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Why Do People Hate Hypocrisy?

Emrys Westacott argues that it’s not usually the hypocrisy itself that we hate.

Hypocrisy has always had a bad press, going back at least to biblical times. But why? The near unanimous and often quite vehement condemnation of hypocrisy is rather surprising when one considers, first, that to a greater or lesser degree we are all hypocrites, and second, that it’s a relatively harmless failing. Unlike vices such as cruelty, treachery, or unkindness, hypocrisy doesn’t have an obvious victim. A man who preaches non-violence and beats up his wife is certainly a hypocrite; but the woman is injured by his fists, not by his hypocrisy.

As with any question, it helps to clarify the meaning of the relevant terms. We can distinguish three basic kinds of hypocrisy, which I will label ‘affective’, ‘cognitive’, and ‘behavioral’.

Rhetoric & Reality Oliver Li

Affective hypocrisy involves claiming to have feelings that you don’t have, for example, saying that you love someone when you don’t. Affective hypocrisy is the kind that is particularly, and repeatedly, condemned in the Bible – as in an Old Testament passage quoted approvingly by Jesus, in which Isaiah has God condemn those who ‘honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me’. The motives of those who pretend to honour God when they don’t are this-worldly: by fooling other people about their religiosity they hope to raise their status, secure some material benefit, or at least avoid censure. Their critics worry about the malign influence of such behaviour on others. But hypocrites of this kind are also represented as pretty stupid: they may fool some people, but they cannot possibly fool God, who sees into the depths of their dark hearts and will punish them accordingly.

But is affective hypocrisy necessarily so bad when the pretended feelings concern other human beings? Suppose a parent can’t help loving one of their children more than the others – should they admit this if asked by their children, or not? Wouldn’t it be better, morally, to lie about their feelings in order to avoid causing unnecessary pain and resentment? Or imagine one of your peers achieves some notable success you believe you deserved more – they win a prestigious award, perhaps. A perfectly normal emotional response here would be to feel bitter and envious. Should you express these feeling to your rival? Surely, it’s better to go along with the accepted norms and to hypocritically offer hearty congratulations – with a “Richly deserved, I’m sure” tacked on for good measure.

Cognitive hypocrisy occurs when someone claims to hold beliefs they do not in fact hold: for example, saying they believe in God when they don’t.

In everyday discourse, we usually assume that people sincerely believe what they’re saying, so if we learn that someone has been professing a belief they don’t hold, our natural response is to be critical. We’ve surely all found ourselves annoyed with the type of person who defends a viewpoint just to get a rise out their interlocutors, but who eventually concede that they were merely playing devil’s advocate. Why lie about what you believe?

Well, actually, there can be very good reasons to misrepresent yourself. Saying you believe in God when you don’t will not fool God, but it might fool the Spanish Inquisition. It’s a harsh moralist who condemns people for lying about their beliefs to avoid being burnt alive. This point can be extended. Millions have lived – and still do live – in societies where their prospects of any sort of decent life would disappear if they didn’t toe the line on matters religious, political, or moral. Martyrs for their beliefs, such as Thomas More or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, display admirable courage. But most of us are probably more like Galileo, who affirmed what he knew to be false once he was shown the instruments of torture. And who can blame him?

Of course, those of us not living under theocracies or brutal dictatorships may never be put to this sort of test, and sometimes, people lie about their beliefs for transparently disreputable reasons. After the 2020 US election, many Republican politicians claimed to believe that the election had been rigged or ‘stolen’, simply because to say otherwise might have cost them their seats. But there are occasions that can easily occur in anyone’s life when asserting something you don’t actually believe might be justifiable. The reason could be legitimate self-interest, as in the case of Galileo; but it could also be a genuine concern for the wellbeing of others. For instance, suppose someone who is seriously ill asks you if you think they’re likely to be cured? Or an average student about to take an exam asks you if you think they’ll pass? Or a friend about to go on a date asks you if they look attractive? Most of us in such circumstances would give the answer we think might do some good by being encouraging, even if it’s contrary to what we believe. Almost everyone dissembles at times for the sake of promoting harmony. A person whose hatred of hypocrisy runs so deep that they can never bring themselves to offer an insincere compliment, or use a little evasive tact to avoid ruining an otherwise pleasant social gathering, may think of themselves as a paragon of integrity, but they will probably be viewed by others as self-righteous, inflexible, inconsiderate, and tedious – and with good reason.

