The Redhunter

I've dealt with all this before (see links at bottom), but give this unfortunate incident I may as well go through it again.

Hypocrisy is a bad thing, but it is not the worst thing. Worse than saying right but doing wrong, is doing and saying wrong.

Hugh Heffner is not a hypocrite. Disgraced preacher Ted Haggard is. Although both have done wrong, Heffner is clearly the worst of the two.

Either an argument is right or it is wrong. Arguments, like facts, exist in and of themselves. Whether they are correct or not is independent of the person making them.

Al Gore is a hypocrite on the issue of environmentalism. He preaches the gospel of global warming yet lives in an energy wasteful house. He jets around hither and yon. But does this mean that global warming is a fraud? Of course not. Whether global warming is real, is caused by mankind, and whether Kyoto is the proper response are completely separate issues.

So the charge of hypocrisy, even when accurate, says nothing about the rightness or wrongness of an argument. You can always find someone on the other side of an who is a hypocrite. If you insist that absolutely no one on the other side of a debate be a hypocrite, you're setting an unrealistic condition.

Surely one should avoid hypocrisy. More importantly, hypocrites themselves should not be the ones making the case. So Al Gore should not be the one making the case for global warming and Kyoto, and Mark Foley should not have been head of the house subcommittee on exploited children, or Ted Haggard should not have preached against the gay lifestyle, or Larry Craig being so vocal on "family values".

Much of the time, the charge of hypocrisy is a way of avoiding debate on the subject at hand. As such, I try and avoid using the charge as part of my arguments. I'm not saying I'm perfect here, folks, just that I don't use the charge of hypocrisy as a general tactic.

The bottom line is that people on the cultural left who cry hypocrisy at social conservatives are doing so because they don't want to change their lifestyle, and they want to avoid discussing values. For that matter, people on the right who obsess over whether Al Gore is an environmental hypocrite are guilty of the same thing. It's about that simple.

Previous

On Hypocrisy and Evangelicals
Hate and Self-Satisfaction

Update

A consolidation

1) Hypocrisy is a bad thing, but not the worst thing. Worse than speaking good but doing bad is speaking bad and doing bad.

2) Centering one's argument around the charge of hypocrisy avoids debating the issue on it's merits. This does not serve the public well.

3) People who claim that they can't take the other side's argument seriously because of "rampant hypocrisy" are setting an impossible standard. It is human nature that there will always be hypocrites on every side of every issue.

4) If you hold yourself to no standards or loose standards, you avoid the charge of hypocrisy. However, see #1.