Preach! (Practice not Included): A Qualified Defense of Hypocrisy

Abstract

Hypocrisy is generally treated as particularly repugnant, perhaps the “only unforgivable sin.” I argue that this attitude is misplaced. Hypocrisy—especially quotidian hypocrisy by the average citizen—plays an essential role in maintaining and promoting a good society. Hypocrisy facilitates the establishment and maintenance of beneficial social norms, and can secure better social outcomes when full compliance with a norm is suboptimal. The hypocrite then, is sometimes playing a crucial role in society, and in such cases doesn’t deserve the full measure of the reprobation we usually reserve for them. Instead of focusing our reactions on their hypocrisy, we should instead target our attitudes on the misbehavior itself.

1 Introduction

There’s nothing worse than a hypocrite. Google search gives over 5 million results for “hypocrites suck”—and only 529,000 for “murderers suck.” Political theorist Judith Shklar observed that hypocrisy is “peculiarly repulsive” and “the only unforgivable sin” (1979). Psychological research has largely borne out these claims, finding that we tend to judge hypocrites as worse than their blatantly immoral counterparts (Cushman et al. 2006), that we hate hypocrites more than other sorts of liars, and that we prefer the consistent miscreant to the ethical flip-flopper (Jordan et al. 2017). Perhaps this is because, as some philosophers have argued, a hypocrite is a monster “who subverts our system of morality” by undermining our ability to make reliable moral judgments (McKinnon 1991).

This attitude towards hypocrisy isn’t apt. I’m going to offer a qualified defense of my hypocrisy, and yours. I’ll show that under common conditions, moderate amounts of hypocrisy has social benefits that should temper our moral opposition to it. If we’re being honest, we’re all hypocrites, and that’s good news! Quotidian hypocrisy plays an essential role in maintaining and promoting a good society because it allows for the incremental establishment of desirable social norms, and stabilizes some beneficial norms which would otherwise be destabilized by low levels of compliance.

This is not to say that hypocrisy doesn’t involve bads as well, but since hypocrisy plays a beneficial social role, it doesn’t deserve its place as first among sins. We should take a more nuanced attitude towards hypocrisy and hypocrites, and refocus our reprobation on other wrongs.

My claim is thus much broader than many recent defenses of hypocrisy, which restrict their scope to hypocritical statements made by politicians in democratic societies. In democratic political systems the non-hypocrite is ineffectual. “Do we really want to be governed or ‘policed’ by individuals who lack the guile of the seasoned politician, and so are capable of being self-deceived?” asks Runciman (2010). Hypocritical posturing is not only a key ingredient in democratic political savvy, but also a force for better political decisions: “The unpleasant fact of the matter is that ‘hypocrisy upward’ (the desire to appear better than one is) has often done more for the public good than the moralizing of anti‑hypocrites” (Quill 2011). This makes sense, because we want our political representatives to represent the values of their constituents, and not necessarily their own personal views and practices—a good representative is a hypocrite almost by definition. Moreover, since constituencies aren’t monolithic, politicians need wiggle room to satisfy segments of voters with competing values. Hypocrisy provides that wiggle room, allowing “representatives to build support for policies, please disparate constituencies, and overcome political gridlock” (Maloyed 2011; drawing on some of Benjamin Franklin’s political theorizing in his Autobiography). Even commentators outside the academy have begun to champion political hypocrisy. A New York Times article entitled “In Praise of Hypocrisy” (Gessen 2017) points out that democratically-oriented politicians tend to be more hypocritical because their hypocrisy is aspirational, while autocratic populists decry hypocrisy. The illiberal politician wears their awfulness on their sleeve and calls it “authenticity” or “real talk,” which is, of course, meant to contrast with the hypocrisy of their more democratic political opponents. I find these arguments for the necessity of political hypocrisy to be compelling and feel no need to add any of my own.

