hypocrisy

This note last modified October 23, 2022

I recently saw a meme which was along the lines of: Democrats claim they care about the lives of children, yet they allow millions of abortions to happen!

I saw another meme: Republicans claim they care about the lives of fetuses, yet once they’re born, they’ll happily sell guns to school shooters!

Both groups think the other are hypocrites, but that just stems from misunderstanding how each other think.

the other is not unified
- Sometimes it may seem like a group is hypocritical in their beliefs, but maybe you’ve just seen two different ideas from two different people.
metaphilosophy
- The solution to this is to intentionally be a hypocrite and maintain cognitive dissonance between what you truly believe is correct, and what philosophy you will act by in a practical manner. Here’s an example:
- I think that everyone does this sort of metaphilosophy all the time, and it explains why everyone is a bit of a hypocrite.
lenses
- I feel like a lot of accusations of hypocrisy boil down to the accuser not understanding the lenses of the accused. Similarly, many who try to change other’s minds fail to do so because they fail to understand the other's lenses.
intellectual power
- “The reason conspiracy theorists aren’t bothered by… getting things constantly wrong… is because it gives them power over others who are bound by something as weak and flimsy as reality… They will happily carve out an exception because it makes them exceptional. They engage in wild hypocrisy as an act of domination, adhering to something demonstrably untrue out of spite, because they believe that power belongs to those with the will to take it, and what greater sign of will than the ability to override truth” - in search of a flat earth
ethics under oppressive structures
- So how do we separate a reasonable level of unethical living from hypocrisy?
It's not necessarily hypocritical to be unethical in an unethical system
- One of the stores advocates for a higher minimum wage so that workers can be paid fairly, but knows that if they pay their workers a higher wage while the other stores pay a lower wage, they will be outcompeted and go out of business. In this toy scenario, I’d argue that it’s not hypocritical to advocate for a higher minimum wage while also not participating themselves.