Behavioral hypocrisy means doing something that contradicts your professed beliefs. Interestingly, this is not the main target of scriptural condemnations of hypocrisy. But when people today accuse someone of hypocrisy, this is what they usually have in mind (affective and cognitive hypocrisy are more commonly classified as instances of insincerity and lying).

History books and contemporary media offer a stream of examples of blatant behavioral hypocrisy. Consider Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that slavery was a ‘moral depravity’ while he himself was buying and selling slaves; or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wrote books extolling the joys of family life and offering advice on how to raise children while placing his own offspring in an orphanage; or Jim Bakker, who preached Christian ethics while accumulating vast wealth and enjoying an extravagant and licentious lifestyle.

But now comes the puzzling question: Why, exactly, does behavioral hypocrisy arouse such disgust? We’ve all heard people say – and we’ve probably ourselves said – something like, “What I can’t stand about them is their hypocrisy!” But is it really the hypocrisy that we find so objectionable?

When Hypocrisy Matters

Let’s distinguish first between morally significant and morally insignificant hypocrisy. Here’s an example of the latter. I regularly and forcefully express the view that doing crossword puzzles is a waste of time. If people want to exercise their brains, I say, they should find something more fruitful to do: learn a foreign language; study physics; write poetry. You then discover that I spend my Sunday mornings doing the crossword. Clearly, I’m a hypocrite. Do you care? To be sure, your opinion of me might be affected a bit – but you’ll probably be merely amused at my inconsistency; you’ll hardly be disgusted or outraged.

But now, suppose I condemn factory farming and advocate veganism while eating factory-farmed meat in secret. Here, once discovered, you’re likely to find my hypocrisy more objectionable. Why? Because it concerns matters invested with moral significance – in this case, the way animals are treated.

In fact, hypocrisy occurs on a spectrum of moral significance. At one end is the hypocritical crossword puzzler; at the other end is the priest who abuses children while preaching love and benevolence. But now we should dig deeper and ask, is it really the hypocrisy that we find objectionable even where morally significant matters are concerned?

Consider the hypothetical case of Kim. He likes to pose as a certain kind of political radical who is critical of charity. Domestic charities, he argues, simply put band aids on the worst failings of capitalism,ultimately doing more harm than good by keeping the revolution at bay. As for global charities, they’re just an arm of capitalist imperialism. Both kinds of charity merely serve to salve the consciences of bleeding-heart liberals who don’t want to give up their comfortable lifestyles. But then it’s revealed that last year Kim donated $30,000 to various charities. Or consider the actual case of the German businessman Oskar Schindler. He joined the Nazi party in 1939, but throughout World War II, while posing as a loyal party member, he used his factories to provide a refuge for Jewish workers. By the end of the war he had saved the lives of over 1,200 people. Or consider one of the most famous hypocrites in literature: Huckleberry Finn. In Mark Twain’s eponymous novel, Huck accepts the mores of the ante-bellum South, believing that slaves are the legitimate property of their owners, and therefore considers that helping slaves to escape is tantamount to theft and without question a moral sin. But he helps Jim to escape. As they drift down the Mississippi, when he has the chance to turn him in to men hunting runaway slaves, he protects Jim instead of betraying him.

These are three pretty clear examples of hypocrisy relating to morally significant matters. Yet I assume that most of us won’t be too critical of Kim, Oskar, or Huck. The reason is obvious: we approve of their actions, which we believe have both good motives and desirable consequences. In Schindler’s case, his posing as a loyal Nazi is simply a mask required by the situation, fully justified by the good it enables him to do. In Huck’s case, we applaud the triumph of friendship, personal loyalty, and humanity over a loathsome ideology. Kim’s case is a little more complex. Someone who endorses his critique of charity might, perhaps, be critical of his charitable actions, and thus also of his hypocrisy. But most of us, I imagine, will infer that his giving to charity indicates humane impulses that we normally view favorably. We recognize the type: a tough exterior hiding a tender heart. And if we do criticize his hypocrisy, isn’t this mainly because we disagree with his position regarding charities?

Examples like these suggest that often, when we condemn hypocrisy, it isn’t really the hypocrisy that upsets us, especially as we give a free pass to some hypocrites and view others with contempt. It seems that we condemn hypocrites whose behavior we consider objectionable, while not worrying about hypocrites whose actions we applaud. This becomes clear if we imagine a negative image of Huck – someone who denounces slavery as a ‘moral depravity’ but who pays agents to capture escaped slaves. Or consider a negative image of Schindler – someone who publicly condemns Nazism while helping to round up Jews.