Instead, I’ll focus on the mundane hypocrisy of ordinary citizens. Let me be clear what I mean by hypocrisy, since not all commentators seem to be referring to the same thing. Quill (2010), for instance, seems to count all sorts of dishonesty as hypocrisy, even the harmless lies required of us by politeness (e.g. responding to “How are you?” with “I’m fine,” even when you’re not fine). I’m going to carve out a narrower set of behaviors, to allow for tighter philosophical analysis. Feder Kittay (1982) leans too far in the opposite direction, restricting hypocrisy to cases “where sincerity really matters.” Since what’s in question for me is whether and how sincerity does really matter, I’ll beg no questions by including such a restriction in my definition. Another concept of hypocrisy comes from the New Testament. When Jesus condemns hypocrites, his targets are those whose devotional behavior is performative, motivated by the desire for public accolade rather than spiritual value. Hypocrisy in this sense is similar to what is picked out by the much-abused term virtue signaling. Virtue signaling and Biblical hypocrisy are close relatives of hypocrisy in the sense I’m going to tackle, but they are not my primary phenomena of interest. Given that ‘hypocrisy’ is clearly used to refer to a large family of related phenomena, I’m not going to attempt to give a comprehensive analysis of the concept. The working definition I’m about to provide captures core cases of the kind of hypocrisy that people tend to find particularly objectionable, but it will by necessity leave out some other phenomena that are sometimes called ‘hypocrisy.’

Here’s my stipulative characterization:

(H) Agent @ engages in hypocrisy to the degree that @ meets conditions H₁ – H₃.

(H₁)@ publicly endorses norm x.

(H₂)@ tends not to comply with x

(H₃) At the time of endorsement, @ does not intend to comply with x or to increase their own compliance with x.

A few words on this characterization. ¹ First, by endorsement I mean any of a family of behaviors which involve advertising that one both believes in a norm and considers it binding on oneself and others. Which behaviors count as endorsement will be culturally-relative, but could include things like expressing verbal approval of a norm, sanctioning norm violators, gossiping about rule-breakers, campaigning for legal enforcement of the norm, praising people who observe the norm, etc.². Second, H is vague in that it admits of degrees with no clear boundaries. What it takes to “tend to comply” with a norm is highly contextual. If you drive under the speed limit 85% of the time, I’m tempted to say you tend to comply with the speed limit norm, but if you murder even one person, you definitely aren’t complying with thou shalt not kill.³ Despite this vagueness, H is sufficient to identify typical cases of hypocrisy, and neither polite lies nor reluctant but consistent norm-following⁴ come out as core cases of hypocrisy on this account. Finally, H₃ allows us to distinguish cases of weakness of will from cases of hypocrisy. Our behavior might fail to live up to the norms we endorse merely because we are prone to error, not because we don’t sincerely want to live up to our stated ideals.

Exemplary cases of hypocrisy in the sense of H would thus include:

• a gossip who criticizes the extramarital affairs of his colleagues, while engaging in affairs of his own.

• a preacher who condemns marijuana use to her congregation but who consumes edibles in private.

• a corporate executive who is the face of an ad campaign touting their company’s diversity initiative, but who engages in discriminatory behavior towards their employees.

By contrast, the following cases are not hypocrisy in the sense of H, or are at best marginal:

• a socialite who insists on proper silverware placement at formal events, but who drinks milk directly from the carton in the privacy of their own home.

• a celebrity who decries sexual harassment in Hollywood, and is open and remorseful about the fact that he is a repeat offender himself.

• an online activist who spouts propaganda primarily for the gratification of seeing her statements liked and reposted, and not because she’s deeply committed the cause.

Now that we’re clear on the phenomena in question, I can lay out the gist of my argument. In brief, the set of norms we have reason to endorse and the set of norms we have reason to comply with are overlapping but not coextensive. There are thus cases where an agent has reason to endorse a norm, and so satisfy H₁, but also has reason not to comply with it, and so satisfy H₂ and H₃. It follows that there are cases where an agent has reason to satisfy all three components of H, that is, to be a hypocrite.

I have two goals for the remainder of this paper. First is to show that the cases where agents have reason to be hypocritical are relatively common. I’ll do this by outlining three broad families of social dilemmas, in each of which hypocrisy is the right choice for at least some individuals. My second goal is to show that hypocrisy in these cases is not only reasonable for the individual agents, but also morally beneficial to society.

