trump the right of the individual politician to privacy.

So, did the leaking of the CCTV footage breach Hancock’s right to privacy? And if so, were the newspaper reports nevertheless justified on balance? My own view is that Hancock had neither waived nor forfeited his right to privacy, and that his right to privacy was not trumped by other considerations – that is to say, I think that the leaking of the footage wronged Hancock in some way. Nevertheless, I have complete sympathy with the subsequent public reaction to the newspaper reports. Throughout the pandemic, many facts which had previously been regarded as paradigmatically ‘private’ (such as whether one was sexually active, and with whom) were suddenly subject to a very high degree of public intrusion. Set against this backdrop, the Hancock affair served as yet another instance of “one rule for the establishment, another for everyone else.”

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On Speaking Up in Polite Company

photograph of place settings at table for Christmas dinner

One of the less joyous aspects of a typical holiday season is breaking bread with family members whose views one finds not merely wrongheaded, but abhorrent. When they choose to air those views around the table, one faces a dilemma: speak up or quietly endure? As with so many choices we encounter in our daily lives, philosophy can help us sort out the good arguments for acting from the bad.

There are three basic positions one could take on this issue: that we always ought to speak up, that we never ought to speak up, and that we sometimes ought to speak up. I will consider these positions in turn, arguing that the last is probably the correct one.

There are at least four arguments for always speaking up. The first is that if you don’t speak up, you are a hypocrite. The second is that if you don’t speak up, then you are choosing to do what is “polite,” rather than what is morally required. But the norms of politeness are always trumped by moral norms, so one ought to always speak up. The third argument is that we are naturally inclined not to speak up, so the best policy — the policy that will ensure that we do the right thing most often — is to always speak up. Finally, the fourth argument is that it is always possible to speak up diplomatically, thereby mitigating any harm that might be done by speaking up.

The hypocrisy argument leads with a false premise and then begs the question. It is simply not the case that if you don’t speak up, you’re a hypocrite. A hypocrite is someone who makes a pretense of conformity to some value or norm for illegitimate reasons. (This is why hypocrisy is a term of opprobrium.) Even if not speaking up always involved making a false impression that one agrees with some sentiment or adheres to some norm, one’s reasons for not speaking up need not be illegitimate. For example, maintaining familial tranquility for the sake of others is not always an illegitimate reason. In any case, the argument also assumes that being a hypocrite is always a morally bad thing. But hypocrisy can be morally justified, at least all-things-considered. For example, it may be permissible for a sexist employer to hire well-qualified female employees in order to impress a progressive female colleague. Here, the employer’s hypocrisy is arguably justified by the good results it produces.

The politeness argument simply assumes that the norms of politeness are not moral norms. But in many cases, etiquette supports morality. The requirement to be courteous, for example, seems to derive its force and legitimacy from the clearly moral requirements to show basic respect or to be kind. As Karen Stohr argues, the conventions of etiquette are the primary means by which we express our moral attitudes and carry out important moral goals. So, in choosing to do what is polite, one does not always depart from the norms of morality. If politeness requires not speaking up, that may be because it is the morally right thing to do.

The claim that always speaking up is the best policy may well be true. After all, most of us are probably seriously biased in favor of not speaking up. So, adopting an inflexible policy of always speaking up may maximize our chances of doing the right thing. But from the fact that the policy of always speaking up will most often lead us to do the right thing it does not follow that speaking up is always the right thing to do. In general, we are sometimes justified in adopting moral policies if they lead us to do the right thing most often, even if they sometimes lead us morally astray. For example, if I know that I am a bad sport at tennis, I may adopt a policy of sprinting away from my opponent after a loss to keep myself giving him the middle finger. This policy will lead me to refrain from doing the wrong thing most of the time, and so may be the one I ought to adopt, even though there may be instances where my opponent richly deserves the finger.

The fourth argument, that we are always able to speak up diplomatically, can help us see a bit more clearly what speaking up involves. It seems to me that it is impossible to speak up diplomatically. Diplomats try to finesse conflict to the point that it ceases to appear to be conflict. Speaking up means, at minimum, making one’s opposition to another person’s views as clear as possible. So, far from always being able to speak up diplomatically, we are in fact not speaking up if we try to do it diplomatically. What we should perhaps aim at is speaking up civilly, but this just means that we should speak up with politeness or courtesy, by showing basic respect to our opponent. This is different from finessing our conflict with our opponent, and even civil opposition can be highly inflammatory in certain contexts.

The arguments for always speaking up appear to be flawed in various ways. On the other hand, the arguments for never speaking up seem to be even worse. Some people will point out that speaking up will rarely change one’s opponent’s mind. This may well be true, but rarely changing one’s opponent’s mind is not the same as never doing so. More fundamentally, for the argument to work, it must assume that the only purpose of speaking up is to change one’s opponent’s mind. In fact, it seems to me that the reason one should speak up is primarily to signal to others that one does or does not support some sentiment, norm, or value, which may give them comfort, strength, or the courage to voice their own views. For example, if a family member voices strong contempt for homosexuality in front of one’s gay cousin, signaling that one does not agree with that contempt can let the cousin know that she is not alone or unloved, and may empower others in the family to confront the homophobe. The signaling function of speaking up is why I earlier claimed that speaking up means making one’s opposition to another person’s views as clear as possible: one must send a clear signal of one’s opposition in order to comfort or encourage others.

We come, then, to the conclusion that we sometimes ought to speak up. But when should we do it? The answer in abstract is deceptively simple, even simplistic: when doing so would bring about more good than any other option realistically available. In saying this, I am doing nothing more than applying the moral doctrine of consequentialism to a practical problem. Consequentialism tells us that we ought to judge an action’s rightness by its consequences, and I see no reason why this philosophy does not capture every morally relevant feature of the problem of speaking up.

In saying that the right thing to do with respect to speaking up is whatever brings about the most good, however, I am not necessarily recommending that people try to perform a consequentialist calculus whenever they face such situations. In practice it may be difficult to know which options available to us will do more good than others. Our epistemic limitations, together with our own biases against conflict, are reasons why we might be justified from a consequentialist point of view in adopting a policy of always speaking up — even if sometimes this policy will lead us to speak up when doing so will not bring about the most good.