Hypocrisy & Other Immoralities

This isn’t to say that there no reasons for ever condemning hypocrisy itself. There are a few. Obviously it can be a way in which wrongdoers mask or divert attention away from their wrongdoings. Authoritarian politicians might proclaim their belief in democracy while pursuing measures that undermine it. Here, hypocrisy is consciously used as a means to an objectionable end. Hypocrisy can also do harm by setting a bad example to others. A parent who advocates sexual equality while not doing their fair share of the housework, or who demands a strong work ethic while regularly using the smallest excuse to phone in sick, provides a poor role model to their children. Those who witness such hypocrisy may choose to follow suit, or they may just become cynical. Politicians who profess solidarity with the poor while assiduously feathering their own nests may similarly sow the seeds of disillusionment among the electorate, leading to reduced civic involvement. Hypocrites also reveal themselves to be untrustworthy in the sense that what they say is an unreliable guide to how they will behave. We prefer people to be predictable, since in most circumstances this makes life simpler and safer.

So yes, there are some grounds for criticizing hypocrisy. But these are rarely if ever what we have in mind when we say that we declare ourselves ‘disgusted’ by someone’s hypocrisy. We aren’t usually thinking about the possible negative consequences that the hypocrisy might facilitate. And again, we are only disgusted when we strongly disapprove of the hypocrite’s actions. This proves that, whatever we might say, it isn’t usually the hypocrisy itself that bothers us. As I noted, people sometimes do say they are more disgusted by the hypocrisy some objectionable behavior exposes than by the behavior itself, but when you think about it, this is a bizarre attitude. After all, who is worse – a politician who explicitly advocates genocide, or one who publicly criticizes genocide but fails to oppose providing financial, diplomatic, and military support to the perpetrators? A man who regularly inflicts serious violence on his wife because he firmly believes that every husband has a right to do this under certain circumstances, or a man who denies that husbands have any such right, but who nevertheless is occasionally physically abusive to his wife, and then feels terrible remorse afterwards?

What does Jefferson most deserve to be roundly criticized for? Buying, selling, and owning slaves, or being hypocritical about slavery? To say it again, Jefferson’s slaves did not suffer from his hypocrisy – they suffered from his decision to own slaves, and all that this entailed. Yes, that decision was hypocritical. But that is simply an aspect or feature of his decision, not the harm itself.

Here’s an analogy. If I drive over the speed limit, my action is illegal. But if, in doing this, I cause an accident that injures someone, the injury isn’t inflicted by the illegality of my action but by my fast driving. The nature of the victim’s injury, the pain they experience, and the treatment they need, are unaffected by whether or not the car that hit them was being driven illegally. Similarly, the suffering of slaves being bought, sold, whipped, branded, overworked, humiliated, and living in bondage, wasn’t materially affected by whether or not their masters were hypocrites. It’s possible to cause exactly the same injury driving legally, just as it’s possible for a slaveowner to cause misery non-hypocritically.

Hypocrisy itself, then, doesn’t directly cause that much harm. Moreover, bleeding-heart hypocrites who feel somewhat ashamed and apologetic about their bad behavior are arguably more susceptible to reform than callous souls who affirm and applaud the same actions. So why do people sometimes condemn the hypocrites more vehemently?

Two faces representing the double nature of hypocrisy

The Distaste of Hypocrisy

I believe that to a large extent the objection people have to hypocrisy is essentially aesthetic, in the original sense of the term, meaning, ‘related to sensation’. To borrow one of Plato’s favorite metaphors, the hypocritical individual offers a displeasing spectacle of someone not in harmony with themselves. The sensation of displeasure is suggested by the words people often use to describe their response to hypocrisy: they find it nauseating, or they’re disgusted by it. Nausea and disgust are visceral reactions, the kind produced by close encounters with physical decay and waste. Such things offend our senses.

Yet this can’t be the whole story since, as we’ve seen, we aren’t disgusted by all instances of hypocrisy, just those where we find behavior morally objectionable. When we witness objectionable hypocrisy, therefore, we see two things that we don’t like: the morally reprehensible behavior; and the person at odds with themself. In addition, the contradiction between the hypocrite’s assertions and actions suggest that they’re insincere, and our default attitude is to condemn insincerity since it makes people harder to know and to trust. What we really don’t like is the objectionable behavior – but we sometimes transfer our displeasure onto the aesthetically offensive but relatively inconsequential spectacle of hypocrisy.

