Casey Hall

This paper broaches two issues regarding the physician-patient relationship. The first concerns whether a doctor’s hypocrisy undermines their authority with respect to advising and blaming patients. I argue that hypocrisy can only ever undermine a doctor’s authority to blame their patient. This conclusion foregrounds the second issue: the permissibility of doctors blaming their patients–what I term “medical blame” While patients may be blameworthy for their poor health in cases where that poorness results from health-impairing behaviors, many authors have argued that medical blame has no place in the medical encounter. I identify six worries against medical blame from the bioethics literature and respond to each, arguing that they do not decisively show that medical blame is always inappropriate. In closing, I demonstrate that doctors, if they are to retain their authority to blame their patients for health-impairing behaviors, possess a unique reason to abstain from health-impairing behaviors themselves.

Monism regarding hypocrisy’s wrongness maintains that there is a single, sui generis wrong of hypocrisy. This paper challenges hypocrisy monism and offers an alternative, hypocrisy disjunctivism, which maintains that the wrongness present in any token case of hypocrisy is always reducible to other, more basic wrongs. Hypocrisy disjunctivism, however, faces a fruitfulness challenge: why have a concept that names a disjunction of wrongs at all in our normative vocabulary? I answer that “hypocrisy” solves a unique practical problem in allowing speakers to hold normatively inconsistent agents accountable for the wrongs, whatever they may be, that beget these agents’ normative inconsistency.

Charging others with hypocrisy often acts as a way of rejecting the practical reasons they attempt to give (Herstein, 2017). There are some merits to a practice of rejecting reasons. To accept others’ provided reasons as valid is to affirm their authority in the relevant normative domain (Isserow and Klein, 2017). Conversely, to reject these reasons as invalid is to undermine the reason-givers’ authority in the domain. However, this practice can be rife with abuse—if we allow charges of ‘Hypocrite!’ to take hold too broadly, we risk compromising the entire enterprise of reason-giving. I propose that one form of such abuse has already entered into our normative vocabulary with the concept of ‘hypocritical advice.’ At best, this term plays a superfluous role in our normative vocabulary; at worst, its vagueness perpetuates a vicious practice of reason-rejecting. Regardless of the severity of its impact on normative discourse, I will argue herein that we should do away with talk of ‘hypocritical advice.’ I begin by echoing a standard distinction between second- and third-personal reasons and the corresponding types of authority that ground agents’ abilities to give reasons of each kind (sec. 2). After briefly discussing the connection between authority and hypocrisy (sec. 3), I argue that most purported cases of hypocritical advice-giving rest on a confusion between an utterance as communicating second- or third-personal reasons (sec. 4). Against recent suggestions that reasons given unambiguously as advice can be hypocritical, I demonstrate that the basis for rejecting third-personal reasons given in hypocritical advice is an interestingly different one than for rejecting second-personal reasons given through blame (sec. 5). I close with some final considerations against keeping ‘hypocritical advice’ in our normative vocabulary.

Plato’s Timaeus reveals a cosmos governed by Necessity and Intellect; commentators have debated the relationship between them. Non-literalists hold that the demiurge, having carte blanche in taming Necessity, is omnipotent. But this omnipotence, alongside the attributes of benevolence and omniscience, creates problems when non-literalists address the problem of evil. We take the demiurge rather as limited by Necessity. This position is supported by episodes within the text, and by its larger consonance with Plato’s philosophy of evil and responsibility. By recognizing the analogy between man and demiurge, the literal reading provides a moral component that its non-literal counterpart lacks.