schweblog

I’ve been thinking about hypocrisy lately, as Hannah Arendt brings it up in a section of On Revolution. It’s a great explanation, but there’s something more to this that I’d like to explore. Hypocrisy, as we usually conceive it, is an act that someone performs that goes directly against what they preach. In short, a hypocrite does not “practice what they preach.”

This is interesting in light of a common distinction made in ethical theory. When one chooses to assign value to a virtue–whether that virtue be honesty, courage, whatever–they can either honor the virtue or promote the virtue. For example, a parent wants to instill their children with a sense of honesty. Those choosing to honor the the virtue of honesty will never lie to their children, portraying the ideal figure of honesty. A parent that chooses to promote the virtue of honesty might tell their child that, “All lies hurt someone,” knowing full well that not all lies hurt people. In one instance, the parent portrays the ideal image of a virtue in practice. In the other, a person may violate the virtue if it leads to more resultant honesty.

Clearly, a person espousing honesty as a virtue can easily be a hypocrite, merely by telling a lie. Those promoting the virtue, on the other hand, aren’t necessarily hypocrites; if they told a lie to their child that produced more honesty, they aren’t hypocrites. But why not? Aren’t they not practicing what they preach? Sort of…

They’re really advocating a meta-virtue of sorts–it’s not really honesty that they’re promoting, but the production of more honesty in this world. Brushing aside the obvious complications of computing something like overall honesty for the moment, this new approach clearly makes the person that lies for the sake of truth a good person. Get it? If not, read the following example:

Let’s say that there’s a priest who cannot bring himself to believe in God or even pray, no matter what he tries. However, he has it on good word from his fellow priests that praying 4 times a day will increase one’s feeling of piety. The priest tells his congregation, “You should pray to God.” Even though the priest clearly does not pray 4 times a day, he is still serving the virtue of piety by encouraging more overall spiritual well-being through a lie. In the traditional sense, we’d label him a hypocrite. But is he really?

Filed under: philosophy by Jesse