Some will argue that hypocrisy itself is not quite as harmless as I’m suggesting. For instance, some Marxists, such as Slavoj Žižek , have argued that hypocrisy is part and parcel of capitalism. According to this account, megarich capitalists like Bill Gates or George Soros demonstrate their concern for the needy by giving huge amounts to charity, but these donations come out of the profit unfairly extracted from underpaid workers. Some businesses, such as Starbucks, attract customers by marketing themselves as ‘companies with a conscience’ – they engage in ‘fair trade,’ pose as eco-friendly, and donate a percentage of their profits to worthy causes – while at the same they prevent their workers from unionizing, eliminate independent local competition, and in many respects operate as ruthlessly as any other company striving after market dominance. Well-off, liberal-minded consumers lament the inequities and destructive impact of global capitalism, then seek to salve their consciences by means of token gestures – buying organic produce, boycotting certain businesses, driving a hybrid – while all along enjoying a prosperity ultimately derived from the very activities they denounce.

Such observations might lead one to conclude that hypocrisy undergirds our economic and political system. I think it is more accurate, though, to see hypocrisy as an effect rather than a cause. The reality isn’t that all this hypocrisy actively props up the system; rather, the system makes what we might call incidental hypocrisy all but unavoidable – at least for those liberal-minded critics of the system who seek to live a normal life while professing moral concern about a whole range of issues including poverty, hunger, homelessness, and inequality (full disclosure: this describes me). For instance, we criticize a regressive tax policy, then take advantage of available tax breaks; we condemn the unfairness built into the education system, but try to ensure that our own kids attend good schools; we sympathize with the struggles of small businesses, and shop on Amazon; condemn companies that are anti-union, and frequent Walmart and Starbucks; call for action to combat global warming, and fly to take vacations or to visit family and friends. We object to the exploitation of workers, yet buy the cheap products of their underpaid labor, and participate in pension schemes that invest in the stock market. We denounce industrial agriculture for destroying ecosystems, and buy its products rather than more expensive local or organic alternatives…

A left-leaning liberal who manages to avoid all such incidental hypocrisies and is not living off-grid will be hard to find. But the same charge of hypocrisy can be levelled at almost everyone regardless of their political persuasion. Libertarians who advocate drastically shrinking the government rely continually on the tax-funded services they say they’d like to cut. Professed patriots buy foreign-made goods rather than more expensive home-produced ones. Pacificists pay taxes that are used to buy weapons and fund wars. We are all entangled in the web that the system spins.

But for this very reason, to direct one’s ire at the hypocrisy itself is misguided. After all, an incidentally hypocritical environmentalist who tries to reduce their ecological footprint still does less damage than a fierce opponent of environmental regulations who brazenly pollutes. Inconsistent peaceniks are still preferable to cold-hearted warmongers. The world would be a better place if all those who trumpet prejudiced, bigoted, and intolerant views, and act accordingly, were to turn into well-intentioned, bleeding-heart, incidental hypocrites.

Zizek makes a similar point when discussing the hypocrisy of liberal democracies that loudly declare their commitment to human rights while supporting or benefiting from regimes that violate such rights. Yes, they are hypocritical, he says: but “hypocrisy is infinitely superior to any brutal display of violence: it keeps alive standards which allow us to judge what we are doing” (Limitations of Democracy, 2003).

Conclusions

To sum up. Hypocrisy is generally held to be a serious moral failing, and is often vehemently condemned. But not all hypocrisy is bad. In certain circumstances, it is excusable (Galileo); sometimes it can used as a justifiable means to a good end (Schindler); and if we approve of a person’s behavior, we don’t usually care that it contradicts their professed beliefs (Huck Finn). In fact, when we criticize a person’s hypocrisy it’s usually because we strongly disapprove of their actions; our moral objection to their behavior is then transferred onto the inconsistency between words and deeds. But arguably, the inconsistency is not itself such a serious moral failing. It may indicate that a person is in some respects not reliable, but in itself, it doesn’t usually injure anyone directly. Our objection to hypocrisy is thus more aesthetic than moral: the discordance is displeasing, yet relatively harmless. A soft-hearted hypocrite is still preferable to a sincere hard-hearted brute.

Emrys Westacott is professor emeritus of philosophy at Alfred University in Alfred, New York. He is the author of The Wisdom of Frugality (2016) and The Virtues of our Vices (2012).