2 Dilemma 1: The Irrelevant Individual

Let’s start with a common type of social dilemma, in which the effect of a single individual on the outcome is negligible but the aggregate behavior matters. Under such situations, the selfish incentives for individuals are often to be hypocritical, endorsing a norm(H₁), but not complying (H₂ and H₃). To avoid hypocrisy, an individual could (intend to) comply with the norm…or one could simply stop endorsing it. Given the futility of individual compliance, the latter route might make more sense for any given individual, meaning that insistence on avoiding hypocrisy will likely encourage a suboptimal social outcome.

Perhaps the most-discussed case of this sort is the paradox of voting. In the seminal modern analysis of the paradox, Downs observes that voting isn’t a costless act, because it takes time. In fact, voting correctly requires a lot of time. In addition to “time to register, to discover what parties are running, to deliberate, to go to the polls, and to mark the ballot,” for voting to be beneficial the voter needs to be informed, and becoming informed takes significant time (Downs 1957). And, “[w]hen there are costs to voting, they may outweigh the returns thereof; hence rational abstention becomes possible even for citizens who want a particular party to win” (ibid.). More recent mathematical analysis has shown that abstention from voting is almost always rational in large societies. If a voter’s only concern is with influencing the outcome of the election (and not, say, getting fuzzy feelings from wearing an “I Voted” sticker around the office all day), then the expected utility of their vote is effectively zero (Brennan and Lomasky 1993; Edlin et al. 2007). The costs of voting thus outweigh the benefits, and outside some additional incentive such as a compulsory voting law, the individual voter has reason to avoid the polls on election day.

Of course, this ignores the possibility that we may have a moral duty to vote independent of our ability to influence the outcome. Campaigns to increase voter participation certainly communicate that we have not only a right but also a responsibility to vote, though the arguments for why such a responsibility exists almost inevitably rely on the specious claim that “your vote matters”. Moreover, survey data suggests both a widespread belief in the civic duty to vote and that this belief is a key reason motivating voters to go to the polls (Verba et al. 1996). Additionally, levels of voter participation vary widely in different countries,⁵ which suggests that cultural norms have a strong influence on voting behavior. In other words, your individual vote is consequentially irrelevant, but the presence of norms in favor of voting can significantly affect outcomes.

Fortunately, endorsing the norm citizens have a duty to vote generally has negligible cost. Taking 30 s out of my lecture on election day to encourage my students to hit the polls is no sacrifice at all. Likewise, as long as her response is penitence and not a backlash, gently criticizing my friend when she admits she didn’t vote costs me little in the way of time, and may in fact increase my reputation among our interlocutors, who now think that I’m virtuously civic-minded. Endorsing citizens have a duty to vote is thus sometimes the opposite of costly. But the low cost associated with endorsing a pro-voting norm doesn’t mean that the payoffs are low. In fact, if I remind a classroom of 100 students to vote, that 30 s of effort will probably lead to several additional votes from people with similar values to mine. Endorsement will often be more consequential than placing my own vote. And, given the known efficacy of citizens have a duty to vote as a norm, if my endorsement contributes to the maintenance or strengthening of the norm in my community for little cost, it is worthwhile (on the assumption that I generally share the values of my community).

That leaves us in the situation in Table 1.

Table 1 Decision matrix for voting

The benefits of endorsing citizens have a duty to vote outweigh the costs, so an individual has reason to endorse the norm, and thus satisfy H₁. But the costs of going to the polls outweigh the benefits, so an individual has reason to not actually comply with the norm, and thus satisfy H₂ and H₃. In general, the reasonable thing to do is to be a hypocrite. Details of specific cases may change the math, of course, as when a close local election means the payoffs for voting can be high, or when someone has little social influence and so little reason to endorse a norm. But in standard cases, voter hypocrisy is reasonable.

The case of voting is merely one illustrative example of a whole family of similar social dilemmas. It’s often the case that individual behavior has a negligible impact. Mitigating climate change doesn’t depend on any individual’s reduced consumption of meat or fossil fuels, and the impact of a protest march doesn’t depend on whether one particular person gets up early on a Sunday morning to attend. In all these cases, the group venture doesn’t stand or fall on the participation of any individual or small group. Some of these cases have a key difference from the voting case, in that individual behavior is more observable—whether I eat a hamburger or a vegan alternative, or whether or not I show up at the rally is often more publicly obvious than whether I voted—but even in these cases the reasonable thing to do might be to fail to comply with the norm when I can avoid detection. The point holds: there are frequent cases of individual irrelevance where the payoff structure of participation makes endorsing a norm rational, but strictly adhering to it pointless.

