It is widely agreed that hypocrites lack standing to blame, but there is substantial disagreement about why this is so. According to Taking Norms Seriously accounts, hypocrites lack standing to blame because they fail to take moral norms seriously, while Moral Equality accounts ground their lack of standing in their implicit rejection of the moral equality of persons. This paper aims to break the recent stalemate between these views in favor of Taking Norms Seriously accounts by presenting novel…
Read moreIt is widely agreed that hypocrites lack standing to blame, but there is substantial disagreement about why this is so. According to Taking Norms Seriously accounts, hypocrites lack standing to blame because they fail to take moral norms seriously, while Moral Equality accounts ground their lack of standing in their implicit rejection of the moral equality of persons. This paper aims to break the recent stalemate between these views in favor of Taking Norms Seriously accounts by presenting novel cases of hypocrisy and its converse, hypercrisy: the act of blaming oneself significantly more than one blames others for relevantly similar wrongs. Unlike standard cases discussed in the literature, I focus on hypocrites who possess insufficient self-regard and hypercrites who have insufficient regard for others. I argue that, in such cases, both hypocrites and hypercrites intuitively retain their standing to blame, despite rejecting the moral equality of persons, because they continue to take the norms seriously.
