On Hypocrisy

[Note that in this entry, "social conservative" is used to refer to personal moral beliefs, which may or may not translate into public policy preferences . Public policy preference are not directly relevant to the topic under discussion.]

Quoth Bryan Caplan:

I’ve repeatedly encountered the following social conservative meme, most recently in an argument over the Mark Sanford affair:

We’ve got to stop acting like hypocrites are the worst thing in the world.  At least hypocrites have moral standards; they’re just not living up to them.  All the war on hypocrisy really accomplishes is to give people a strong incentive to become libertines, people who openly flout traditional moral standards.  What could be worse?

I could argue that traditional moral standards are a mixed bag of truth and error.  But I don’t have to.  Even if traditional moral standards were infallibly correct, ardent social conservatives should still prefer libertines to hypocrites. 

Caplan goes on to make a good case for his proposition, but I’m reminded of a commentary on hypocrisy made by a character in Neal Stephenson’s novel Diamond Age:

You know, when I was a young man, hypocrisy was deemed the worst of vices,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It was all because of moral relativism. You see, in that sort of a climate, you are not allowed to criticise others-after all, if there is no absolute right and wrong, then what grounds is there for criticism? … Now, this led to a good deal of general frustration, for people are naturally censorious and love nothing better than to criticise others’ shortcomings. And so it was that they seized on hypocrisy and elevated it from a ubiquitous peccadillo into the monarch of all vices. For, you see, even if there is no right and wrong, you can find grounds to criticise another person by contrasting what he has espoused with what he has actually done. In this case, you are not making any judgment whatsoever as to the correctness of his views or the morality of his behaviour-you are merely pointing out that he has said one thing and done another. Virtually all political discourse in the days of my youth was devoted to the ferreting out of hypocrisy.
[…]
We take a somewhat different view of hypocrisy,” Finkle-McGraw continued. “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. Of course, most hypocrites are not like that. Most of the time it’s a spirit-is-willing, flesh-is-weak sort of thing.”

“That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code,” Major Napier said, working it through, “does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.”

“Of course not,” Finkle-McGraw said. “It’s perfectly obvious, really. No one ever said that it was easy to hew to a strict code of conduct. Really, the difficulties involved-the missteps we make along the way-are what make it interesting. The internal, and eternal, struggle, between our base impulses and the rigorous demands of our own moral system is quintessentially human. It is how we conduct ourselves in that struggle that determines how we may in time be judged by a higher power.”

It’s my feeling that Caplan is right about the kind of hypocrite whose hypocrisy is driven by a fundamental dishonesty. That hypocrite is a libertine flying false colors, and a true social conservative should prefer the honest libertine to the dishonest libertine.

However, for a flesh-is-weak hypocrite, a social conservative’s response should probably be one of understanding and forgiveness. The weak fleshed hypocrite wants to be moral and makes an honest attempt at it, but falls off the wagon from time to time. If you want to spread your values, you need to help those who are trying to live them but wind up falling short.

And for most social conservatives in the US, their values derive from Christianity, of which one of the fundamental premises is that all flesh is weak, but God’s capacity for forgiveness is infinite. Love and forgiveness are among the highest virtues in the moral codes of most interpretations of Christianity, and there is a moral imperative to offer forgiveness to a repentant sinner.

[Disclosure: Most social conservatives would consider me something of a libertine, but I'm much more mellow in my personal behavior than most of my full-out libertine friends. Like most libertines of my acquantaince, I have a strong moral code of personal behavior, albeit one that departs significantly from traditional conservitive mores. Short version: do what you want, but be honest about it, don't hurt others doing it, and take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. From my perspective, I respect the honest social conservative as someone who shares and lives my core values of honesty and responsibility despite following a very different code of behavior; I feel sorry for the weak-fleshed hypocrite who is suffering for his failure live up to a moral code I don't share; and I have nothing but contempt for the intentionally dishonest hypocrite.]