Hypocrisy is a ubiquitous feature of moral and political life, and accusations of hypocrisy a ubiquitous feature of moral and political discourse. Yet it has been curiously under-theorized in analytic philosophy. Fortunately, the last decade has seen a boomlet of articles that address hypocrisy in order to explain and justify conditions on the so-called “standing” to blame (Wallace 2010; Friedman 2013; Bell 2013; Todd 2017; Herstein 2017; Roadevin 2018; Fritz and Miller 2018). Nevertheless, much of this more recent literature does (...) not adequately address the question, “what is hypocrisy?” In this paper, I develop and defend an account of hypocrisy as vicious, value-expressing inconsistency. I show how this account solves some traditional and some novel philosophical puzzles concerning hypocrisy and affords a deeper understanding of the features of hypocrisy emphasized by other prominent accounts. (shrink)

A distinction is made between acting hypocritically and the character trait of being a hypocrite. The former is understood as resulting from the employment of a double standard in order to obtain a wrongful advantage, while a particular problem with the latter is that hypocrites do not give trustworthy testimony.

The quality of our public discourse – think of the climate change debate for instance – is never very high. A day spent observing it reveals a litany of misrepresentation and error, argumentative fallacy, and a general lack of good will. In this paper I focus on a microcosmic aspect of these practices: the use of two types of argument – the argumentum ad hominem and appeal to authority – and a way in which they are related. Public debate is (...) so contaminated by the misuse of the ad hominem tactic that it is important to have an understanding of one of the ways in which its use may be legitimate. So readers who might have expected an analysis of the ad hominem fallacy will, on the contrary, be presented with an account of one of the places for its potential success. In ad hominem, arguers are viewed as legitimate constitutive targets for their own argument; in authority arguments, arguers provide a legitimate constitutive warrant for an argument they deploy. These types of argument are connected in so far as the identities of persons deploying them carry the cognitive weight of the argument. If authority arguments sometimes deserve to succeed, ad hominem attacks on them are potentially legitimate. An important motivation for this analysis is that in identifying the success conditions for one of the ad hominem types we attain some clarity in the evaluation of their use. (shrink)

Hypocrisy is a multi-faceted concept that has been studied empirically by psychologists and discussed logically by philosophers. In this study, we pose various behavioral scenarios to research participants and ask them to indicate whether the actor in the scenario behaved hypocritically. We assess many of the components that have been considered to be necessary for hypocrisy (e.g., the intent to deceive, self-deception), factors that may or may not be distinguished from hypocrisy (e.g., weakness of will), and factors that may moderate (...) hypocrisy (e.g., the degree of discrepancy between the attitude and behavior, whether the attitude is stated publicly, and the nature and severity of the behavioral consequences). Our findings indicate that lay conceptions of hypocrisy are often at odds with philosophical speculation. We argue that a complete understanding of the criteria for hypocrisy requires consideration of how ordinary people construe the concept. In contrast to some concepts (e.g., physical causation), for which lay conceptions, while interesting, are largely irrelevant, hypocrisy is an essential component of social judgment. One could argue, therefore, that folk wisdom is the ultimate arbiter of what hypocrisy entails. We note limitations of our methodology and suggest avenues for future research. (shrink)

L'hypocrisie implique un souci de la réputation morale qui conduit à des contradictions entre les actions et les raisons d'agir qui sont ouvertement déclarées,ou entre les raisons d'agir réelles et celles qui sont ouvertement déclarées. On opposera ici les actions hypocrites aux actions velléitaires, et les personnes hypocrites aux personnes velléitaires. Les rapports entre l'intégrité et l'hypocrisie seront esquissés : ce qui distingue la personne intègre et l'hypocrite, ce sont leurs attitudes respectives à l'endroit de leurs raisons d'agir; cela ouvre (...) une voie pour la compréhension de ce qu'il y a de mauvais dans l'hypocrisie. Les supercheries de l'hypocrite font obstacle à sa tentative de se construire pour lui-même une personnalité dans le cadre de laquelle ses identifications autoconstitutives puissent lui fournir des raisons d'agir. II compromet ainsi son propre bien. Et il sape, au surplus, la fin collective de la moralité en faussant les données sur lesquelles les autres basent leurs jugements moraux. (shrink)

Consequentialism has trouble explaining why hypocrisy is a term of moral condem-nation, largely because hypocrites often try to deceive others about their own selfishness through the useof words or deeds which themselves have good consequences. We argue that consequentialist attempts to deal with the problem by separating the evaluation of agent and action, or by the directevaluation of dispositions, or by focusing on long-term consequences such as reliability and erosion of trust, all prove inadequate to the challenge. We go on (...) to argue, however, that a version of consequentialism which values the fulfilment of desires, rather than mental states, is able to explain why hypocrisy is generally wrong, and indeed can do so better than its Kantian rivals. (shrink)

