Volume 4, Issue 5 - July 2001

Getting the Scoop on Moral Hipocrisy

Reprinted with permission from The Globe and Mail, June 2, 1994

My cocker spaniel Panda was accompanying me on our regular walk along Winnipeg’s elegant Wellington Crescent when our journey was interrupted by a stranger.

The stranger knew me, from the media, as a professor of ethics. We wanted to tell me that he was a writer who, having observed me scooping up Panda’s turds, now intended to write a story about this. An unlikely project, I thought, but then who am I to judge? We chatted briefly about the civic duty to protect public space and the common weal, and I proceeded to complete the ritual of my morning walk.

This was not the first time I had been stopped by a vigilant fellow citizen. A few years ago, a woman with whom I was casually acquainted made a point of informing me that she had seen my dog crap on the boulevard. She watched me carefully, she remarked, to see whether I, an “ethicist”, would “do the right thing”.

No one expects that physicists will automatically be good golfers, despite their expertise at calculating force vectors around objects such as golf balls in flight, so why should anyone expect that an ethics professor will automatically be a good person? Anyway, thank goodness, on this occasion, it seems that I had scooped. Indeed, although there is the occasional slip-up, I generally take great care not to leave home without every pocket stuffed to overflowing with Safeway plastic vegetable bags.

There is more than one thread typing these two incidents together, but the point I want to explore concerns not dogs and boulevards, but the problem of not living up to the principles one espouses.

First, another anecdote. In the run-up to this year’s income-tax filing deadline, I happened, during a dinner with friends, to denounce the RRSP deduction as unfairly favouring prosperous middle-class people. After listening patiently to this jeremiad, one friend asked whether I had ever taken advantage of this iniquitous tax dodge.
Gulp. I was forced to admit that, yes, I had indeed claimed the RRSP deduction. Not just once, either, but every year and to the maximum limit permitted by our federal government. She was dismayed by my inconsistency, but her husband was positively delighted to see me exposed, yet again, as a moral hypocrite.

Of course, I defended myself strenuously. I explained that I regularly voted for a political party that would, if elected, dramatically increase the taxes on people like me, in order to benefit others less privileged. But, so long as my fellow citizens continued to elect governments that favoured the rich over the poor, and so long as the rest of the middle class was taking advantage, I would continue to claim some of those morally dubious benefits for myself. To act otherwise, I added sotto voce, would result in the horrible feeling of being suckered. But even as I spoke, I knew that the everyone-else-is-doing-it argument is the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Needless to say, my dinner companions were not persuaded, and the more I protested my innocence, the more I incurred their contempt. So, what should I have replied to my friends?

I could have pointed out that we live in a nation of materialistic gratification maximers. None of us wholly escape this ubiquitous culture of greed and selfishness. Virtually from the moment of birth we are assaulted with advertising messages proclaiming that the road to happiness is paved with ceaseless consumption. We are exhorted to “look out for No. 1”, “get an edge,” “strike first,” “never give a sucker an even break.” In a nation of sharpies and cheats, everyone is infected, more or less, by egoism and greed, including those whose job it is to teach ethics or preach sermons.

It’s undeniably true that all of us behave selfishly some of the time. And probably true that in rough times, selfish behaviour multiplies and divides rapidly.

Nevertheless, it is also true that almost everyone is capable of generosity toward others. Large numbers of people – even in our me-first culture – make some sacrifices for their moral principles. . We recycle our garbage, volunteer our time at the local community club, donate money to Oxfam and blood to the Red Cross and, yes, scoop up after our dogs. Of course, we are, at the same time, guilty of using our cars when we could walk or cycle, of consuming too much energy and wasting too many of the Earth’s scarce resources. In short, our lives are a bundle of contradictions.

The great danger is that our pleasure in discovering the inevitable moral hypocrisy of our friends can degenerate easily into an all-pervasive cynicism. We end up disparaging our own motives as well as the motives of everyone else. This cynicism is no less blind to complex reality than is the naïve belief in universal altruism.

Admittedly, moral heroes are few. We are almost all flawed; our lives are a series of shabby compromises with our ideals. But this is no reason to fall into cynicism or despair. Quite the reverse. We have to find some way to hold ourselves and others to the highest moral standards at the same time as we accept the truth of that old Russian proverb. “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” So we have to be prepared to forgive lapses of virtue. More important, we have to work together to create a society in which one doesn’t feel “suckered” when one puts the interests of the community ahead of one’s own interests. Most important, we have to find ways to expand our definition of ourselves, so that our self-interest encompasses the good of our community.

Views offered in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Provincial Health Ethics Network.