The Moral Equality Account of Hypocrisy (ME) is a prominent theory of why hypocrites lack moral standing to blame. Hypocrites make exceptions for themselves and thereby implicitly deny moral equality, which is an essential premise of moral standing to blame. ME has recently faced challenges from philosophers who deny that it is the hypocrite’s rejection of moral equality that causes her to lose moral standing to blame. I have distinguished three main challenges which I discuss and rebut in this article: (...) “The Internal Blame and Blame of Fictional Characters Challenge”, which I attribute to Todd ( 2019 ), and “The Hypercrite Challenge” and “The Inegalitarian Norm Challenge”, which are due to Lippert-Rasmussen ( 2021 ). The article begins by offering an account of ME. It fills in a few gaps in the theory, by explaining why it is necessary for a blamer to invoke a special right to blame and by determining the type of right that standing to blame is. It also distinguishes between the question of why hypocrisy is wrong or bad, and the question of why it undermines moral standing to blame. I hold that several theories provide plausible answers to the first question, but only ME has so far given a good answer to the second question. When distinguishing properly between these two questions, we see that ME can respond satisfactorily to the three challenges. (shrink)

In response to criticism, we often say – in these or similar words – “Let’s see you do better!” Prima facie, it looks like this response is a challenge of a certain kind – a challenge to prove that one has what has recently been called standing. More generally, the data here seems to point a certain kind of norm of criticism: be better. Slightly more carefully: One must: criticize x with respect to standard s only if one is better (...) than x with respect to standard s. In this paper, I defend precisely this norm of criticism – an underexplored norm that is nevertheless ubiquitous in our lives, once we begin looking for it. The be better norm is, I hope to show, continuously invoked in a wide range of ordinary settings, can undergird and explain the widely endorsed non-hypocrisy condition on the standing to blame, and apparent counterexamples to the norm are no such counterexamples at all. I further contend that, given some plausible principles, my previous “moral commitment” account of the moral standing to blame will be extensionally equivalent to the be better norm. (shrink)

According to an influential account of standing, hypocritical blamers lack standing to blame in virtue of their lack of commitment to the norm etc. which they invoke. Nevertheless, the commitment account has the wrong shape for it to explain why hypocrites lack standing to blame. Building on the lessons of that critique I propose a novel account of what undermines standing to blame – the comparative fairness account. This differs from the commitment account and the other prominent account of why (...) hypocrites lack standing to blame offered in the literature: the moral equality account. Finally, I observe that, intuitively, lack of commitment undermines standing to blame and that many hypocrites might lack standing for that reason also. Moreover, typically the hypocrite's failure to address their own faults is a feature in virtue of which, other things being equal, the hypocrite is less committed to the norm in question. These two observations provide the basis for an error theory of the commitment account's appeal, despite its inability to explain why, qua hypocritical blamer, one lacks standing to blame. (shrink)