The United Nations has been trying for years to pin the moral blame for global slavery exclusively on European nations. The UN has conveniently forgotten that Arab and African countries traded slaves for centuries before Europeans got involved in the Trans-Atlantic trade. They are egged on in this hypocritical endeavor by the “antiracist” lobby in Europe who would love nothing better than for their countries to be denounced as morally culpable for historic crimes.
The United States voted against the UN resolution blaming Europe for slavery, rightly recognizing it as a thinly-veiled demand for wealth transfers from the West to the Third World in the form of “reparations.”
Many antiracists are socialists, ideologically committed to wealth redistribution. They lobbied for the UN to rank European involvement in the slave trade as somehow morally worse than Africans selling slaves to Arabs for centuries. As a matter of principle, the US was right to reject this self-serving attempt to rank historic crimes.
The United States also strongly objects to the resolution’s attempt to rank crimes against humanity in any type of hierarchy. . . The assertion that some crimes against humanity are less severe than others objectively diminishes the suffering of countless victims and survivors of other atrocities throughout history.
Supporters of slavery reparations sometimes argue that the hypocrisies of UN member states are irrelevant in evaluating historic injustice. It is, in principle, unsound to dismiss a demand couched in the language of justice simply by arguing that the people putting it forward happen to be hypocrites. That approach—pointing out the speaker’s hypocrisies—is a form of ad hominem argument.
A tu quoque (you too) retort highlights inconsistency between the speakers’ own conduct and their stated commitment to justice, but it is often seen as a rather childish attempt to change the subject. It is certainly no substitute for considering a proposal on its merits. But given the prevalence of hypocrisy among states, it is still worth asking what significance should be attached to it in evaluating political demands, and the potential hazards of overlooking hypocrisy altogether.
The political philosopher Judith Shklar argued that hypocrisy is by no means the worst of potential moral failings. An otherwise sound political strategy should not be dismissed out of hand purely on grounds that its promoters are hypocrites. She pointed out that being hypocritical may well be a moral failing but it is not as bad as cruelty. She highlighted “the moral distance between crime and pretense,” arguing that mere pretense is not as morally culpable as crime.
Shklar is right to point out “the difference between wickedness and mere pretension.” Doing the right thing weighs more heavily than hypocrisy. The example usually given is that of a doctor who smokes but advises his patients against it. We often separate political or professional opinions from the personal choices of the speaker. This is what people mean when they ask others to “hold their noses and vote” for a political candidate they personally abhor, if they regard the platform itself as objectively sound.
Yet Shklar also acknowledges the danger in ignoring hypocrisy. First, hypocrisy is a vice. That matters for its own sake to those who seek the path of virtue. Further, the self-deception entailed in hypocrisy is often the occasion of causing harm to others. Self-deception is often the handmaiden of cruelty. What seems to be a mere moral failing—the hypocrisy—fuels cruelty by providing ostensible moral cover for criminals. Ignoring that indirectly promotes cruelty. Shklar explains,
Because cruelty is made easier by hypocrisy and self-deception, they are bound to stand high on the list of vices that begins with cruelty. . . . Dishonesty becomes here less a violation of truth than an aid to cruelty.
A notable example is the case of war crimes. The victors deem their own crimes necessary to win—or, at least, to end the war quickly—and justify their cruelty by arguing that any other state would have been equally cruel. Shklar illustrates this by quoting Becket saying, “A soldier’s honor, Baron, is to win victories. Let us not be hypocritical.”
The implication of Becket’s remark is that the honorable soldier does whatever he deems necessary to win, committing war crimes if necessary, and any opponent who criticizes him for it is merely being hypocritical because he too, would do the same. Yet the remark is at the same time self-serving, offered as a justification for the speaker’s own crimes.
This double hypocrisy is seen when states insist that war crimes are unacceptable in principle, and to be denounced when done by their opponents, and yet, they do not refrain from that conduct themselves or, if they do, they treat it as justified. Justifying war crimes “only when we do it” masks cruelty. As the British journalist, Peter Hitchens, has asked,
Was the USA right to drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima 80 years ago? Most people think so, even though they also realise that the attack killed many innocent civilians, often in quite horrible ways which it is hard to face.
Do they excuse those gruesome horrors of burned human flesh and radiation sickness because they simply can’t bear to consider the possibility that it was both a major mistake and a moral crime?
Mr. Hitchens raises the possibility that people avoid asking themselves these questions when they cannot bear to face the truth. Instead, victors enthusiastically turn their attention to examining the faults of the losing side, accusing them of war crimes. Here, as David Gordon observes, further hypocrisy arises:
[Hans] Kelsen called for a neutral court to try all individuals guilty of war crimes, whether from victor or vanquished nations. What took place at Nuremberg and after was quite different: only those from defeated nations were tried, and the winners conducted the trials. . . Nations unfortunate enough to lose a military struggle with the United States become subject to “victor’s justice.” The result is a “two-tier” structure of justice in which opponents of America face strict scrutiny while America and her allies are immune.
This enrolls states in a race to the bottom—what F. J. P. Veale called an “advance to barbarism.” It begins when states treat their own war crimes as militarily necessary and, therefore, morally inconsequential or blameless. They do not scrutinize their own conduct. Other states respond by reasoning that if they play by the rules they will be at a disadvantage as the other side has no scruples. In the age of what Veale calls “total war,” the rules of civilized warfare are seen as a path to certain defeat.
In the example of Abraham Lincoln’s war, Veale observed that while the cruelty of General Sherman’s “total war” strategies is well known, few historians pin any moral blame on Lincoln. It is as if the war crimes perpetrated against Southern civilians do not matter because Lincoln won. The ethos is that might makes right. Veale rejects the view that this was merely about personal excesses on Sherman’s part.
Sherman only executed the most dramatic and devastating example of the strategy which was laid down by President Lincoln himself and was followed faithfully by General Ulysses S. Grant as commander-in-chief of the Northern armies. That Lincoln determined the basic lines of Northern military strategy has been well established in such books as Collin R. Ballard’s The Military Genius of Abraham Lincoln and T. Harry Williams’ Lincoln and His Generals. . . Sherman was only carrying out effectively the military policy which Lincoln and Grant had adopted.
Yet the suffering of Southern civilians is forgotten by those who admire the “military genius of Abraham Lincoln.” Many go even further to argue that Sherman probably did not know what his soldiers were doing, so we should shrug our shoulders and chalk it all down to “bad things happen in war.”
This dismissive approach to the moral blame that lies on one’s own side is the key weakness of the hypocrite. States should, instead, scrutinize their own conduct by reference to the same rules they apply to others. As the Irish Penny Journal warned, in 1840,
Hypocrisy is, of all vices, the most hateful to man; because it combines the malice of guilt with the meanness of deception. Of all vices it is the most dangerous; because its whole machinery is constructed on treachery, through the means of confidence, on compounding virtue with vice, on making the noblest qualities of our nature minister to the most profligate purposes of our ruin. It erects a false light where it declares a beacon, and destroys by the very instrument blazoned as a security.