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Treating Principles as Mere Means

photograph of US Capitol Building with mirror image reflected in lake

With the Republican about-face concerning Supreme Court Senate votes, hypocrisy is once again back in the headlines. Many accusations of hypocrisy have been directed at Senator Lindsey Graham, whose support for a Senate vote for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee so clearly clashes with earlier statements — he said in 2018 that “if an opening comes in the last year of President Trump’s term and the primary process has started, we’ll wait till the next election” — that his behavior seems like the Platonic form of a certain kind of hypocrisy. Graham has responded with a hypocrisy accusation of his own, writing to Democrats on the judiciary panel that “if the shoe were on the other foot, you would do the same.” Amidst this controversy, it’s worth taking a step back to ask what force the accusation of hypocrisy is supposed to have.

In earlier columns, I have explored some suggestions for why hypocrisy is morally objectionable and rejected them. In this column I want to consider a theory first articulated by the philosopher Eva Feder Kittay. This account says that hypocrisy is morally objectionable because it involves treating important religious, political, or moral principles as mere means.

Immanuel Kant famously intoned against treating persons as mere means, or using them as mere instruments for the satisfaction of our own desires. What’s wrong with this is that it involves a kind of category error — it treats persons, beings with the capacity to rationally order their lives, as if they were things.

Clearly, however, this can’t be exactly what Kittay means when she talks about hypocrites treating principles as mere means: principles are not persons. Yet there is a link here. The kinds of principles Kittay is concerned with — moral and religious principles — are supposed to be adhered to because they are right, and not because they are useful to the adherent. Kant expressed this point with his distinction between categorical and hypothetical imperatives. A categorical imperative is one that is binding on you regardless of what you happen to desire. You can’t claim that some moral principle — “don’t kill innocents,” say — is not binding on you because you happen to want to kill innocents. That principle provides a reason for you not to kill innocents regardless of what you happen to want. By contrast, a hypothetical imperative — for example, “go to the store” — is only binding if you have some desire that will be promoted by acting according to the imperative. If there were nothing you wanted that you could get by going to store, that imperative would not be binding on you.

So, when Kittay says that hypocrites treat principles as mere means, she means that they treat categorical imperatives as if they were merely hypothetical. The hypocrite will adopt and discard moral principles as it suits them. Sometimes that adoption will be merely rhetorical — some hypocrites are entirely conscious that their pretense of principle is a charade. But other hypocrites will sincerely adopt moral principles, only to discard them whenever holding to them becomes inexpedient. In the case of Senate Republicans, their hypocrisy lies in their adoption of the principle of not confirming Supreme Court justices during an election year when it was convenient for them to do so, followed by their abandonment of this principle when it was convenient to do that. In doing this, they treated what seemed to be a categorical imperative — one that was binding on them even if they didn’t want to adhere to it — as if it were hypothetical.

What’s wrong with treating principles as mere means? For Kittay, the problem has to do with trust. According to her, we trust that when people claim to hold to certain categorical principles, they hold to them as categorical. We rely on this belief in our dealings with them, assuming, for example, that they will hold to those principles even if it is inconvenient for them to do so. Moreover, their assurances of commitment are all we have to go on; we can’t look into their souls to see what their true attitude toward their principles is. Hypocrisy reveals that there can be a deep divide between what people say they are committed to and what they are actually committed to. Thus, hypocrisy shows us that the part of our lives structured by principles is actually quite fragile, depending as it does on our trust in what people say. We therefore have strong incentives to expose and condemn hypocrisy. As Graham’s Democratic challenger for his Senate seat recently tweeted, “Senator Graham, you have proven that your word is worthless.”

There is, I think, another point to be made about how hypocrisy undermines categorical principles. What hypocrisy reveals is that for at least certain people, categorical principles are a mere mask for the unvarnished pursuit of power, wealth, and self-aggrandizement. The trouble is that compared to such people, those who voluntarily restrain themselves in accordance with categorical principles are at a distinct disadvantage. This puts pressure on everyone to abandon their principles. Thus, hypocrisy tends to erode everyone’s commitment to categorical principles as such. And if we think that categorical principles are good on the whole — that they help solve certain coordination problems, for example — then this is a bad thing for everyone.

So, what Senate Republicans have revealed with their latest hypocrisy is that for them, politics is a game of power untempered by principles. But when Republicans throw their principles overboard when it is convenient for them to do so, this increases the incentives for everyone else to do the same. And that, I will wager, is worse for everyone in the long run.

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The Uses and Abuses of Political Hypocrisy

photograph of pinocchio sculpture atop puppet theatre in Kiev

Accusations of hypocrisy are so common in American politics that one usage of the term “politician” is as a near-synonym for “hypocrite” (“what’s your supervisor like?” “he’s a real politician.”) And for the most part, the hypocrisy of politicians is not considered laudable. Immanuel Kant famously condemned what he called the “political moralist” who “fashions his morality to suit his own advantage as a statesman,” paying homage to morality while devising “a hundred excuses and subterfuges to get out of observing them in practice.” Like Kant, most of us seem to prize integrity in our politicians.

Yet throughout history, other philosophers have argued that hypocrisy is a necessary part of politics. Niccolò Machiavelli defended hypocrisy as an indispensable tool in a world in which “a man who wants to make a profession of good in all regards must come to ruin among so many who are not good.” Much more recently, Judith Shklar argued that hypocrisy is nearly inevitable in political systems premised upon competitive elections, since candidates will employ persuasive rhetoric that requires a certain degree of dissimulation. Ruth Grant went further, arguing that without a plausible alternative for achieving comparable goods, hypocrisy in politics may very well be a moral necessity.

Thus, there appears to be disagreement about the inevitability and justifiability of hypocrisy in politics. In this column, I will focus on the kinds of hypocrisy politicians exhibit, and the question of whether and when political hypocrisy is morally preferable to non-hypocrisy.