What’s the moral significance of this conclusion about individual practical rationality? It might be that the futility of individual contribution actually does undermine the demands of morality in these sorts of cases, but let’s assume for sake of argument that we all have a duty comply with these norms even when our individual compliance has no significant effect on outcomes (e.g. that you have a duty to vote even if your vote truly doesn’t matter). The morally ideal person will comply with the duty of compliance and will also endorse the relevant norm. Hypocrisy, because it departs from this ideal, is in fact a moral failing. But what sort of moral failing is it? Or better, what should our attitude towards hypocrisy in these situations be? Here it’s worth looking at the consequences of our attitude towards hypocrisy on social outcomes. If society treats hypocrisy in these situations as an “unforgivable sin” (Shklar 1979), we may encourage some people who endorse a norm but don’t comply to start complying. But people could also avoid hypocrisy by ceasing to endorse the norm. Since avoiding endorsement is a much easier path to avoiding hypocrisy than practicing compliance, we should expect that focusing our reactive and other moral attitudes on hypocrisy, rather than on (non)compliance itself, will tend to discourage endorsement more than it encourages compliance. Endorsement, as I’ve argued, tends to encourage compliance, so treating hypocrisy as a significant wrong in situations of the irrelevant individual is likely to undermine general compliance with the norm.

By treating hypocrisy as a serious moral failing in these situations, we’re likely to decrease both rates of norm endorsement and rates of norm compliance, and this matters morally, not just as a matter of individual prudence. This suggests not necessarily that hypocrisy is innocent, but that at minimum we should regard it as a lesser moral failing. There’s a social and moral cost to treating the hypocrite as somehow worse than the unrepentant non-voter (or carnivore, or whatever), because there’s a social and moral value to endorsing good norms.

3 Dilemma 2: Partial Compliance

In stereotypical cases of collective behavior, the ideal outcomes involve full compliance with a governing norm or convention. We’re all better off if everyone follows drive on the right side of the road, and from a social perspective there is no advantage to having a certain percentage of individuals evade taxes. But full compliance isn’t always ideal. Sometimes the optimal outcome involves either a minority of the population failing to comply or everyone complying only some of the time.

A concrete example is the piracy of digitally-reproducible products, like software and entertainment media. Legal and social norms proscribe piracy, though there is no consensus among the public on whether piracy is morally wrong (Peace et al. 2003; Siegfried 2004). What is agreed is that piracy, if practiced too widely, could be disastrous. If everyone pirated all the time, the economic incentives for creative production would vanish, and we’d all be worse off. Less intuitively, full compliance with don’t pirate digital goods would also be suboptimal. Consider the case of a pirate who, if she didn’t pirate a piece of software, wouldn’t buy it (or an alternative) anyway. The software’s publisher is no better or worse off whether she pirates or not, but the would-be-pirate is clearly better off if she pirates. The pareto optimal outcome thus involves her piracy.

Paradoxically, limited piracy can even be beneficial for the publisher. Empirical research shows that limited piracy often yields higher sales than no piracy (Croxson 2007). One reason is that pirates become free salespeople for the software; if they benefit from it, they promote it by word-of-mouth. In fact, developers often give away free copies of their software to influencers to mimic this effect, but doing so requires more investment than just allowing pirates to do it on their own. Pirate-driven viral marketing is efficient marketing. Additionally, if piracy allows a software platform to spread more widely, it can help that platform outcompete its competitors. Suppose, for instance, a bunch of us pirate Microsoft PowerPoint, and thus create decks with a .ppt extension. When we share those decks, they work best on other versions of PowerPoint, and not as well on a competitor like Apple Keynote. Our piracy thus creates pressure for other users to adopt PowerPoint instead of Keynote, meaning that limited piracy of PowerPoint is beneficial to Microsoft as well as to the pirates. Similar effects arise in the case of media piracy. For example, an HBO executive admitted that piracy of popular TV show Game of Thrones was a “compliment” that “didn’t negatively impact” sales, and may even have increased legitimate viewership by contributing to Thrones becoming a cultural phenomenon.⁶ Work by Kim et al. (2018) demonstrates another benefit to producers (and consumers) of moderate amounts of piracy: it creates a market pressure which leads retailers to lower prices, yielding higher sales and thus more revenue for producers (as well as cheaper goods for consumers). So both consumers and producers would be worse off without a limited amount of digital goods piracy.

