entirely safe and fun

I have been meaning to put in a brief word on Nick Gillespie’s interview with Jeremy Lott in Reason, which appeared on the web site two weeks ago. They talk about hypocrisy, and about Lott’s book on the topic. Lott outlines his argument pretty coarsely; I wish Gillespie had done a better job of eliciting a more articulate account from his subject.

The moral status of hypocrisy has been in the eye of the Western philosophical tradition at least since Aristotle. He argued that incontinence - recognizing good but failing to do it, basically hypocrisy in its larval form - is a superior state to mere vice. The now widely-held belief that consistency is the greatest ethical good to which we can aspire, a consequence of moral relativism becoming the default naïve ethical theory, is very temporally parochial. Freshmen studying philosophy get little surprises like this every day; the history of ideas fills a very big space.

Lott does add an interesting angle to the valorization of hypocrisy relative to forthright wrongdoing. At least part of his position is that hypocrisy can increase good society-wide, acting as a kind of ethical ratchet. Consider the case of kitten-eating, which is the ne plus ultra of evil…

The Forehead: If you’re so evil, eat this kitten.
The Tick: Eating kittens is just plain… plain wrong! And no one should do it, ever!
The Tick, “Armless but Not Harmless” (1994)

Suppose for the moment that The Tick is a moral saint, but that kitten-eating is actually quite widespread among supervillains like The Forehead, some of whom may recognize its (objective) plain wrongness. On Lott’s account, it is for the best if Chairface Chippendale and The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight publicly condemn kitten-eating, even if they indulge themselves in private, because it creates a climate in which further kitten-eating will be more difficult. It certainly creates a climate in which further public kitten-eating will be more likely to meet condemnation, and in which that condemnation is more likely to take hold. What’s most interesting is the thermodynamic (”virtuous cycle,” if you will) character of Lott’s position. This is not the unsophisticated thermodynamic argument of the Social Darwinist - “it’s good because it’s stable and self-stabilizing” - but rather a nuanced account in which the best way to see good done is to make it harder to do evil. In many ways, it’s a positive version of Singer’s argument in A Darwinian Left, and of Pinker’s in The Blank Slate. Singer and Pinker argue that it is dangerous and unnecessary to predicate ethical conclusions on “facts” about human nature which may turn out to be untrue (and also dangerous and unnecessary to blindly set aside what we do find out about human nature); Lott holds out the possibility of engineering the state of the world, using our outward behavior, as a way to ground our ethical conclusions.

Edit 5 July 2006: Life imitates art. Shooting puppies is surely the moral equivalent of eating kittens.