Note: This is a continuation of my series on morality. Here are the other parts: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, and part 7 (plus an additional posts on free will). The entire series makes up the fourth chapter of my book, The Triple Path, which can be downloaded for free here in PDF and eReader formats or purchased at all major book retailers (in print and eReader formats).

 

Hypocrisy is claiming to have beliefs, qualities, or motivations that you do not really possess. It is making criticisms of others or having expectations of others that you do not apply to yourself. It is living in moral self-contradiction. Hypocrites are parasites who willingly reap the benefits of others’ moral acts, but who are unwilling to reciprocate.

We all condemn hypocrisy, but no one is free from at least a little of its taint on his or her personal character.

When we practice hypocrisy, we get the external social benefits of gaining others’ trust and of earning a respected place in the community, but without sacrificing anything to truly earn that trust and respect.

Such hidden immorality usually imposes greater costs on society than the short-term personal benefits the hypocrite gains for himself. Because of this, hypocrisy makes a perverse sort of short-term sense to selfish individuals unconcerned about the greater good, but the hypocrite does not come out ahead either: his hypocrisy is always bad for himself too, in the long-run. If he is discovered, it will destroy his reputation. And even if he is not, he will have cankered and polluted his soul.

Furthermore, there are many ways in which your wrongdoing can cause you to suffer its bad consequences, even if you manage to keep your misconduct concealed from others. Professor Jordan Peterson has said that, after thousands of hours of clinical practice as a psychologist, he has observed that no one ever really gets away with anything—the consequences for your immoral acts always come, somehow.

Every culture’s norms call for strictly punishing hypocrisy when it is discovered. Indeed, dealing with the problem of hy­pocrisy is likely one of the reasons moral rules, and punishments for violations, developed. Professor Peter Turchin explained:

For example, one way to suppress within-group variation in cooperativeness is “moralistic punishment.” Cooperators are of course vulnerable to exploitation by selfish free riders. But what if they become angry and impose sanctions on those who refuse to contribute to the common good? This is where moralistic punishment comes in. If punishment is severe enough (and in the presence of lethal weapons it can grade all the way up to execution), even rational free riders calculate that contributing pays better, because the alternative is worse.

Groups still need enough moralistic cooperators who will force non-cooperators to pull their weight. If there are not enough moralists, cooperation unravels (and the moralists themselves stop contributing, because they don’t want to be taken advantage of). But in groups that have achieved cooperation, moralistic punishment enforces the social norm that everybody contributes equally (some voluntarily, others because the alternative is worse). In other words, cooperators are no longer at a disadvantage compared with free riders. Moralistic punishment is basically a “leveling mechanism” that makes everybody equal within the group and, thus, shuts down within-group competition.1

Such enforcement helps discourage hypocrisy, but no enforcement system is perfect. External incentives are never enough to force hypocrites to always follow the rules—there are just too many opportunities to cheat. This is when virtue ethics shows its strength. People who believe in doing good for its own sake are less likely to change their actions when they think no one else is watching.

Wisdom also leads you to try to stamp out hypocrisy within yourself. The aggregate of all of our actions creates the human world in which we live. If you really want to live in a good, moral, just, fair, and prosperous society, then you have an obligation to work to make it a reality by being good, moral, honest, just, fair, and hardworking, even when no one is watching. If you avoid doing these things when you can get away with it, then you are demonstrating through your actions that you do not really want to live in a good, moral, just, fair, and prosperous society.

Certain situations make hypocrisy more likely. For example, an experiment with college students showed that those occupying positions of power were prone to act with greater hypocrisy by judging others more harshly for moral failings while judging themselves leniently, even though they were less likely to actually follow those same moral requirements. Conversely, those who felt that their power was illegitimate were more honest than the average person, judging themselves more harshly than they judged others.2 Other laboratory experiments have shown that people who move into a position of power get better at deceiving others.3

This means that in your personal life, the more power you get, the more you should be aware of the potential for you to act with hypocrisy. On a broader scale, it also means we should set up our societal hierarchies—in government, business, private institutions, church, and everywhere else—in ways that force extreme transparency on those in power, to make it more difficult for them to get away with the hypocrisy to which their position may naturally predispose them. There should also be accountability. Everyone, no matter how powerful, should always be accountable to others who have real power to oversee and supervise them (and those people overseeing should also be accountable to others, in a circle of overlapping accountabilities that is wide enough to prevent cronyism).

Moreover, since people who feel that their power is illegitimate act with less hypocrisy, perhaps we should reevaluate the ways in which we select people to fill positions of power in the first place. The Ancient Athenians used a system of sortition to select many of their leaders. In this system, they had a lottery among those qualified to fill a position. The winner of the lottery took up the position.

There are almost always at least several qualified candidates who can capably fill any vacant leadership job. The “winner take all” nature of top positions means that there are often very small differences (if any) in the competency of different potential candidates. Starting from a candidate pool of similarly-qualified people, leaders often rise to the top through some combination of luck, uninhibited ambition, and cheating. These three things are hardly a sound basis for putting someone in charge. Our current systems for choosing people to fill positions of power tend to favor the selection of traits associated with sociopathy. By introducing some randomness into leadership selection, the person in charge hopefully will feel less deserving of the position (especially if the list he was chosen from was not too short) and more likely act with integrity. It will also make it harder for people with sociopathic tendencies to manipulate their way to the top. We should also strengthen the ways we make those in authority accountable and impose higher penalties for leaders who violate laws and moral rules, to provide incentives to counteract the potential for hypocrisy.4

And personally, we should focus less on criticizing hypo­crisy in others and more on rooting it out within ourselves. Almost since the invention of writing, we have records of people thinking and debating about morality and ethics. Some people devote their entire career to it. Many of the rest of us think it interesting to ponder and discuss moral questions. No matter how long and how much we think and write about morality, the human condition is too complicated and nuanced for someone to be able to write down a set of moral rules that are always applicable at all times.

The incompleteness of any moral system may lead to the temptation to use that incompleteness to justify unethical behavior. When clear, established moral rules and norms do not directly address a particular situation, it would be easy to use that moral ambiguity to justify misconduct. We are good at rationalizing and justifying our bad behavior because we all have some natural tendencies toward hypocrisy.

But the inherent flaws and gaps of any moral system do not give license to act unethically. We must all be on guard, and we must encourage transparency in all facets of life to combat our natural hypocritical tendencies—we are less likely to act hypocritically when we know others are watching or if we know we will be held accountable.

 

 

Footnotes

1. Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety, p. 111.

2. Joris Lammers, et. al., “Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior”, Psychological Science, Vol. 21, No. 5, May 2010, pp. 737-744.

3. Dana R. Carney, et. al., “The Powerful Are Better Liars but the Powerless Are Better Lie-Detectors”, Unpublished Manuscript, 2019.

4. For this reason, the Triple Path establishes a church structure that uses sortition to fill positions of authority, imposes limited terms on those positions, and requires oversight.