Byrne's Eye View

Most of us are hypocrites. None of us should care. Hypocrisy is a popular sin because it's so easy to find: if you say one thing and do another, you're probably doing something wrong. But it's only easy because it's such a cowardly form of moral arbitrage: in effect, calling someone a hypocrite is saying "I don't know what you did wrong, but you must think you did something wrong."

It's never hard to find an example of why accusing someone of hypocrisy is moronic: take the editorializing on Al Gore's advocacy of lower emissions contrasted with his carbon-spewing lifestyle. It's true that Gore pollutes more than most of us, and asks us all to pollute less -- but from the perspective of caring about climate change, it really doesn't matter exactly what Gore does if the net result is less carbon. Objecting to Gore's advocacy of lower emissions on the grounds that he doesn't appear to follow this belief system in his personal life is Moral Marxism -- caring more about actions and intentions than about results and the parties that suffer for them.

The World Economic Forum in Davos was "carbon neutral," despite all these folks flying it to attend, because in large part, people donated money to third world countries to plant trees or build hydoelectric dams for electricity.

That's more or less the point of a division of labor: rather than treating carbon as a sin for which we owe penance, we can treat it as a problem to solve as cheaply as possible. And solving a problem cheaply is synonymous with paying whoever can solve it for less to do so -- polluting and buying carbon credits is hypocritical in the same way that buying groceries instead of having a garden is.

It takes a simple thought experiment to show that the Gore kerfuffle is ridiculous. We can assume that pollution is either bad or neutral, and thus that either Gore is bad for advocating emissions cutbacks but good for enjoying his high-carbon lifestyle, or he is good for wanting lower emissions but bad for burning so many fossil fuels. Now, he could try to satisfy the anti-hypocrisy contingent by cutting his personal emissions to be in line with his stated preferences. That would almost certainly mean he couldn't make any movies (flying around looking pensive spends more carbon than a quiet evening at home) and cutting back from a mansion to a middle-class house would certainly preclude some furrowed-brow soirées among the cares-about-carbon set.

Unfortunately, this means that pollution proponents are less satisfied with him (he's not burning much fuel!) while opponents are equally annoyed (he's not suggesting any more cutbacks!). Consider: if someone out there lives a low-carbon lifestyle but sees pollution as okay, and he an Gore maintain their views but switch their lifestyles, the only (moral) difference is who's doing the polluting versus who's doing the pronouncing -- the level of pollution and criticism are unchanged. In fact, the only constituency pleased by that turn of events would be the anti-hypocrisy crowd: the only people who believe that it's a good idea to be consistent are the ones who don't believe in much of anything.

It's easy to gravely opine that our actions ought to be consistent with our philosophies, but it's also a null criticism. If a hypocrite is someone whose actions and beliefs appear to diverge, they must be doing something right. They're also doing something wrong, but as long as hypocrisy is the object of criticism, they'll have no idea what. Hypocrisy is morally neutral, because correcting it means a 50/50 chance of being better or doubling down on error -- it's hardly useful to argue that we shouldn't hedge our bets.