Piracy is only one case among many where partial norm compliance is optimal. Political corruption, to give another example, is detrimental to both income equality and economic efficiency, if rampant. Limited corruption, on the other hand, can increase income equality by creating an informal workforce sector accessible to the most marginalized (Dobson and Ramlogan-Dobson 2012). It can also enable economic efficiency by providing a means to circumvent needlessly cumbersome bureaucracy (Houston 2007). So while all of us, including public servants, should endorse norms opposing political corruption, we might be better off if political administrators were hypocrites who occasionally failed to comply with the anti-corruption norms they espouse. We’ve all been in a situation where it’s obvious that not just the more efficient thing to do, but the right thing to do, would be for a bureaucrat to cut through the red tape.

An obvious objection to my analysis of cases where partial compliance is optimal is that we could avoid reasonable hypocrisy in these cases merely by endorsing more sophisticated norms. Instead of don’t pirate software we could endorse only pirate software 15% of the time or pirate software only if you are an influencer who wouldn’t purchase the software anyway. In response, I’ll suggest that these are ill-formed norms, for two reasons. First, they aren’t practical to enforce through either formal (e.g. legal) or informal (e.g. reputational) means. We tend to endorse all-or-nothing norms for this very reason. Second these highly specific norms aren’t particularly internalizable in the sense of Hooker’s (2000) discussion of what sort of rules we should endorse.⁷ As Hooker demonstrates, human cognitive limitations mean that the ideal systems of norms “will contain rules of limited number and limited complexity.” Don’t pirate software is a simple, cognitively internalizable rule. More specific alternatives are not, especially if we’re expected to internalize such complicated rules in every domain of behavior. Given the constraints of enforceability and internalizability, hypocrisy becomes a way to have our cake and eat it too. It allows our systems of norms to be internalizable, without leading to the socially suboptimal outcomes that full compliance would generate.

So in cases where partial compliance is socially optimal, hypocrites are performing a useful social function. Is it right and fair to condemn them for their hypocrisy, when we are, in general, benefiting from it? Probably not. We do need to condemn these hypocrites, since doing so sustains the norm against piracy, corruption, or whatever. But to sustain the norm, we don’t need to condemn their hypocrisy, only their lack of norm compliance. In fact, by condemning their hypocrisy, we discourage them either from their beneficial partial compliance, or from doing their part in endorsing and sustaining the norm, neither of which is good. So society has good reason not to cast too much disapprobation on hypocrisy in cases where partial compliance is optimal.

4 Dilemma 3: Lack of Enforcement

Often, adherence to a norm only makes sense if the norm is generally observed. If it turns out that no one is following a fashion norm or a norm of etiquette, I’d just look silly if I continued to observe the norm, and the best thing to do is just to let the norm die. But in cases where social norms have greater moral significance, preserving or developing the norm is preferable. Consider public goods games, where the benefit is contingent on the majority of the group participating in an individually costly behavior. For example, compliance with don’t litter is individually costly, because it requires us to carry around garbage. If most people comply, however, we all get the benefit of living in a clean city. On the other hand, if even a substantial subset of people litter, the city is dirty, and my compliance with don’t litter is near meaningless. As another example, take the norm donate when the collection plate goes around at church. If most parishioners comply with the norm, all get the benefit of being able to rent the place of worship, hire a pastor, hold church picnics, and so on. But if enough people don’t follow the norm, the church will become defunct, and all parishioners will be worse off.

One way to promote success in these sorts of public goods games is to punish norm violators (Fehr and Gachter 2000; Brandt et al. 2003). Each individual can be more confident that the sacrifice they make for the public good won’t go to waste if there is an enforcement mechanism securing the requisite level of participation. Enforcement thus changes the calculus. If I believe that my fellow citizens generally litter freely, I see only costs and no benefits to avoiding littering myself. But if I think that the threat of punishment will generally keep my fellows from trashing the city, it might become reasonable for me to avoid littering even when I won’t get caught.