It is important to note that hypocrisy is not a mere inconsistency between one’s words and deeds. For example, I would condemn many things I did as a teenager, but that does not automatically make me a hypocrite. One hallmark of hypocrisy is that the hypocrite pays homage to morality not out of genuine concern, but for self-serving reasons — to gain some undeserved advantage, to excuse himself, or to hide from blame. It is for this reason that we cannot trust that the hypocrite’s utterances reflect what he truly cares about, rather than what he believes to be advantageous in the moment.

It follows from this that many instances of political behavior that some might be tempted to call “hypocrisy” are, on reflection, not hypocrisy at all. Suppose that a politician publicly supports policy A, but then reads more about the issue and ends up voting for policy B. His former supporters might accuse him of hypocrisy, but this does not seem to be apt: the inconsistency between his public support of A and his eventual vote for B is due to a change of mind about the issue, rather than some self-serving reason.

Nevertheless, there are certainly many instances of true hypocrisy in politics. And while we tend to value integrity in our politicians, it can be plausibly argued that hypocrisy in the service of morally good ends is preferable to integrity in the service of morally bad ends. Politician A, while secretly racist, campaigns for office on an anti-racist platform in order to attract the support of minority constituents. Politician B, who is also racist, believes that one should stick to one’s principles even when doing so might hurt one’s electoral prospects, so he supports a racist platform. I would rather have A as a player in my political system, since A’s hypocrisy will help his minority constituents, unlike B’s integrity.

On the other hand, compare politician A to politician C, who genuinely holds anti-racist views and supports the same anti-racist platform. C seems morally preferable to A, but on what grounds? One answer is that, since C supports the anti-racist platform because it is right to do so, his support is morally creditworthy in a way that A’s is not. This might be Kant’s view, as he famously distinguished between actions in accord with and actions from duty; according to him, only the latter have moral worth. Another answer is that C’s proper anti-racist motives will more reliably lead him to promote anti-racist ends, whereas A would abandon those ends whenever it suits him politically. Some consequentialists might adopt this line. A third answer is that C’s behavior arises from virtuous motives while A’s does not; this is one position that a virtue theorist might take.

The trouble with the Kantian or virtue theoretical positions is that, while they can distinguish between A and C, they give no reason for us to prefer A over B. As we have seen, A’s support of the anti-racist platform is not morally creditworthy. Furthermore, because it involves deception — A knowingly causes others to falsely believe he supports an anti-racist position — its underlying maxim could not be universalized, which is Kant’s test for whether an action is morally permissible. So, on Kant’s view the deception practiced by A may make A worse than B; A’s behavior amounts to a “double iniquity.” If B’s integrity is a virtue, then the virtue theorist may also have to say that B is preferable to A; and if it is not, then at best A and B are morally equal, as in neither case does their behavior flow from virtuous motives.

Now consider politician D, who is secretly anti-racist but panders to his racist constituents by supporting B’s platform. This character seems obviously morally worse than A or C, but what about B? I think a common reaction is that B is less loathsome than D, but it is difficult to explain this judgment in consequentialist terms. After all, D’s anti-racist values will lead him to support a racist platform less reliably than B, just as C’s anti-racist values will lead him to support an anti-racist platform more reliably than A; so consequentialist reasoning seemingly should lead us to prefer D to B.

On the other hand, it may be that D’s stance undermines something that we care about very much in politicians: namely, transparency. Because we can only vote for or otherwise support a politician on the basis of what they say and do, we want their words and deeds to reflect their actual commitments. This is precisely what is not the case when it comes to hypocrites. Of course, we do not value transparency above everything else: as between a hypocrite who insincerely supports the good and an outright villain, we prefer the former. But as between B, an outright villain, and D, a hypocrite who insincerely supports the bad, we seem to prefer the villain’s integrity, because at least we know where we stand with him. Thus, consequentialism can explain our ranking of politicians A, B, C, and D in terms of the interplay between our desire for transparency and other values we want to promote, such as justice.

Perhaps a useful way to think about this disagreement between consequentialists, Kantians, and virtue theorists concerning political hypocrisy is in terms of two political virtues Max Weber famously distinguished: the ethic of conviction and the ethic of responsibility. The ethic of conviction involves a “constancy of [a person’s] inner relation to certain ultimate ‘values,’” or in other words, integrity. The ethic of responsibility, on the other hand, involves a proper understanding of the consequences of one’s actions and a practical ability to promote one’s ends. Those who favor the latter will likely believe that hypocrisy is no great sin (although still problematic, because transparency-negating), so long as it can be directed toward good ends, as in the case of politician A. By contrast, political hypocrisy is likely to deeply offend someone who places more emphasis on the ethic of conviction. Put another way, those who think an excellent politician is one who effectively promotes policy goals will not care about her reasons for pursuing those goals, except insofar as those reasons make her a less reliable advocate of them. On the other hand, those who think an excellent politician is one whose actions reflect her values will care deeply about eradicating hypocrisy from politics.

Yet, a too-fervent attachment to the ethic of conviction can lead to a dangerous kind of anti-hypocrisy hypocrisy. Consider politician E, who sincerely believes, and often publicly declares, that (1) a country should never start a land war in Asia and (2) a politician should always stick to his core principles. When his party starts a land war in Asia and he, without a hint of self-consciousness, votes in favor of a war resolution, he explains that the resolution authorizes a police action, not a war. This kind of self-deceived hypocrisy is particularly dangerous in politics, since it is very difficult for the politician herself to limit or check. It is also frequently a symptom of a kind of self-righteousness that may, in the politician’s own mind, license her to operate outside the normal bounds of morality. Thus, in a quest for purity of intention, politicians can fall prey to a hypocrisy more insidious than that which they seek to avoid.

We arrive, then, at a few conclusions. First, there are occasions where hypocrisy is morally preferable to non-hypocrisy. In particular, there is reason to prefer the hypocrisy of insincere politicians who support morally laudable ends to the integrity of our sincere villains. At the same time, the most morally problematic hypocrites are the anti-hypocrisy hypocrite and the hypocrite who espouses bad values without believing them. These judgments assume, or are rather supported by, a consequentialist style of moral reasoning that places emphasis on the ethics of responsibility over the ethics of conviction. Kantians and others, who elevate the significance of intention and motive in their moral judgments, may come to different conclusions.

