Do you mean to tell me that hypocrisy is perfectly okay with you? That you have the same respect for someone who practices what they preach as you do for one that does the same thing that they denigrate others for? Are you proud to be so disinterested in integrity?
No, that is not what I mean at all.
We should be able to evaluate a person's values on their own. Do we agree with their values or not? If not, then consistency between their actions and values can't reconcile their values to us, and inconsistency isn't needed to disagree with their values. If so, then the mere failing to live up to those values, regardless of any advocacy of them, is the real problem.
And we can evaluate a person's actions on their own as well. Do we think they acted correctly or not? If they acted incorrectly, would that condemn values they violated but which they shared with us? It shouldn't. Would their actions be excusable if their own values, in contrast to ours, permitted such actions? Again, we have no reason to accept that.
So how is not successfully living up to a moral value worse than not having that value at all? I don't see how it is. That doesn't excuse not living up to a moral value that they should live up to, but the problem there is the failure to live up to the value, not the hypocrisy. Why should I care about someone not living up to a value that I don't consider relevant?
You speak of integrity, but how, exactly, does integrity enter the picture here? Do you mean that hypocrites are advocating values they don't actually believe in, and that's why they act hypocritically? Perhaps. But in that case, the problem is that they're dishonest, and possibly that they don't really hold a value one thinks they should hold. So it's still not the hypocrisy per se that's the important issue.
The problem with this obsession with hypocrisy, absent any evaluation of the morals themselves, is that it panders to the lowest denominator. By elevating hypocrisy above the values themselves, one essentially rewards
not having values, because then one cannot be hypocritical. This is a corrosive attitude. Worse, it is frequently employed cynically, by people who never cared about the value in question but merely hope to gain leverage from that value anyways.
And it is unnecessary.