Hypocrisy becomes the reasonable stance in the intermediate case, where lack of enforcement means compliance levels aren’t high enough, but the possibility of more strongly establishing the relevant norm is possible. Suppose my city poorly enforces a relevant norm, so the norm isn’t generally observed, and thus individual compliance is irrational. Obviously, I have little reason to follow the norm. But I still might have reason to endorse the norm, so long as can expect either that (a) my endorsement contributes to increased levels of compliance, which could eventually make individual compliance meaningful, or (b) public endorsement could lead to the implementation of better enforcement mechanisms. In this sort of intermediate case, norm endorsement but not norm compliance⁸ can be (temporarily) reasonable, making hypocrisy reasonable. Hypocrisy can play the important role of facilitating transition to broader compliance with important ethical and social norms.

This sort of situation arises not only in public goods games, but in any situation where we’d all generally be better off with a norm enforcement mechanism. An example might be the norm honor business agreements in situations of competing interest. Without enforceable contract law, it wouldn’t always be rational for parties to follow through on commitments when they might be cheated by other parties. Nevertheless, it would be rational to endorse promise-keeping, because endorsing the norm is essential to laying the groundwork for establishing an enforceable contract law, with which we’d all be better off. Hypocrisy, then, is often the right stance to take towards norms that work best under regimes of enforcement until those regimes are securely in place.

Bringing it together: How hypocrisy enables good norms.

Uniting all three cases is the recognition that hypocrisy has some social value. Sometimes this social value is in terms of social goods like more efficient economies. But in every case, a key social benefit of hypocrisy is the role it plays in establishing and maintaining good social norms. It should require no argument that establishing and maintaining good social norms is a significant moral good, meaning that hypocrisy performs a positive moral function. Arguments for the moral badness of hypocrisy (e.g. Feder Kittay 1982; McKinnon 1991; Fritz and Miller 2018) are inconclusive until they’re weighed against this positive moral function.

Let’s make the positive function more explicit by drawing on Bicchieri’s (2006; 2016) work on how social norms are established and stabilized. For decades, empirical research has shown that moralistic badgering is ineffective at getting people to comply with a norm (Mendelsohn 1973). Instead, Bicchieri argues, people prefer to conform with a social norm when “they believe that (a) most people in their reference network conform to it (empirical expectation), and (b) that most people in their reference network believe they ought to conform to it (normative expectation)” (2006). Experimental work has borne this out, showing that when one of these expectations is violated, it makes “positive normative messaging worthless” (Bicchieri 2016). In other words, for a social norm to establish or stabilize, most people within a social network need to believe not only that most people in the network approve of the norm, but that most people in the network comply with it. Non-compliance thus makes norms both difficult to establish and fragile once established. Hypocrisy, however, can strengthen norms by creating false beliefs. Even if levels of compliance or levels of positive attitudes towards a norm are relatively low, mass hypocrisy can make it appear that both the empirical expectation and normative expectation are met. McKinnon’s (1991) complaint that hypocrisy undermines our ability to make reliable moral judgments in fact identifies why hypocrisy is beneficial: it allows us to unreliably judge our peers to be better people than they actually are, and thus facilitates our possessing false beliefs that motivate us to comply with good norms.

For example, it may be the case that in parts of the U.S. the norm don’t use racial slurs is frequently observed even by racists, because those racists incorrectly believe that most of the people around them accept and comply with the norm. Why would they think this? Hypocrisy. Many of their fellows publicly endorse the norm against slurs, but resent the norm and sometimes use slurs in private. Consequently, the norm against slurs can be maintained in a group even when the majority of the group privately resents the norm. Even better, a norm maintained over time can be internalized by group members, or adopted unreluctantly by new group members, such as the children who take public endorsement of anti-racist norms at face value and don’t realize that the adults in the group endorse those norms only hypocritically. Hypocrisy, in short, plays a key role in social progress.

