In defense of hypocrisy and insincerity in liberalism.

Abstract

It is no secret that hypocrisy and insincerity occupy an ethically ambivalent if unsavory place in our culture. Even as they pervasively animate our micro social encounters, and even as we concede their utility and more than occasional necessity, they have never stood on the podium of virtue as, for instance, honesty, loyalty and love. One may say more strongly that they are no virtues at all but are partly defined by stigmas. Accordingly, the very idea of trying to defend them would seem potentially embarrassing or worse. But that is precisely what I seek to do. Specifically, I try to illuminate the ways in which hypocrisy and insincerity help to underwrite three important functions of contemporary liberalism in creating and sustaining conditions for equal public respect; the promotion of deliberative democracy and its search for provisional truths; and the production of publicly-regarding justifications by self-interested parties.