| Notes | Book |
To me they are opposites. The hypocrite believes that whatever he does is OK, but when the other person does the same thing, it is bad.
I think these are ways to express moral equivalency:
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
I guess some people think the moral equivalent of terrorism is taxation, incarceration, and war. To me, they are just equivalent. One is inherently no more moral than another.
If there is some kind of absolute morality, it is of little practical use. It is obvious from the amount of disagreement about what is moral, the if such a thing exists, it is only accessible to a small number of people.
But a smoothly functioning social organization, requires some accepted standard of morality, otherwise there is no way to evaluate social interactions. But hypocrisy, by definition, means that there are different standards. To say that what is good for the goose is not good for the gander guarantees that there will be a lot of squawking and pecking.
A society of people who judge themselves by the same standard as they judge others is a healthy and prosperous society.
A society that believes that putting on a uniform and filling out forms gives a person the right to perform criminal acts is a sick society.