Doppelganger Garden of Forking Paths

Hypocrisy

A lot of folks think that if you're a hypocrite, then you lose your moral standing to hold others responsible for their misdeeds (where "holding responsible" involves more than mere evaluative judgments that the agent in question acted badly). 

But what is hypocrisy exactly?  And what is it about hypocrisy that makes it inappropriate for you to hold others responsible when you're a hypocrite (i.e., why does the hypocrite lose her moral standing)?

I have some ideas about how to answer this question, but I'm worried they're idiosyncratic, so I'd like to hear what others thought.

An Asymmetry Between Praise and Blame?

Suppose that it's appropriate to blame S for φ only if in φ-ing, S fails to meet some demand or expectation.  Something like this seems to fit our practices; that is, we tend to blame (or otherwise hold responsible) those individuals who fail to satisfy our (normative) expectations or demands. 

But what's the analog for praise?  A couple possibilities:

• (A) It's appropriate to praise S for φ only if in φ-ing, S meets our demands/expectations.
• (B) It's appropriate to praise S for φ only if in φ-ing, S greatly exceeds our demands/expectations.

I don't think either of these is going to get the job done as an account of praise (i.e. an explanation of how praise functions in our actual practices) or as a norm for praising (i.e. how we should go about praising). 

(A) seems to be too liberal; I think that it's reasonable to expect of me that I won't kick any cats today, and guess what-- I haven't kicked any cats today!  Surely I haven't merited praise for refraining from kicking cats.  (B) seems to be too restrictive; imagine a trolley problem in which you are the fat man perched over the tracks and instead of five people in the path of the runaway trolley, there is a detonation device that if hit will eradicate New York City.  If we stipulate that the only way to stop the trolley is for you to jump in front of it, then it seems to me that you’re obligated to do so.  And yet, in spite of your obligation, the evening news reports that posthumously laud you as a hero seem entirely appropriate.

If (A) and (B) won't do the job, what will?  Here are a couple of suggestions:

• (C) The appropriateness of praise is a function from what is demanded/expected of an agent to the strength of will that must be exerted in order to perform the action in question.
• (D) It is appropriate to praise S for φ only if in φ-ing, S acted virtuously (i.e. she acted in such a way that she fares well when evaluated against some standard)

I think I'm inclined towards something like (D) right now, but if either something like (C) or (D) is correct, then it's not obvious to me that the conditions under which it's appropriate to blame an agent for her actions will be the same as those conditions under which it's appropriate it to praise her. 

So I'm wondering whether (C), (D), or something I haven't suggested seem plausible?  Or maybe I've dismissed (A) and (B) too quickly?

The Epistemology of Holding Responsible?

Consider the following principle:

(HR) It is fair to hold an agent S morally responsible for φ only if you know that S is morally responsible for φ.

Although (HR) seems true to me (at the very least it's related to the very plausible principle which holds that you should assert p only if you know that p), I won't be able to offer a defense of it here.  But tentatively accepting it, here are some questions.

Most compatibilists and libertarians believe that it is sometimes appropriate for us to hold individual agents morally responsible for their actions.  If you're one of these compatibilists (as I am) or one of these libertarians who thinks that it's sometimes fair for us to hold individual agents responsible, then given the putative truth of (HR), it seems like we're committed to the claim that we sometimes know that individual agents are morally responsible.  But this seems like a problem because how could we know that any particular agent satisfied the conditions of moral responsibility at a particular time?

I suppose that if Frankfurt's requirement on freedom of the will is correct, then we could just ask the wrongdoer about whether or not her second-order desire issued in the first-order volition that produced her action.  But what if Fischer and Ravizza's account of moral responsibility is correct?  How could we ever know that S acted from her own moderately reasons responsive mechanism?  And it wouldn't help to study those neurological or psychological mechanisms that actually issue in our actions because it's unclear what that could tell us about the modal properties of such mechanisms that are relevant to moderate reasons responsiveness.  Worse still, what if moral responsibility requires that we posses agent causal powers?  How could we ever know that we possess such powers?  Do we simply know it through introspection?  Or as a result of divine revelation?  Are those of us who think that it is sometimes appropriate to hold individual agents responsible committed to one of these answers?  Or should we simply abandon (HR)?  Of course, if we give up on (HR), we'll need another principle to replace it because surely there is some connection between what we believe of another agent and whether or not it is appropriate for us to hold that agent responsible.

I suppose a final option is that we radically alter our practices, not because we're not morally responsible (as the hard incompatibilist supposes), but because none of us is in the right sort of epistemic position to hold others morally responsible.  This seems to me (at least initially) to be a bad result, but maybe it wouldn't be so bad; I don't know, but I'd appreciate any help in sorting out the flurry of questions that seem to have emerged from this way of thinking about these issues.