My personal examples of hypocrisy:
I believe it is ethically better to be a vegetarian, or even better to be a vegan. Yet I am not a vegetarian, and to be honest, it's not even because I would love eating meat to much (veganism would be more difficult, because I love cheese), but merely because it would be inconvenient. If I had a vegan restaurant near my job, and enough practice with cooking different vegetarian meals, I probably wouldn't mind being vegetarian; it wouldn't even seem like having sacrificed anything.
(Okay, I took some steps to fix this, but this is not meant to be a thread about making excuses, it's about admitting hypocrisy.)
I believe I should spend less time on internet, because my spending too much time online is probably the worst obstacle at reaching many of my goals. Guess what I am doing right now?
Seeing an ideal not being met is not an argument against the ideal.
Hypocrisy is always evidence. Often, it is evidence about the hypocrite. It may be evidence of a weak will, a misguided belief, a misunderstood belief, or even deliberately disguised intentions. It all depends on the person and the act.
Sometimes, hypocrisy is evidence about an ideal itself, especially if many holders of the ideal also practice the hypocrisy. Then, you might start to link the hypocrisy to the ideal, perhaps as a correlated phenomena, perhaps as an effect of some specific phenomena or axiom of the belief. It, again, all depends.
Of course, like any error, hypocrisy is a sign that something, somewhere, is not optimized. It may be as simple as "I just COULDN'T resist that steak when I saw it sizzling" or it might be more systemic. But hypocrisy does not automatically destroy an ideal. It is evidence and it is up to us to decide what needs to be fixed. Do I need stronger will power? Do I have personal beliefs I profess not to hold but continue to act upon? Do I have a belief about my ideal that is in error? Or, finally, is the ideal itself in error? We have to figure it out.
Reminds me of "The Proper Use of Humility". With artificial humility, a human pretends to have no strong beliefs, so they can socially display humility about any of their beliefs. In this case, with articifial consistency, a human pretends to have no difficult-to-achieve values, so they can socially display consistency between their values and behavior.
Acting according to your values is a virtue, but pretending to have no nontrivial values is cheating (or perhaps admitting to psychopathy if that really happens to be true).
It does not make sense to compare how much person X acts according to X-values with how much person Y acts according to Y-values (where X-values and Y-values are the professed values, not necessarily the ones truly felt). Those are two different scales.
A huge problem with seeing hypocrisy as a vice is that it's prevents one from pointing out in polite company that the other person is hypocritical.
In general it would be good to have a culture where people can say: "Yes, I'm a bit of hypocrical about one issue. Yes, it would be better if I would walk my talk but the flesh is weak."
The danger of being accused of hypocrisy led me to embracing amoralism. If you have no principles, you can't break them and you have no chance of hyporcrisy. It is the only honest option, don't want to be hyprocritical after all.
I say you're a hypocrite, pretending indifference between good and evil yet for the most part choosing good.
This is based on "hypocrisy" referring to not living up to one's values, but I think that there is another sense of "hypocrisy" that refers to not merely acting contrary to one's stated values, but asserting rights inconsistent with one's stated values. Take, for instance, members of the KKK. They surely considered themselves to have a right to not be murdered, yet they asserted a right to murder others. Avoiding this sort of hypocrisy is a fundamental principle of morality: when a kid hits another kid, an adult will often ask something...
Hypocrisy is only a vice for people with correct views. Consistently doing the Wrong Thing is not praiseworthy.
Unfortunately, it's much easier to demonstrate inconsistency than incorrectness.
"In the course of my life, I have often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I have always found it a wholesome diet."
(it's not quite hypocrisy, but related)
The role of bodhisattva is hypocrisy as virtue. Nirvana is best for all, but a bodhisattva turns away from nirvana to help others go in. And as J. R. "Bob" Dobbs said, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the kind of man I'm preaching to."