To be clear, I’m not saying that hypocrisy always facilitates adoption of good norms, only that it can, so we shouldn’t treat no hypocrisy whatsoever as the moral ideal. We could easily imagine cases where hypocrisy helps maintain detrimental norms, or hypocrisy benefits only the selfish individual with no broader redeeming effects, so I’m not claiming that hypocrisy is always, or even generally, good. I’ve focused on conditions under which hypocrisy supports good norms, but certainly in other cases hypocritical behavior could undermine the strength of a beneficial norm, and it might makes sense to condemn that hypocrisy. My argument, however, requires only establishing that hypocrisy frequently has the effect of helping societies adopt better social norms, since this is enough to push back against the widespread attitude that it is the worst of sins.

I might even go further, and suggest that hypocrisy isn’t even bad or undesirable in itself; that to identify a particular case of hypocrisy as wrong or blameworthy we need to look to other features of the case, and not the hypocrisy itself. By corollary, when we discover that someone is engaging in reprehensible behavior, we should focus our criticism on the bad behavior itself, and not the fact that said behavior is hypocritical.⁹

How far you follow me down this route will depend on some of your other commitments. The arguments I’ve made establish that hypocrisy can have social benefits, and these will sometimes, and only sometimes, outweigh its bads. But establishing that hypocrisy isn’t as bad as is often thought, and that stringently discouraging it might have detrimental side effects, doesn’t on its own settle all the questions. Whether, when, and to what extent hypocrites are blameworthy or should be condemned will depend on the account of blameworthiness that we adopt. I’m not fool enough to try to defend any particular such account here, so I won’t be able to provide a precise conclusion about the blameworthiness of hypocrisy. Whatever the right auxiliary commitments, however, my arguments should move the needle, and result in us taking a more nuanced attitude towards hypocrisy than we would have without considering them.

5 Objections and Replies

Objection 1

Whether hypocrisy is reasonable or moral depends on the set of alternatives. Sure, the hypocrite who, say, endorses reducing carbon emissions but doesn’t do so themselves might be consequentially preferable (if still more repugnant) than the openly anti-environmental alternative. But better still would be the non-hypocrite who both endorses and observes eco-conscious norms. That hypocrisy is better than one alternative is no justification, as long as an even better alternative exists.

Reply

My endorsement of hypocrisy must be taken to be an endorsement relevant to our non-ideal world. Rates of non-compliance with norms such as anti-corruption norms or norms of sexual fidelity are high enough to threaten the stability of those norms, unless there’s a good deal of hypocrisy. The world where we tacitly tolerate that hypocrisy as a necessary evil is a more accessible alternative world than the one where corruption is unheard of or cheating vanishingly rare. That we can conceive of a perfect world where there is no need for police departments is a poor argument for abolishing the constabulary in the world we live in. Likewise, that a world of angels wouldn’t see any social benefits from hypocrisy in no way undermines the fact that hypocrisy has positive social effects in the real world.

An anonymous referee observes that this reply helps delimit the scope of my qualified defense of hypocrisy. The benefits of hypocrisy that I’ve identified occur when “useful” norms are in “tenuous” positions, to borrow Reviewer 1’s phrasing. That’s right, and another way of framing my reply here is to say that useful norms are frequently in tenuous positions, so the scope of my argument, while limited, still covers ample territory.

Objection 2

Suppose for the sake of argument that morality does ask of us some ethical hypocrisy. This should be seen as supererogatory because of its onerousness. First, the costs if one is discovered to be a hypocrite can be very high, and even if the hypocrite remains undiscovered, worrying about the possibility of discovery exacts a steep psychological toll. Second, because hypocrisy involves inconsistency and a lack of integrity, being a hypocrite can undermine one’s sense of self-unity and narrative identity, which are important to feeling that one’s life is meaningful.

Reply

Worries about the risk of discovery are overstated. When a hypocrite is exposed, they have the chance to contest the accusation of hypocrisy, and as many cases of hypocrisy among public figures attest, such contestations often succeed. Moreover, worrying about the risk of discovery isn’t unique to hypocritical behavior. In any realm where we value privacy we have to worry about exposure, whether that’s worry about someone publishing our web browsing history, reading our diary, or recording a private conversation. We don’t take worries about exposure to be decisive reasons to avoid browsing the web, writing in a journal, or holding private conversations. Neither should we take worries about exposure to serve as decisive reasons against hypocritical behavior, though in borderline cases they may help tip the scale.

