Topics Ethics

Question Why should consistency be seen as a universal moral principle? Unless everybody is a Jesus that sacrifices for others, isn't everyone to some degree a hypocrite? The only thing that matters is how much one disregards other people. Couldn't some term like "stability" or "peace" replace the necessity of absolute consistency (lack of hypocrisy), although it would be hard to define exactly what that stability ought to look like.

Accepted:
June 24, 2008

Comments

Perhaps we could make a distinction. Perhaps we could all agree that ideally, we'd all steer clear of hypocrisy. The phrase "good hypocrisy" has a strange ring, suggesting that nothing would count. The phrase "tolerable hypocrisy," however, is less strange. Few of us, if any, manage to steer clear of hypocrisy altogether, and it's doubtful whether it's morally healthy to worry too much about one's moral health. (In this connection, Susan Wolf's paper "Moral Saints," from the Journal of Philosophy August 1982 makes interesting reading.)

So we can agree that no one should be condemned simply for not being absolutely beyond condemnation, but we can also agree that hypocrisy isn't a good thing. After all, if I'm being a hypocrite, my sin isn't just posing as someone who acts in accord with a certain principle. Quite aside from the dishonesty in the way I represent myself, to count as a hypocrite I have to be doing things that by my own lights, I shouldn't be doing. And depending on what those transgressions are, that may be where the more serious wrong resides.