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Oh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual
by ctkrohn 16y ago
Oh come on. It's easy to call someone a hypocrite -- everyone agrees its wrong, whatever their other moral principles might be. The failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right.
EDIT: changed "everyone agrees its wrong" to "everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong"
- abstractbill 16y agoeveryone agrees its wrong Are you saying everyone agrees piracy is wrong? In my mind that's very much still open to debate.
- ctkrohn 16y agoNo, not at all. I certainly agree that piracy is open to debate. I meant to say that everyone agrees hypocrisy is wrong. If that's the most obvious reading of my comment, the downvotes make a little more sense...
- pbhjpbhj 16y agoEveryone agrees there are no absolutes. I think you'd find there are many people who find it acceptable to act contrary to how they expect others to act and moreover acceptable to pretend to be that which they are not.
- randallsquared 16y agoThe failures of an individual don't really have much bearing on whether the individual's moral beliefs are right. If you assume they're failures, they don't have much bearing. If, however, you assume that people's actions reflect their beliefs more closely than their arguments do, the fact of hypocrisy regarding a given belief suggests rather strongly that even the person making the argument doesn't believe it. When an argument's proponents don't even believe it, I think it's reasonably strong evidence that it isn't true.
- ctkrohn 16y agoI actually disagree that people's actions reflect their beliefs more than their arguments. I suppose these are fundamental assumptions that you can't really present much evidence for either way, but I do think that people try to hold themselves to standards that they can't often achieve. To take a simplistic example: suppose I'm trying to stick to a rigorous diet, but I lapse every so often. Does this mean that I really don't believe the diet is important? Or if I'm trying to learn a new programming language in my spare time, perhaps I'm not as studious as I'd like... but that doesn't mean that the language isn't worth learning. It just means it's hard, and people tend to give in to laziness.