This article seeks to interpret Mencius’ criticism of the village worthies and shed light on the distinctive psychological phenomenon that Mencius has captured but not quite articulated. An attempt at filling out the Mencian view of the village worthies will help us better understand the content of the moral charges made against them and also deepen our analysis of the kind of psychology that early Confucians regard as crucial to moral agency. Following an introduction that overviews Mencius’ criticisms of the (...) village worthies, the main discussion of this article is divided into three sections. Section 2 offers an interpretation of the psychology of the village worthy and articulates the way in which the village worthy can be regarded as a special kind of hypocrite, which I label as “appearance-only” hypocrite. Section 3 draws on the proposed interpretation to make sense of Mencius’ criticisms of the village worthy. I argue that while the village worthy can elude some common charges against hypocrisy, it is still problematic in the sense that it weakens an unstable system of morality from the inside and inflicts harm on the genuinely virtuous person. Section 4 delves deeper into analyzing the ethical implications for the self and for others. (shrink)

Accusations of hypocrisy in law and politics typically invoke hypocrisy as a personal failing. This locution misses the much more dangerous way laws and legal institutions themselves can be hypocritical. Hypocrisy can be equally revealed when an institution not only deceives another but acts against its avowed values or does not act in ways required by the values professed. Thus, legal actors, institutions, and norms can, in their institutional role, act against the values they avow, displaying legal hypocrisy. By avowing (...) attractive values while acting in ways that undermine those values, laws and legal institutions victimize citizens to achieve goals that could not be openly justified. In doing so, hypocritical laws not only harm their victims but, by obscuring the injury, undermine the victim’s ability to call the law into account. Hypocrisy is important to highlight precisely because it suffocates the voice of its victims. Because hypocrisy takes advantage of a person while only pretending to justify one’s actions, hypocrisy not only harms citizens but treats them with a form of contempt. The vicious irony is that hypocrisy in the law not only harms its “direct victims” but ultimately undermines the very rule of law. (shrink)

Hypocrisy seems to be a distinctive moral wrong. This thesis offers an account of that wrong. The distinctive wrong of hypocrisy is not a rational failing, or a deception of others. It is a problem in how we critique, and blame, others, when we ourselves are guilty of similar faults. Not only does it seem wrong to blame others hypocritically; it is also widely remarked that hypocrites ‘lack standing’ to blame. I defend both judgments. When we engage others in response (...) to wrongdoing, there is both instrumental and non-instrumental value in ensuring that those who face similar moral predicaments reason about these predicaments, and the appropriate responses to them, together. Hypocrisy is wrong because it hampers our ability to realise that value. And hypocrites lose standing to blame for a similar reason. Standing depends on the value of particular people engaging in an accountability procedure together, a value which the hypocrite forestalls, by failing to acknowledge wrongdoing in the course of blaming. This account of a duty to blame non-hypocritically helps unpack the relationship between hypocrisy and a range of other defects in a person’s standing. It also responds to a central sceptical challenge to the wrongness of hypocritical blaming. The challenge is that accurate hypocritical blaming can’t be wrong because it is morally good, and indeed is morally better than not blaming others at all. My response: hypocritical blaming is wrong, not because it is morally worse than not blaming at all, but because it is second-best, i.e. worse than non-hypocritical blaming, which enables mutual deliberation about wrongdoing. (shrink)

RésuméCet article examine diverses façons d'exploiter l'éthique aristotélicienne pour rendre compte philosophiquement de l'hypocrisie. Aristote lui-même n'apas dit grand chose d'explicite à ce sujet, mais nous nous employons à identifier et à scruter les passages qui sont les plus pertinents pour un traitement distinctif de l'hypocrisie, élucidant en cours de route un certain nombre de confusions à propos d'Aristote. Nous envisageons divers domaines d'émotion et d'action qui pourraient fournir un lieu propre au vice de l'hypocrisie, ceux en particulier de l'engagement (...) personnel, du souci à l'égard des opinions d'autrui, et de la sincérité. Nous concluons de cet examen que la doctrine du juste milieu ne fournit pas une explication satisfaisante de l'hypocrisie. Nous proposons alors que si un système moral comme celui d' Aristote doit rendre compte de la moralité dans son entièreté, il lui faut trouver place pour des phénomènes qui excèdent les limites de la doctrine du juste milieu. L'hypocrisie, selon nous, appartient précisément à cette famille de phénomènes. Finalement, nous esquissons une approche de l'hypocrisie qui fait usage d'éléments aristotéliciens, mais sans pour autant s'y confiner. (shrink)

Provided we blame others accurately, is blaming them morally right even if we are guilty of similar wrongdoing ourselves? On the one hand, hypocrisy seems to render blame morally wrong, and unjustified; but on the other, even hypocritical blaming seems better than silence. I develop an account of the wrongness of hypocritical blaming which resolves this apparent dilemma. When holding others accountable for their moral failings, we ought to be willing to reason, together with them, about our own, similar failings. (...) Hypocrisy undermines this process of mutual deliberation. Thus, even if better than silence, hypocritical blaming is second-best, and that is why it is wrong. (shrink)

“When is it good to be a little bad? And particularly, when and why is it necessary, when being a little bad, to maintain the appearance of goodness?”. These are among the provocative questions Ruth Grant raises in this book, which contributes to the growing body of literature on hypocrisy and integrity, particularly as they apply to politics. Grant focuses to a large degree on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s conception of integrity and its relevance to contemporary politics, but she also tries to (...) identify different types of hypocrisy and to argue that hypocrisy is both inevitable and desirable in the political realm. As a work on interpreting Rousseau, Grant’s book is thorough and interesting. As an attempt at understanding hypocrisy and integrity and their moral status, this book is not as rigorous as one might like, but it does contain a number of worthwhile insights and arguments. (shrink)