Similarly, the worry about losing one’s integrity loses its teeth once we realize just how much of our quotidian activity is already inconsistent. Consider, for instance, the data behind the situationist critique of virtue theories (reviewed in Sreenivasan 2013), which suggest that our character and personality traits shift from situation to situation. This is just an empirical fact, so if a sense of self-unity or narrative cohesion is necessary to a meaningful life, it had better be the case that we are capable of crafting them despite a good deal of inconsistency in our behavior. Likewise, navigating the variegated social world we live in requires a constant shifting of masks. I don’t present myself as the same person in the classroom as I do with my family, nor do I act or speak the way I do on the basketball court when I’m at a religious ceremony. None of this re-presentation and misrepresentation of myself threatens my sense of identity, nor should hypocrisy, which is just another sort of mask shifting.

Objection 3

Hypocrisy is unjust, because a hypocrite is a free rider who reaps the benefits of group behavior without paying the costs. For example, the hypocritical non-voter benefits from democracy without paying into the system, and the hypocritical pseudo-vegetarian enjoys the environmental goods that come from a cleaner diet without having to give up on the gustatory pleasures of meat.

Reply

Endorsing hypocrisy doesn’t entail endorsing that only a subset of the population can be hypocrites. The benefits (and costs—see Objection 2) of hypocrisy can be distributed fairly if each of us engages in limited hypocrisy in different domains. For example, I’m a voting hypocrite, but not a vegetarian hypocrite. I sometimes skip voting, but I both endorse don’t eat meat and consistently observe it. Perhaps you endorse the same voting and vegetarian norms as I do, and vote consistently but eat the occasional hamburger. Scaled up to encompass the broader population and a wider set of norms, this may be a fair system with an optimal outcome. We all gain the group benefits of hypocrisy, with the individual benefits spread out across the population.

Objection 4

¹⁰The societal benefits of hypocrisy will sometimes trade off against smaller scale interpersonal moral goods. For example, if I’ve wronged someone, I might have strong moral and personal reasons to come clean to them about my behavior. Honesty might be a requirement for effective apology and restoration of trust, for instance, and those goods might outweigh the social benefits of pretending to be compliant with the norm I violated. This could further limit the scope of my argument.

Reply

I’ll give this bullet at least a nibble. There will be some cases where interpersonal reasons incontrovertibly outweigh the social benefits of hypocrisy, and this could limit the number of cases my arguments apply to. I’m not particularly worried, however. For one thing, I’ve given plenty of significant examples of the kinds of cases where this is unlikely. Voting, littering, software piracy, and the like are generally not going to generate the sort of interpersonal wrongs that generate this objection. So there remains a vast set of cases to which my argument does apply. Additionally, it will often be both possible and desirable to achieve both interpersonal honesty and social hypocrisy. If I come clean to someone I have wronged and apologize, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they should announce to the world that I’ve done wrong. It will in some cases, such as if my wronging them has harmed their reputation, and so making amends requires publicizing my wrongdoing. But in many other cases, effective reparations and apology don’t require and may even preclude publicizing my norm violation. For example, in cases of violations of norms of sexual fidelity or norms against breaches of confidence or privacy, publicizing the wrongdoing may further harm the victim, so reparation might require coming clean only to affected parties, but keeping the violation secret from the broader social group. The wrongdoer might make amends to the wronged party, but maintain their hypocrisy with regards to their broader society. All that is to say, “point taken,” but I don’t see this objection as carving away so much of the scope of my argument that its significance is undermined.

6 Conclusion

There are good arguments for the immorality of hypocrisy. But in this paper, I demonstrate that it also performs positive social and moral functions, helping secure better outcomes in cases of social dilemmas, and especially in helping establish and maintain good social norms. These mitigate, and in some cases might eclipse, the moral badness of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy thus doesn’t entirely deserve its bad reputation.

But judge for yourself. I’m not going to tell you to go out and be a hypocrite. In fact, if anyone asks, I’ll deny that I’m a proponent of hypocrisy, and I’m still going to complain loudly about all the annoying hypocrisy in Washington and the media. But don’t be surprised if I engage in hypocritical behavior myself, despite refusing to flat out endorse hypocrisy. If I did otherwise, I wouldn’t be practicing what I preach.