Hypocrisy Denounced. Now Tell Us Which Thing They Were Right About.

There are plenty of accusations of hypocrisy floating around. They often take the form of: You took the position X in a previous case, but now you're taking the position "not X". Supposedly someone's opinion changes just when it's politically convenient, or someone evokes a principle when it favors them but repudiates the principle when it doesn't. I think most of these accusations miss the mark. The two things being contrasted aren't actually in conflict. A simple conversation with one of the "hypocrites" would reveal that there is no internal contradiction. The person accusing you of hypocrisy is imagining himself to have more insight than you do into your own mind. Arnold Kling calls this "asymmetric insight," and we should all be extremely careful about doing this. Adherents of an ideology usually understand that ideology better than its critics.

Still, I want to take some of these accusations of hypocrisy at face value. I want to note that the claims of hypocrisy are usually perfectly symmetrical. Usually if "the Right" believes "X" in one situation and "not X" in another, "the Left" believes "not X" in the first situation and "X" in the latter. If you're making a charge of hypocrisy, it might be useful to specify in which instance the hypocrite is correct.

Consider a few examples that I have seen.

• Conservatives were once for the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, now they are against it.
• Conservatives side with the police when young black males are shot, but are either silent or side with the agitators when they are white (like Cliven Bundy and his followers).
• Conservatives are all in favor of the rights of the unborn, but don't seem to care about children once they are born.

For the first bullet point, you can turn this around and point out that liberals once opposed the individual mandate, until it became a feature of the ACA and they decided they liked it. In the case of the second bullet point, I wish people would state clearly whether police confrontations are an appropriate or inappropriate response to rowdy protesters. When Cliven Bundy's people were occupying government buildings, I remember seeing some left-wing chatter on Facebook wishing that American soldiers would descend on them and "split open their skulls." (citation needed) It's fine to say that different protests take on a different character and thus invite different kinds of police responses. But if anyone is going to insist on some kind of absolute consistency, let's first have them tell us which kind of response is appropriate.

For the third bullet point, this is once again reversible. If we're collapsing these issues down to, "Well, do you care about children or don't you?" then conservatives could turn this one around on their accusers. You could defend this by saying something like, "No, the question of whether an unborn fetus is a person is different from the question of how the welfare state protects living people from misfortune." But this concedes the point that we're talking about two very different policy questions, and we can't collapse it to a one-dimensional question like "How much do you care about children?" You can believe that an unborn fetus is a person with all the associated rights and legal protections, but that a government-run welfare state creates perverse incentives that causes more misery than it solves. You can likewise believe that an unborn fetus is definitely not a person, and that a welfare state definitely ameliorates poverty and saves lives of people who are materially underprivileged. Or you can mix and match. No combinations of these viewpoints is self-contradicting or internally inconsistent. But if you do insist on some foolish consistency, you commit yourself to that consistency, too.

My preferred approach to these alleged hypocrisies is to say there probably is none. You are probably just failing to understand someone's viewpoint. But beware the symmetry of these accusations, which usually ensnare the accuser along with the accused.

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There is a very different kind of hypocrisy, where someone does something in their own life that is inconsistent with their stated moral beliefs. ("Al Gore uses a lot of fossil fuels while decrying the use of fossil fuels." "Bill Bennett preaches the dangers of addiction while indulging a gambling habit and a chain-smoking habit.")  I won't say much about this other kind. I will point out that sometimes the hypocrite has the right professed morals, even if they lack the character to live up to them. It would be unfair to do an ad hominem against, say, arguments in favor of temperance.