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Hypocrisy and the Fall of Falwell

close-up photograph of Jerry Falwell Jr. at speaking engagement

It has not been a good week for Jerry Falwell Jr. It began when the prominent evangelical posted a bizarre photograph on Instagram of himself with his pants unzipped and his arm around a bare-midriffed woman who is not his wife. Falwell tried to do damage control with a radio spot that, owing to his possibly substance-induced incoherence, dug him deeper into the hole. Days later, the board of trustees of Liberty University, an evangelical college in Lynchburg, Virginia, announced that Falwell will be taking an indefinite leave of absence from his role as president and chancellor. While Falwell has been accused of arguably much more serious misconduct, the final straw appears to have been this display of flagrant hypocrisy; Liberty Law School’s honor code includes prohibitions on “display of objects or pictures” that are “sexual in nature,” “sexually oriented joking,” “the encouragement or advocacy of any form of sexual behavior” that would undermine the University’s “Christian identity,” and the possession of alcohol (in the picture, Falwell holds a glass of what he calls “black water”).

Falwell’s is not the first case of hypocrisy by a high-profile religious leader. Yet the ethical argument against hypocrisy is far from clear. What is it about hypocrisy that makes it morally objectionable?

In order to answer this question, we must first say what hypocrisy is. Ask most people, and they will tell you that hypocrisy is not practicing what you preach. But consider this: in the process of becoming mature adults, we often do things that we later condemn, or condemn things we later do. On some occasions, this can amount to hypocrisy — particularly if we try to hide the fact that we previously engaged in the behavior of which we currently disapprove. Yet it does not have to be hypocritical to acknowledge that we have undergone moral improvement, and as a consequence currently disapprove of what we did in the past. So, not practicing what you preach is not enough to make someone a hypocrite. I believe that what’s required, beyond the inconsistency between our words and deeds, is that this inconsistency involves representing oneself as better than one is by the lights of some community’s moral standards.

That hypocrisy is not mere inconsistency in itself suggests that the ethical complaint against hypocrisy cannot simply be that it involves inconsistency. After all, there is an inconsistency over time between the actions and words of a reformed racist, but such inconsistency is to be welcomed.

One suggestion is that hypocrisy is a form of dishonesty. Hypocrites pretend to be better than they are, thus deceiving others about their moral commitments and concerns. Upon reflection, however, this can only be a small part of the story. There is a certain type of hypocrite — we might call her a cynical hypocrite — who consciously pretends to be morally better than she is in order to obtain some extrinsic benefits, such as social status. This kind of hypocrisy does involve dishonesty. Yet many hypocrites — indeed, those who on some views most clearly deserve the label — are perfectly sincere in their belief in their own goodness, as well as in their condemnation of others for norm violations. It might be suggested that the problem with these hypocrites is that they are self-deceived, but even if this is true, self-deception does not usually invite the sort of moral opprobrium to which hypocrites are regularly subjected.

Another suggestion is that, because hypocrites are primarily concerned with representing themselves as morally better than they are, their words are unlikely to represent (a) their actual values or (b) the “correct” assessment of the moral facts. Insincere hypocrites are motivated to hide their true commitments behind the appearance of goodness, while sincere hypocrites are likely to make whatever moral judgments will represent themselves in the best light. In either case, their testimony about (a) and (b) is suspect. The suggestion, then, is that hypocrisy is a kind of untrustworthiness. While I think this diagnosis gets at something important about hypocrites, it does not explain our moral objection to them. After all, there are plenty of people whose testimony we cannot trust, but whom we do not loathe. Think, for example, of an extremely naïve person whose moral judgments are clouded by a misplaced faith in human goodness. Such a person is not trustworthy, in the sense that it would be foolish for us to rely on their testimony when deciding the morally right course of action. We might even criticize such a person for being naïve. But we would not have the strong negative response to this person that we regularly do to hypocrites.

The last and, I think, best suggestion is that hypocrites are free riders, enjoying the advantages of undeserved moral approval while secretly collecting the dividends of vice. On this view, what makes hypocrisy objectionable is that it tends to cause hypocrites to appear better than they really are, whether they are sincere or insincere. So long as their hypocrisy remains unmasked, others will reward this apparent goodness even as the hypocrite continues to reap the benefits of acting contrary to moral standards. This account seems able to explain why we hate hypocrites so much: generally, we tend to hate people who obtain advantages they don’t deserve, as well as those who fail to make their contribution to goods we all enjoy — in this case, morality itself. It offends our deeply ingrained, and possibly innate, sense of fairness.

To return to Falwell and others like him, we can now see one important reason why even other evangelicals might have a strong negative response to his behavior. Leaders of all kinds, but particularly leaders of religious communities, often owe their status in part to a belief that they exemplify certain moral virtues. When such leaders are unmasked as hypocrites, this reveals that their leadership role, with all the perks that come with it, is undeserved. And this strikes us as deeply unfair; after all, there are plenty of other people who are earnestly striving to live according to often strict standards, yet who receive less praise and other benefits for doing so.

Thomas Hobbes called hypocrisy a “double iniquity,” suggesting that it was actually worse than outright villainy. On the fairness account, this makes sense: the hypocrite not only violates moral norms, but commits the further wrong of free riding on others’ compliance with moral norms in order to reap the undeserved benefits of appearing good and doing evil. In short, there are grounds for thinking that being a hypocrite with respect to some standard is worse than simply flouting the standard. This still doesn’t mean that hypocrites are always worse than simple wrong-doers — not all standards are equally important — but it does mean that hypocrites with respect to some rule, like Falwell, are liable to more loathing than someone who simply breaks that rule, like Falstaff.

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Principles, Pragmatics, and Pragmatic Principles

close-up photograph of horse with blinders

In this post, I want to talk about a certain sort of neglected moral hypocrisy that I have noticed is common in my own moral thinking and, that I expect, is common in most of yours. And to illustrate this hypocrisy, I want to look carefully at the hypocritical application of democratic principles, and conclude by discussing President Trump’s recent tweet about delaying the election.

