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“WAVING THE BANNER OF DEMOCRACY”: DEMOCRATIC SANCTIONS AND THREE HYPOCRISY PUZZLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 May 2024
Abstract
This essay aims to advance the general discussion of hypocrisy in moral and political philosophy as well as normative policy debates regarding democratic sanctions against autocracies that often trigger charges of hypocrisy. In the process of making sense of these charges, I articulate and tackle three general puzzles regarding hypocrisy complaints. The first—the inaction puzzle—asks why a charge of hypocrisy should have any effect on the moral assessment of an agent’s actions, as distinct from the agent’s character or attitudes. The second—the ambivalence puzzle—asks why we often react to hypocrisy charges with seemingly paradoxical ambivalence, recognizing such charges for the transparent deflections they often are, but also granting their normative force. The third—the preemption puzzle—asks why hypocrisy charges do not entirely lose their force when their targets openly concede that they too have suffered from the same flaws that they highlight in others. I argue that sustained reflection on each of these puzzles can enrich—and be enriched by—normative analysis of democratic sanctions.
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Footnotes
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Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, shmuel.nili@northwestern.edu. Competing Interests: The author declares none. I am grateful to the other contributors to this volume for their generous feedback on an earlier version of this essay. Thanks also to Lizzie Krontiris and Lior Erez for extended conversations.
References
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3 The philosophical literature on hypocrisy is vast. For only a few examples from recent years, see Wallace, R. Jay, “Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 38, no. 4 (2010): 307–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cohen, G. A, “Ways of Silencing Critics,” in Finding Oneself in the Other, ed. Otsuka, Michael (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 134–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Friedman, Marilyn, “How to Blame People Responsibly,” Journal of Value Inquiry 47 (2013): 271–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fritz, Kyle and Miller, Daniel, “Hypocrisy and the Standing to Blame,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 99, no. 1 (2018): 118–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herstein, Ori, “Understanding Standing: Permission to Deflect Reasons,” Philosophical Studies 174, no. 12 (2017): 3109–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Isserow, Jessica and Klein, Colin, “Hypocrisy and Moral Authority,” Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 12, no. 2 (2017): 191–222 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I put aside here those parts of the literature concerned with agents who have somehow caused, through their own wrongful actions, the conduct that they are now criticizing; see, e.g., G. A. Cohen, “Casting the First Stone: Who Can, and Who Can’t, Condemn the Terrorists?” in Finding Oneself in the Other, 115–33; Frick, Johann, “What We Owe to Hypocrites: Contractualism and the Speaker-Relativity of Justification,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 44, no. 4 (2016): 223–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
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10 Fabre, Economic Statecraft, 169–70. Fabre, it should be noted, distinguishes the charge of hypocrisy from the charge (invoked in this passage) of double standards. In my view, though, there is nothing necessarily problematic about an account of hypocrisy that brings these two charges together.
11 See, e.g., Wallace, “Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons,” 329n37.
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16 I do not mean to deny that attributing hypocrisy to a collective can be difficult, given conflicting plans, imperatives, and motivations across different members of the collective; see, e.g., Nils Brunsson, The Organization of Hypocrisy (1992; repr., Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School Press, 2002). Yet, elsewhere, I have argued at length that many of the relevant challenges can be avoided. See Shmuel Nili, Integrity, Personal and Political (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), chaps. 1, 2.
17 Matt King, “Skepticism About the Standing to Blame,” Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, vol. 6 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 276–77.
18 James Goldgeier and Bruce Jentleson, “The United States Needs a Democracy Summit at Home,” Foreign Affairs, January 9, 2021, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2021-01-09/united-states-needs-democracy-summit-home.
19 Goldgeier and Jentleson, “The United States Needs a Democracy Summit at Home.”
20 See, e.g., Wallace, “Hypocrisy, Moral Address, and the Equal Standing of Persons”; Fritz and Miller, “Hypocrisy and the Standing to Blame”; Friedman, “How to Blame People Responsibly”; Cristina Roadevin, “Hypocritical Blame, Fairness, and Standing,” Metaphilosophy 49, nos. 1–2 (2018): 137–52.
21 Ori Herstein, “Justifying Standing to Give Reasons: Hypocrisy, Minding Your Own Business, and Knowing One’s Place,” Philosophers’ Imprint 20, no. 7 (2020): 10.
