The Disjunctive Wrongness of Hypocrisy

ABSTRACT Monism regarding hypocrisy's wrongness maintains that there is a single, sui generis wrong of hypocrisy. This paper challenges hypocrisy monism and offers an alternative, hypocrisy disjunctivism, which maintains that the wrongness present in any token case of hypocrisy is always reducible to other, more basic wrongs. Hypocrisy disjunctivism, however, faces a fruitfulness challenge: Why have a concept that names a disjunction of wrongs at all in our normative vocabulary? I answer that “hypocrisy” solves a unique practical problem in allowing speakers to hold normatively inconsistent agents accountable for the wrongs, whatever they may be, that beget these agents' normative inconsistency.