First, however, I want to introduce a distinction between two types of hypocrisy: overt and subtle hypocrisy. Overt hypocrisy occurs when you, in full awareness of the double standard, differentially apply a principle to relevantly similar cases. It is easy to find examples. One is Mitch McConnell’s claim that he would confirm a new Supreme Court Justice right before an election after blocking the confirmation of President Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland because of how close the nation was to a presidential election. It is clear that Senator McConnell knows he is applying the democratic principle inconsistently, he just also does not think politics is about principles, he thinks it is about promoting his political agenda.

Subtle hypocrisy, in contrast, occurs when you inconsistently apply your principles but you do not realize you are applying them inconsistently. Names aside, a lot of subtle hypocrisy, while it is hard to recognize in the moment, is pretty clear upon reflection. We tend to only notice our principles are at play in some contexts and not others. We are more likely to notice curtailments of free speech when it happens to those who say similar things to ourselves. We are much more likely to notice when we are harmed by inequitable treatment than when we are benefited by it.

We are especially likely to hypocritically apply our principles when we begin to consider purported reasons given for various policies. If the Supreme Court issues a decision I agree with, chances are good that I won’t actually go and check the majority reasoning to see if I think it’s sound. Rather, I’m content with the win and trust the court’s decision. In contrast, if the Court issues a decision I find dubious, I often do look up the reasoning and, if I think it is inadequate, will openly criticize the decision.

Why is this sort of hypocrisy so common? Because violations of our principles don’t always jump out at us. Often you won’t notice a principle is at stake unless you carefully deliberate about the question. Yet, we don’t just preemptively deliberate about every action in light of every principle we hold. Rather, something needs to incline us to deliberate. Something needs to prompt us to begin to morally reflect on an action, and, according to an awful lot of psychological research, it is our biases and unreflective intuitions that prompt our tendency to reason (see Part I of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind). Because we are more likely to try and think of ethical problems in the behavior of our political enemies, we are much more likely to notice when actions we instinctively oppose violate our principles, and are unlikely to notice the same when considering actions we instinctively support.

I can, of course, provide an example of personal hypocrisy in my application of democratic principles against disenfranchisement. When conservative policy makers started trying to pass voter ID laws I was suspicious, I did my research, and I condemned these laws as democratically discriminatory. In contrast, when more liberal states gestured at moving towards mail-only voting to deal with COVID I just assumed it was fine. I never did any research, and it was just by luck that a podcast informed me that mail-only voting can differentially disenfranchise both liberal voting blocs like Black Americans and conservative voting blocs like older rural voters). Thus, but for luck and given my own political proclivities, my commitment to democratic principles would have been applied hypocritically to condemn only policies floated by conservative lawmakers.

This subtle hypocrisy is extraordinarily troubling because, while we can recognize it once it is pointed out, it is incredibly difficult to notice in the moment. This is one of the reasons it is important to hear from ideologically diverse perspectives, and to engage in regular and brutal self-criticism.

But while subtle hypocrisy is difficult to see, I think there is another sort of hypocrisy which is even more difficult to notice. To see it, it will be useful if we take a brief digression and try to figure out what exactly is undemocratic about President Trump’s proposal to delay the election. I, like many of you, find it outrageous that President Donald Trump would even suggest delaying the election due to the COVID crisis. Partly this is because I believe President Trump is acting in bad faith. Tweeting not because he wants to delay the election but because he wants to preemptively delegitimize it. Or perhaps because he wants to distract the media from otherwise damning stories about COVID-19 and the economy.

But a larger part of me thinks it would be outrageous even if President Trump were acting in good faith, and that is because delaying an election is in tension with core democratic principles. Now, you might think delaying the election is undemocratic because regular elections are the means by which a government is held democratically accountable to its citizens (this is the sort of argument I hear most people making). Thus, if the current government is empowered to delay an election, it might enable the government to, at least for a time, escape democratic accountability. Of course, this is not a real worry in the U.S. context. Even were the U.S. congress to delay the election, it would not change when President Trump is removed from office. His term ends January 20th whether or not a new President has been elected. If no one has been elected, then either the Speaker of the House or the President pro tempore of the Senate takes over (and I am eagerly awaiting whatever new TV show in the Spring decides to run with that counterfactual).

But there is a different principled democratic concern at stake. Suppose a political party, while in control of Congress, would delay an election whenever polls looked particularly unpromising. This would be troublingly undemocratic because while Congress would have to hold the election at some point before January 3rd, they could also wait till the moment that the party currently in power seems to have the largest comparative advantage. But just as gerrymandering is undemocratic because it allows those currently in power to employ their political power to secure an advantage in the upcoming elections, so too is this strategy of delaying elections for partisan reasons.

But what if Congress really were acting in good faith. Would that mean it could be democratic to delay the election? Perhaps. If you were confident you were acting on entirely non-partisan reasons, then delaying in such contexts is just as likely to harm your chances as to help them. And indeed, I could imagine disasters so serious as to justify delaying an election.

However, I think in general there are pragmatic reasons to stick to the democratic principles even when we are acting on entirely non-partisan reasons. First, it can be difficult to verify that reasons are entirely non-partisan. It can be hard to know the intention of Senators, and sometimes it can even be hard to know our own intentions.

Second, and I think more profoundly, there is a concern that we will tend to inequitably notice non-partisan reasons. Take the Brexit referendum. When I first saw some of the chaos that happened following the Brexit vote, I began to seriously consider if the UK should just hold a second referendum. After all, I thought, and still think, there were clear principled democratic issues with the election (for example, there seemed to be a systematic spread of misinformation).

The problem of course is that had the Brexit vote gone the other way, then I almost certainly would never have looked into the election, and so never noticed anything democratically troubling about the result. My partisan thoughts about Brexit influence what non-partisan reasons for redoing the election I ended up noticing. To call for redoing an election is surely at least as undemocratic as calling for delaying an election (indeed, I expect it is quite a bit more undemocratic, since it actually gives one side two chances at winning), and yet I almost instantly condemn the call to delay an election and it took me ages to see the democratic issues with redoing the Brexit vote.