Those who know me in person will know I regularly point out at least one of my own hypocrisies: specifically, that of eating meat. My hope is that it makes clear that I don't endorse my own behavior on the matter, and that I'm generally "on Team Vegetarian" even though I eat meat (largely for flesh-is-weak reasons). I'll even refer to meat as "animal suffering" in regular conversation, as in "I usually get the 'Tarzan' at Sandwich Spot, which is like the 'Erica Cato' but with animal suffering added" or "Spoonrocket's vegg...
In the late-twentieth-century Weltanschauung, a hypocrite was someone who espoused high moral views as part of a planned campaign of deception-he never held these beliefs sincerely and routinely violated them in privacy.
Hypocrisy, and lying in general, is a large part of social advantage as long as there is not a high social punishment enforced when detected by others. Defecting works, if you can get away with it, or if you're not punished when found out. If there's no real cost to being found out (or even a potential benefit, as you've marked yourself...
To generalize: holding high moral ideals is going to produce cognitive dissonance when you are not able to live up to those ideals. It is always tempting--for me at least--to resolve this dissonance by backing down from those high ideals. An alternative we might try is to be more comfortable with hypocrisy.
It seems obvious to me that you won't be able to follow your own moral code in the strictest way possible. Humans are fallible and minds are lazy. The point is not that you should always live up to your moral ideal, it's that you should always try to do so.
We should allow for failure. If you want to name that sort of failure hypocrisy, I'm fine with that.
After all, clearly any moral code which is inconsistent is wrong.
I don't find this self-evident. In which meaning do you use the word "wrong"?
It's an interesting thought.
Hypocrisy involves (I think necessarily) deceit, which is why I think it is viewed as "wrong". Most people I know are okay with the idea that living up to the ideals we hold is very difficult, and are okay with the idea when people talk a better game than they are actually living.
I'm not sure if I agree with this characterization of the current political climate; in any case, that's not the point I'm interested in. I'm also not interested in moral relativism.
As an aside, then, if anyone is interested in the sort of thing Stephenson is possibly referring to, David Foster Wallace's essay E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction (1993, two years before The Diamond Age) is a classic. In DFW's version, hypocrisy was the monarch of vices for a time, although discourse was not a matter of simply pointing it out (which still requir...
I would expect anyone who genuinely believes that eating meat is wrong to not eat meat. If they eat meat while talking about how wrong it is, they believe something other than "Eating meat is wrong", such as "I don't want other people to eat meat". Or perhaps they think that eating meat promotes suffering, and suffering is socially assigned the label "bad", but they don't actually think that the extent to which they contribute to it is bad.
If your high moral ideals are unappealing to you, then perhaps they're incorrect and you shouldn't abide by them. More generally, if you can't live up to your own ideals, you should reexamine what you mean by "should" and "your ideals".
Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age takes place several decades in the future and this conversation is looking back on the present day:
I'm not sure if I agree with this characterization of the current political climate; in any case, that's not the point I'm interested in. I'm also not interested in moral relativism.
But the passage does point out a flaw which I recognize in myself: a preference for consistency over actually doing the right thing. I place a lot of stock--as I think many here do--on self-consistency. After all, clearly any moral code which is inconsistent is wrong. But dismissing a moral code for inconsistency or a person for hypocrisy is lazy. Morality is hard. It's easy to get a warm glow from the nice self-consistency of your own principles and mistake this for actually being right.
Placing too much emphasis on consistency led me to at least one embarrassing failure. I decided that no one who ate meat could be taken seriously when discussing animal rights: killing animals because they taste good seems completely inconsistent with placing any value on their lives. Furthermore, I myself ignored the whole concept of animal rights because I eat meat, so that it would be inconsistent for me to assign animals any rights. Consistency between my moral principles and my actions--not being a hypocrite--was more important to me than actually figuring out what the correct moral principles were.
To generalize: holding high moral ideals is going to produce cognitive dissonance when you are not able to live up to those ideals. It is always tempting--for me at least--to resolve this dissonance by backing down from those high ideals. An alternative we might try is to be more comfortable with hypocrisy.
Related: Self-deception: Hypocrisy or Akrasia?