“Hypocrisy as evasion”

Thomas Sinclair

“Three questions dominate philosophical discussions of hypocrisy:

1) What is hypocrisy?

2) What’s wrong with it (when it is objectionable)?

3) Why do hypocrites lose their standing to criticise others (when they do)?

In response to the first of these questions, it’s widely agreed that hypocrisy involves an inconsistency or tension between the values the hypocrite affects to care about (at least implicitly) and what actually determines her choices. But the second and third questions attract no such consensus. …

This paper focuses on the second and third questions, taking the widely agreed answer to the first for granted. I’ll suggest that there is a feature of hypocrisy in general that justifies its condemnation and explains the loss of standing. This is the distinctive way in which hypocrites evade responsibility. The basic idea is that blame and moral criticism purport to give others reasons to recognise and respond to the speaker as one invested in relations of reciprocal expectation and accountability structured by the relevant standards, whose sense of her own responsibilities is accordingly sensitive to these standards. The hypocrite is not really invested and her sense of her responsibilities is not really sensitive to the standards. So she doesn’t really accept the constraints on her will that are bound up with those relations. But by speaking as if she does, she also avoids accepting responsibility for her real position. In this way she evades responsibility altogether. This is a moral fault in itself, and moreover the evasion justifies dismissing the reasons the hypocrite’s blame and criticism purport to give.”

Excerpt from the paper’s introduction.