Here, it is not that I was hypocritically applying a democratic principle. Rather, I was missing a democratic principle I should have already had given my tendency to hypocrisy. Because partisan preferences influence what non-partisan reasons I notice, I should have adopted a pragmatic principle against calling for reelections following results with which I disagreed. Not because reelections are themselves undemocratic (just as delaying an election might not itself be undemocratic), but because as a human reasoner, I cannot always trust my own even non-partisan reasoning and so should sometimes blinker it with pragmatic principles.

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University Divestment from Fossil Fuels

photograph of campus building at McGill University

This month, tenured McGill University Philosophy professor Gregory Mikkelson resigned from his position. Mikkelson explained that he could no longer work for an institution that professes a commitment to a reduction to its carbon footprint, all the while continuing to invest in fossil fuels. Mikkelson argued further that the university board’s continued refusal to divest from fossil fuels is in opposition to the democratic mandate in favor of divestment that has developed across the campus.

Mikkelson’s actions make a powerful statement in a general academic climate in which divestment from fossil fuels has strong support among faculty and students. Some universities have taken action in response. In September 2019, the University of California system announced that they would be cutting fossil fuels from their over $80 billion dollar investment portfolio, citing financial risk as a major motivating factor. The University of California system is the largest educational system in the country, so this move sets an important precedent for other universities under pressure to do the same thing.

Many prominent schools across the country are resisting pressure to divest. On January 3rd, students of Harvard and Yale Universities staged a protest of their respective universities’ continued support for the fossil fuel industry by storming the field of the annual football game between Harvard and Yale, delaying the game by almost an hour. This is only one such protest; there have been many others over a span of almost a decade. Students, faculty members, and staff have occupied the offices of administrators, held sit-ins, and conducted rallies.

Those who wish to defend continued investment in the fossil fuel industry make the argument that universities have a fiduciary obligation to students, faculty, and staff. As a result, they need to maintain the most promising investment portfolio possible. They need financial security in order to continue to provide a thriving learning environment. This involves investing in the market that actually exists rather than an idealized market that doesn’t. A portfolio that includes diversified investments in sustainable renewable sources of energy would be ideal, but many think that the current political climate provides little evidence that this approach would be a wise investment strategy. President Trump can be relied upon to thwart the advance of renewable energy at every turn. At this point, it is unclear how many more years universities will need to make investment decisions that take into account the political realities of living under this administration. Those who make this argument contend that the primary obligation of a university—first and foremost—is to provide education to students. Universities can fulfill this obligation if and only if they are financially secure.

Relatedly, some argue that, in keeping with universities’ general fiduciary responsibilities, institutions should avoid making investment decisions that are overly political. Investments that look like political statements could deter future donors, which would limit the potential services the university could provide. In response to this argument, critics are quick to point out that continued investment in fossil fuels is a political statement. Crucially, it is a political statement with which the heart and soul of the university—faculty, staff, and students—tend to strenuously disagree.

Those who want to defend continued investment in the fossil fuel industry argue further that investors are in a better position to change the behavior of fossil fuel companies because they have voting powers on crucial issues. Shareholders are in a position to vote directors and even entire boards out of their jobs if they do not acknowledge and take meaningful action on climate change. Shareholders are in a position to force transparency when it comes to publishing substantive emissions data. When fossil fuel industries are forced to acknowledge the threat that they pose, they may lead the transition to renewables from within.

Many critics are dubious about the authenticity of this proposal. Even if we take it at face value, we don’t have much reason to believe that this approach is motivating the fossil fuel industry at anything approaching the rate we would need to see in order to achieve the necessary change in the right timeframe. To ward off, or, at the very least, minimize, the threat posed by climate change, we need to take significant meaningful action now, rather than waiting the indeterminate amount of time it might take for the fossil fuel industry to make internal changes that seem to be decidedly against their own interests.

Many disagree with the claim that continued investment in fossil fuels provides a university with financial security. In fact, the entire University of California system disagrees. The reasons the UC system offered for their decision to divest were financial rather than ethical. Their argument is that abandoning investment in fossil fuels now in favor of developing a portfolio of sustainable renewable resources cuts their losses later and is consistent with the inevitable green path forward. It simply isn’t possible to continue in the direction we’re headed. We will inevitably change course.

When academic institutions refuse to divest, faculty and students are put in an uncomfortable position—it is difficult for a person who is concerned about climate change to continue in their role at such an institution while avoiding the charge of personal hypocrisy. Students work hard to earn their spots at universities, and they pay dearly for them. The academic job market is notoriously competitive, and professor positions are extremely hard to come by. Many find Mikkelson’s actions admirable, but recognize that they are not in a position to follow in his footsteps.

Divestment sends a powerful message—institutions of higher education will no longer provide financial support to industries that contribute to climate change. The very nature and mission of universities cast such institutions in pivotal roles to usher in a new, healthier, greener future. Far from shying away from this role, universities should embrace it as a natural fit—after all, they ideally prepare young citizens to design, and thrive in, a promising future. Mikkelson recognized that refusal on the part of higher education to divest from fossil fuels is hypocrisy on the part of the university itself—it is antithetical to the goals of excellence in innovation, empathy and compassion toward our fellow living beings and respect for the ecosystems in which we live, as well as clear, rigorous critical thinking that includes the ability to give appropriate weight to supporting evidence.

What’s more, fossil fuel companies have intentionally obfuscated the facts when it comes to the harms posed by climate change. This practice of putting significant roadblocks in the pathway to knowledge about critical issues is not consistent with the pursuit of knowledge that characterizes a college or university. If an academic institution is to act with integrity, it should not continue to support campaigns of misinformation, especially when the stakes are so high.

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Jay-Z and the NFL: Hypocrisy or Suite Participation?

photograph of Jay-Z mural

Jay-Z (aka Shawn Carter) made headlines recently when he announced a new partnership with the NFL to “work with the league on social justice initiatives and entertainment programming,” including the Super Bowl halftime show. The move came as a surprise to many, as in the past Carter has vocally expressed his opposition to the behavior of the NFL, especially with regards to their treatment of Colin Kaepernick and the national anthem protests. He has even included such criticisms in his lyrics: for example in “Apeshit” he raps,

I said no to the Superbowl, you need me, I don’t need you
Every night we in the endzone, tell the NFL we in stadiums too

Here he refers to an incident in which he turned down an offer from the NFL to perform at the Super Bowl, again, out of solidarity with Kaepernick.

