The Morality of Hypocrisy

BBC Radio 4 - Moral Maze, The Morality of Hypocrisy

"[On being a libertarian] ‘I'm saying you're overregulating and taking away my freedom of choice. *You* are the one who has low standards, low standard of freedom and respect for civil liberties.’

‘Would you, would you like, the same applies to your kids as well?’

‘Obviously not. There are no libertarian fathers of teenage daughters. I can tell you that… if you want to ask about my hypocrisy, they better not be listening tonight.’...

‘There is an issue here with using hypocrisy as the sole element of how we judge somebody. In the political world, one of the things that we should look further, it's not just motive. It's not just attitude. It's not just what people say. It's what they actually managed to achieve. And in that respect, Michael Gove has an excellent record. In fact, if this whole drugs business wouldn't come up, he would be very much one of the front runners.

If you look at results, if you look at what people actually achieve, then you have to say to yourself, well, we don't necessarily want saints as our politicians. We just had a saint, she didn't achieve anything. That's not great. You know, I'm perfectly happy to have somebody who does more than just run through a field of wheat, if it means that what we actually get at the end is a well governed country’...

‘Is it quite hypocritical to accuse people of hypocrisy?’

‘I think it is, because we're all hypocrites. And the reason why from a psychological perspective we enjoy accusing other people of hypocrisy is because we get to project our own conflict onto them and say, that's the hypocrite over there. It's not me’

‘Misdirection’...

‘If you're going into politics, and you're a normal human being with all our normal hypocrisies, it seems that completely different rules apply to politicians. It’s, it's like, perhaps that’s why we get terrible politicians’

‘In a sense. I mean, there's an analogy I was thinking of just before, which is, if you found a really good cardiologist, and you found out they were a smoker, you might be a little bit offended that a cardiologist was a smoker. But if they're a great cardiologist, you still might want them to work on your heart. If however, you found out that the director of a smoking cessation charity was a smoker, you'd have a very different opinion of that, because they're, they’re so much more involved in that role.’...

‘Which in your view, is the greater problem, the hypocrisy or the deed?’...

‘I think neither is necessarily a deal breaker. You know, it's not it's not the end of the world. I think if someone has tried a Class A drug, I don’t think it means they should not be in public life. And I think an element of hypocrisy is on one hand necessary, that a politician has to uphold the law. If you're a public servant, you have to be seen to be upholding the public rules. So I think there's an inevitable hypocrisy and the word comes from the Greek of playing a role. And, you know, that's what public servants do, they have to pretend to be a bit purer than they are. And if we’re grown up, we'll see that that's, you know, part of life’...

'Hypocrisy might actually be useful to us. Because if we were to simply like Paul, rewrite all the laws so that we could live honestly, we might have no law whatsoever'...

'The fact that we've become so obsessed with this idea of hypocrisy. It's the one thing, and you know, we talked to the psychotherapist and he said, look, we're all bloody hypocrites, all of us are. And so how come it's this thing that's now, it Paul’s [sp?] stains, it’s the great gotcha in our media culture? And that's because we probably haven't got anything else. You know, we don't believe in any of the other stuff. And that’s essentially, rather terrifying’

‘In his words, the only peg you can hang people on’

‘That's extraordinary, not character, not morality, not what's right and wrong. Just hypocrisy.’...

‘That's part of where Donald Trump comes in. Everything leads back to Donald Trump inevitably. It's very difficult to explain why conservative evangelicals voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump, and he breaks every single one of their rules about character... people make excuses for the people that agree with and they see him as their weapon. And in a weird way, his lack of character is a good thing, because it suggests transparency. So in an odd way, he is not hypocritical and as much as you know what he's guilty of, and he smirks, and he admits to it, and therefore he is a legitimate weapon, because he's, he's their guy, he's their hypocrite’"