CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – Tom Sinclair (Oxford)

Title: Hypocrisy as Evasion

Abstract: Hypocrites attract moral condemnation and are widely thought to lack standing to criticise others. This paper argues against attempts to explain this that appeal to moral conditions on blaming and notions of moral authority, proposing instead an account based on a conception of moral interactions as fundamentally dialogical in character. According to this account, blame is just one of many tools of moral exchange whose proper use is the building of a shared moral world of mutually acknowledged responsibilities. The hypocrite misuses these tools, and this both generates a basic moral objection to hypocrisy that is prior to the more specific objections highlighted by other accounts and explains the hypocrite’s loss of standing.

Location: Edgecliffe G03