22 Fabre, Economic Statecraft, 156 (italics added).
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24 “Guy Peleg: I Think That Netanyahu Will Go for a Plea Bargain at Some Point,” Maariv, May 24, 2020, www.maariv.co.il/news/law/Article-767229.
25 This point is particularly explicit in Daniela Dover’s helpful characterization of the conventional view, which she criticizes on grounds different from those proposed here. See Dover, Daniela, “The Walk and the Talk,” The Philosophical Review 128, no. 4 (2019): 387–422 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Eloquently emphasized, among others, in Runciman, David, Political Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Grant, Ruth, Hypocrisy and Integrity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 47–48. Thus, to take Dover’s apt example, it was no surprise that an Idaho senator who advocated anti-gay measures, but who turned out to be a closeted gay man himself, won “the enmity and ridicule of right-thinking liberals and homophobic reactionaries alike.” Although these two groups may not agree on virtually any substantive point of political morality, they were still “united, for once, in their contempt for his hypocrisy.” Dover, “The Walk and the Talk,” 406–7.
28 For further examples along similar lines, see Bukovansky, Mlada, “Institutionalized Hypocrisy and the Politics of Agricultural Trade,” in Constructing the International Economy, ed. Adbelal, Rawi, Blyth, Mark, and Parsons, Craig (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 68–90 Google Scholar.
29 Quoted, e.g., in Tom McCarthy, “‘Slayer Pete’: Buttigieg Emerges as Biden’s Unlikely Fox News fighter,” The Guardian, October 13, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/oct/13/slayer-pete-buttigieg-joe-biden-fox-news.
30 I take no stance on the relation between this kind of problem and the akratic issues more familiar to philosophers who have long pondered the case of “Professor Procrastinate,” who is asked to take on a job that he knows he is too weak-willed to carry out successfully. See, e.g., Jackson, Frank, “Procrastinate Revisited,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 95, no. 4 (2014): 634–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 Although the following, famous remarks from Michael Walzer concern specifically the relationship between a government and its people, they can fairly be applied to the context of our discussion as well: “The state is constituted by the union of people and government…. Foreigners are in no position to deny the reality of that union, or rather, they are in no position to attempt anything more than speculative denials. They don’t know enough about its history, and they have no direct experience, and can form no concrete judgments, of the conflicts and harmonies, the historical choices and cultural affinities, the loyalties and resentments, that underlie it. Hence their conduct, in the first instance at least, cannot be determined by either knowledge or judgment.” Michael Walzer, “The Moral Standing of States: A Response to Four Critics,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 9, no. 3 (1980): 212.
32 For one particularly harrowing example, see Tim McGirk, “How the bin Laden Raid Put Vaccinators Under the Gun in Pakistan,” National Geographic, February 25, 2015, news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150225-poliopakistan-vaccination-virus-health.
33 See, e.g., Svolik, Milan, “Polarization Versus Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 30, no. 3 (2019): 20–32 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
34 This is true even if there are other relevant things, including other sanctions, that would be right for the government to pursue.
35 See, e.g., Pogge, Thomas, “Achieving Democracy,” Ethics & International Affairs 15, no. 1 (2001): 3–23 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barry, Christian, “Sovereign Debt, Human Rights, and Policy Conditionality,” Journal of Political Philosophy 19, no. 3 (2011): 282–305 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nili, Shmuel, The People’s Duty (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chap. 4.
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37 As far as I am aware, Fabre’s aforementioned discussion is the only exception to this generalization. It is also a partial exception, since Fabre’s focus in discussing democratic hypocrisy is on the attitudes rather than the policies that democracies may adopt toward autocratic regimes.
38 The literature on “costly signaling” in international relations is vast. For its latest iterations, see, e.g., Quek, Kai, “Four Costly Signaling Mechanisms,” American Political Science Review 115, no. 2 (2021): 537–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kertzer, Joshua, Rathbun, Brian, and Rathbun, Nina Srinivasan, “The Price of Peace: Motivated Reasoning and Costly Signaling in International Relations,” International Organization 74, no. 1 (2020): 95–118 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
39 This worry seems like the best, if not only, moral rationale that could be offered, for example, for the buyers’ cartel that the Biden Administration was trying to construct with regard to Russian oil. See, e.g., “Russia Is Making Heaps of Money from Oil, but There Is a Way to Stop That,” New York Times, July 29, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/opinion/russia-oil-sanctions-biden.html.