My Trump-supporter friends understand that he’s a liar and adulterer but adamantly defend him with reasoning like ‘‘Everyone lies — have you not lied before?’’ or ‘‘My dad’s an extremely trustworthy guy even though he cheated on my mom a couple of times — so what?’’ I understand they are rationalizing to feel good about their candidate, but is it ethical to be hypocritical? — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
Yes, everybody lies. Still, lying about private matters, matters you think are nobody else’s business, may be quite different from lying about public matters in order to manipulate others into doing what you want. We may think of honesty as a unitary ‘‘global trait’’ — such that people are either honest across the board or not — but there’s research in moral psychology that argues otherwise. The philosopher Rachana Kamtekar, reviewing some empirical studies of honesty and other virtues, has argued that people might have ‘‘cross-situational consistency’’ if we start to think in terms of more specific traits, like ‘‘honesty with respect to property.’’ Cheating on your wife, similarly, might not indicate that you’re more likely to cheat in other ways.
Maybe what your friends really mean is that, though they might have preferred a president who showed greater fidelity to the truth and to his wives, these traits are less important to them than other traits that they actively favor. What they shouldn’t commit themselves to is the position that you can’t criticize someone for doing something you have done yourself. It also seems hard to dispute that, as David Leonhardt, Ian Prasad Philbrick and Stuart A. Thompson have argued in The Times, Trump has lied on a scale that outstrips his presidential predecessors. But we can put aside the tally. Hypocrisy, in Rochefoucauld’s deathless line, is the tribute vice pays to virtue. Society would founder if we had to be blameless to stand up for the values we hold dear.
Readers Respond
The previous question was from a man caught between his mother and in-laws. He wrote: “My mother, a two-time Trump voter in Florida, has moved closer to us in a safely blue state. While I don’t know what her vote was in the 2024 presidential election, it wouldn’t have affected the outcome. I strongly oppose Trump, as do my wife and her family, who live nearby. I’m troubled by my mother’s support of someone I consider morally abhorrent and dangerous, especially when she voted in a former swing state. With the result of the 2024 election, my wife and her family are directing their understandable fury at my mother. … I’m torn. My wife and her family expect me to brook no compromise and to speak out on an issue that feels existential to them (as it does to me), but because I know that her vote here doesn’t make a difference, I have trouble feeling motivated to admonish her for her past and possibly present support of Trump. … My mother expects me to intervene and speak up for her or to encourage my wife’s family to be more civil. She sees her vote as a ‘‘personal choice’’ and doesn’t seem to believe that she should be criticized for it. Ethically, is it wrong for me to hold my tongue or to try to negotiate the peace even though I agree with the substance of my wife’s family’s position?”