In response to this new deal, then, many have called Carter a hypocrite, charging him with abandoning his principles simply to make a buck. How should we think of Carter’s actions here? There certainly does seem to be something unsavory about this seemingly abrupt about-face, but should we think that he has crossed a moral line?

The charge of hypocrisy is not lost on Carter. In response to concerns that in making a deal with the NFL he is essentially abandoning Kaepernick, Carter defended his actions, albeit in a way that some have found troubling. For instance, when asked how he could join forces with the NFL with a good conscious, he responded that he thought that “we’ve moved past kneeling” and that he could do more good working from within:

Let me bring attention to injustice. Everyone’s saying “How are you going forward if Kaep doesn’t have a job?” This wasn’t about him having a job. That became a part of the discussion. He was kneeling to bring attention to injustice. We know what it is. Now how do we address the injustice?

If this is what Carter genuinely thinks that he’s doing – that he really is putting himself in a position to do more good working from within – does this mean that he should not be charged with being a hypocrite?

First things first, it’s far from clear whether we really have moved passed kneeling. The fact that kneeling during the national anthem garnered so much initial attention indicates that such protests are at least somewhat effective, and the cause that the demonstrations were initially meant to draw attention to – namely the disproportionate violence of police officers against African Americans – is still one that very much requires attention. There is certainly a reading of Carter’s statements, then, that makes it seem as though he is merely trying to justify selling out, rather than actually being interested in genuine activism.

But perhaps this is too harsh. Socialist and writer Michael Eric Dyson, for instance, argues that:

Jay’s deal with the NFL represents a valid and potentially viable attempt to raise awareness of injustice to black folk, and to inspire the league to embrace just action for the black masses. It may fail — and it certainly should not be used to diminish Kaepernick’s noble, iconic battle — but the effort is not a repudiation of justice.

According to Dyson, putting someone like Carter in a position of power within the NFL is indeed something that could effect change in a way that mere protesting could not, a move that Dyson refers to shifting from “street protests to suite participation.” If partnering with the NFL could, in fact, give Carter more power to effect the kinds of changes Kapernick and others want to see within the league and elsewhere, then Carter’s deal would not represent an abandoning of Kaepernick or his causes.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Writing at the Washington Post, Kevin Blackistone argues that Jay-Z’s support for Kaepernick is fundamentally at odds with his deal with the NFL, stating that:

Jay-Z can’t stand up for Kaepernick while tucking himself into bed with the NFL. It is disingenuous. It is hypocritical. It is fake. It’s like a rapper growing up in tony suburbs rappin’ about trappin’.

Blackistone also notes that this would not be the first instance of hypocritical behavior in Carter’s business career, referring to his involvement with the development of the Barclays Center which saw the displacement of many working-class residents in Brooklyn. With this history in mind it is tempting to interpret Carter’s actions as ones motivated by a good business sense, and not by a good moral sense.

While many have speculated on Jay-Z’s intentions and hypothesized about what will or will not happen once his deal with the NFL officially begins, we will of course have to watch and wait to see whether anything good actually comes out of this partnership. There is one reason to be pessimistic, however, which is that it’s difficult to imagine that the NFL is actually concerned about improving social justice initiatives and not just trying to make it seem like it cares by aligning itself with Jay-Z. For instance, Michael Harriot writes:

The NFL has no interest in social justice. As long as they can keep their new-millennium Mandingos mute until the players’ repeatedly concussed brains and cartilage-less knees render them disposable, the NFL couldn’t care less about black lives. 

Similarly, Billy Haisley writes that:

It’s perfectly reasonable to believe that, at heart, both Kaepernick and Jay-Z are serious, compassionate, well-meaning men who are deeply invested in addressing the plight of marginalized communities, and who seek to use their considerable platforms to do so in the best way they know how. It’s also accurate to say that lending themselves and the things they stand for to mega-corps that do not and cannot care about the admirable convictions they wish to support is a lamentable, counterproductive plan of action.

Of course, even if the NFL is motivated much more by having the appearance of caring about social justice rather than actually caring about it, that does not mean that someone like Carter would not still be able to effect change within the organization. It might just make it more difficult for actual change to take place (for discussion see Cole Martin’s “Commodifying Activism“).

So what should we take away from all this? Again, there is a sense in which time will have to tell as to whether the partnership between Jay-Z and the NFL is a beneficial one. Of course, we can still ask the questions of whether siding with the enemy is acceptable if one genuinely thinks that one can better effect change from within, or whether doing so makes one a hypocrite regardless of good intentions.

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What’s Wrong with Hypocrisy?

Black and white photograph of the inside of a cathedral

Much has been written about the recent grand jury report revealing both an epidemic of extreme sexual abuse among Roman Catholic parishes in Pennsylvania and a conspiracy by church leaders to quietly cover up the crimes. The numbers are shocking: over 300 priests across 54 counties abused more than 1000 victims over the course of at least 80 years. Of course, sexual assault of any stripe is abhorrent, yet the moral hypocrisy evident in this case makes this story particularly cruel. Not only have the “predatory priests” damaged a thousand immediate victims, but the ripple effects of their decisions to twist their respected social positions into such corrupted outlets for their own selfish evils will inevitably taint the faith of a generation of Roman Catholics or more.

Indeed, it is bad enough to be a victim of injustice, but when the crime is performed by one who claims a position of moral authority, the injustice is multiplied. One can do wrong without being hypocritical, but one cannot be a hypocrite without doing wrong; in fact, hypocrisy typically compounds the painful consequences of evil.

In chapter two of her 1963 book On Revolution, German philosopher Hannah Arendt dubs hypocrisy “the vice of vices” on the grounds that it is inescapably indefensible. Any other vice, she argues, could feasibly be justified from the right perspective, but hypocrisy alone is bereft of any possible integrity: “Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”

On one level, being a good person – and being known for being a good person – affords an individual certain social benefits. Moral hypocrisy amounts to a person attempting to get those benefits without actually being the moral person they appear to be. In many cases, moral integrity requires some level of self-sacrifice; if a person can receive acclaim for being self-sacrificial without actually sacrificing anything, then that person selfishly comes out ahead. However, to do so means not only committing to being a moral hypocrite, but also to committing additional immoral acts such as lying or threatening those who know the truth to hide your secret. Once revealed, the moral hypocrite’s victims are not limited only to those affected by their explicit crimes: the dissonance suffered by those whom the hypocrite played for fools must also be considered.

