Comment by simpaticoder
Comment by simpaticoder 14 hours ago
Yes, a lack of disincentive to hypocrisy and, in fact, considerable disincentive to pointing it out, seems to be the case. Why? From a utilitarian perspective, at the societal level hypocrisy undermines the "cooperate" Nash equilibrium; at the individual level, it undermines "conscience". The question we might ask is how did we lose conscience? If psychological egoism is the default "philsophy" of humans (and I think that it is, just as "autocracy" is the default governing system), then the better question is how did we get it and maintain it in the first place? In an ideal world you get to do tests, where one group's values are tested against another group with different values to see which group is stronger. An example of this is with war - WWII was liberalism vs fascism, and the Cold War was liberalism vs communism. We won both. So what happened? Could it be that liberalism collapses on its own when it's not measured against an alternative?
I too had been thinking of such a similar blog post, of why hyprocrisy even matters. In most of human history, might had essentially made right (or rather, power did not care whether it were hypocritical or not). However, we did indeed cooperate before modern liberalism as well, so it's hard to say exactly what effect this modern-day obsession being non-hypocritical creates.