And perhaps the most rotten hypocrites of all are those who pretend to be moral while hiding their sins and set out to publicly condemn others.

In his 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo introduced the world to the villainous Claude Frollo, the respected archdeacon of the famous French cathedral whose obsession with pious chastity gives way to an uncontrollable lust for the beautiful Esmeralda. By the end of the novel, Frollo’s bitterness has led him to betray his surrogate son, stab Esmeralda’s lover, and even turn Esmeralda herself over to be executed for a crime that Frollo committed simply because she continues to reject his advances. When Frollo himself is pushed over the edge of Notre Dame’s roof, the average reader feels little remorse for the death of the spiteful hypocrite.

In the case of most moral hypocrites, the problem is twofold: firstly, the hypocrite has committed an immoral act; secondly, he has simultaneously lied about and/or hidden that act, while also unjustly receiving moral praise from his peers. In Frollo’s case, the problem is threefold: he has committed a crime, he has hidden it, and he continues to publically crusade against others who are guilty of the same crimes.

Consider the perspective of one of Frollo’s fictional parishioners: they may agree with Frollo’s condemnation of sexual licentiousness, even once they discover that Frollo himself is guilty of that very act. On one hand, Frollo’s public words are correct; on the other, Frollo’s private actions are not – to try and make sense of such a disjunction can be remarkably unsettling. How can one easily reconcile the familiar picture of a respectable leader with the new knowledge that the person was dishonestly putting on a show for the public? Such lies cast a pall over Frollo’s entire public persona, calling into question even those things that most people would otherwise take for granted. This means that Frollo’s crimes are not limited only to his violent assaults on Esmeralda or Phoebus; the angst that his moral hypocrisy would force upon innocent observers is an additional wrong that complicates a situation already dripping with moral hazards.

On some level, studies suggest that most people are guilty of hypocrisy on some level. One experiment performed at the University of Kansas in the late 90s asked individuals to privately choose between doing two tasks: both tasks were left vague, but one was described as boring with no reward while the other would offer the person a chance to win a prize in a raffle. The subject was told that she could select which task she would be assigned and which task would go to her unseen counterpart; in 70-80% of cases, the individuals assigned themselves the raffle-eligible task and gave the boring one to the stranger.

Then, in a second round, the researchers explained the same parameters, but suggested that the subject flip a coin to randomly (and, therefore fairly) assign the raffle task and the boring task. The results here were surprising: the subjects who chose not to flip the coin saw the same rate of task assignments as in round one (roughly 80-90% of people chose the raffle-eligible task for themselves), but the subjects who did flip the coin also saw the same rate of task assignments as in round one (85-90%)! One would think that the subjects who used the coin would have task assignment rates closer to 50% unless there was some element of cheating going on behind the scenes.

However, many moral hypocrites willfully admit their limitations (in the Kansas study, for instance, cheating subjects routinely ranked themselves as having done something immoral at the end of the experiment). Perhaps this suggests that the ambiguity in many moral cases allows for some degree of natural forgiveness to be reasonably extended to fallible agents; to claim a form of moral infallibility, as Frollo does when speaking of morality from the position of a teaching authority, inversely changes an observer’s willingness to forgive a hypocrite.

The fallout from the Pennsylvania Sex Abuse Scandal has already led to responses from Catholics around the country as they have renamed schools, implemented new policies, and gathered to commiserate with loved ones after learning that beloved religious leaders were hiding horrible secrets. As if the monumental pain of sexual abuse alone was not horrible enough to force upon a community, the hypocrisy of these priests has sown seeds of mistrust, doubt, and fear to corners far beyond the Pittsburgh parish. Now, reports have begun to leak out that the Vatican and even Pope Francis himself may be implicated in the cover-up; facts that, if true, will only increase the waves of pain sent around the globe because of this horrendous scandal.

Although Frollo was trying to describe himself, his words in his final scene with Esmeralda ironically fit the victims of moral hypocrisy – both his and others’ – far better: “I bear the dungeon within me; within me there is winter, ice, despair; I have night in my soul” (Book VIII, chapter four).

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A Trump Administration Press Secretary Walks Into a Restaurant

Photograph of the White House and the fence that surrounds it

On Friday, June 22nd, the Trump Administration’s Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, arrived and was seated at the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia.  Sanders was one guest in a party arriving for a reservation for eight, booked in her husband’s name.  When the wait staff realized that Sanders was with the party, they called the owner of the restaurant, Stephanie Wilkinson.  Wilkinson dropped everything and rushed to the restaurant. She allowed her employees to vote on a course of action. They voted to ask Sanders to leave.  Wilkinson approached Sanders and said, “I’m the owner. I’d like you to come out on the patio with me for a word.” Once they were out of earshot of other customers, Wilkinson explained that the values that Sanders publicly espouses and defends were not consistent with her own and that, as a result, Wilkinson must ask her to leave.  Sanders complied with the request. The other guests in the party were invited to stay, but, unsurprisingly, they declined the offer. They had already been served appetizers, and Wilkinson insisted that their bill was on the house. Continue reading “A Trump Administration Press Secretary Walks Into a Restaurant”

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Eric Schneiderman and the Moral Wrongs of Hypocrisy

Image of New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman

Eric Schneiderman was the New York Attorney General since 2011 and a strong opponent of President Trump’s policies to end DACA. Most recently, he sued the Weinstein Company over sexual harassment and civil rights violations while being a vocal supporter of the #Metoo movement. His clear stance as an advocate for civil rights, and specifically feminist goals, has made the circumstances of his recent resignation particularly frustrating.  Schneiderman resigned as New York Attorney General the first week in May in response to claims that in four past relationships, he had physically assaulted his partners.

Continue reading “Eric Schneiderman and the Moral Wrongs of Hypocrisy”