The worldviews of Jean Genet, Marquis de Sade, and Anton LaVey are presented in this chapter. All of them accuse society of being morally hypocritical. Empirical research vis-à-vis hypocrisy in the psychology of morality is discussed. A moral-pluralistic approach is proposed in which different moral positions are prominent and can come into conflict with each other. In this context, Max Weber’s “ethic of responsibility” is discussed as relevant to political leadership. Then, the monopositionality of utopian visions, such as fascism, communism, religions, and neoliberalism, are criticized as being focused on one ideal end-position that does not allow counter-positions or alternative points of view As practical implications of this chapter, I offer three guidelines for dealing with hypocrisy: the role of self-awareness, perspective-taking, and the stimulation of moral multiplicity.

Some degree of hypocritical conformity is necessary, Spinoza argues, for a political society to function. Individuals cannot be free to do whatever they like, even if their conscience conflicts with the law. Yet Spinoza also recognizes that hypocritical conformity has its own pernicious repercussions, specifically the corrosion of civic trust. Spinoza’s conscientious speech warns that conformity corrodes the social trust that undergirds politics since individuals are not able to confidently assess the sincerity of their citizens. Spinoza aims to reconcile this tension by distinguishing speech from action. Dissenters must conform to the law, even if it conflicts with their conscience, but they should be able to express their conscience freely in speech.

This book argues that liberty of conscience remains a crucial freedom worth protecting, because safeguarding it prevents political, social, and psychological threats to freedom. Influential early modern theorists of toleration, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and Pierre Bayle, I show, defend liberty of conscience by stressing the unanticipated repercussions of conformity. By recovering the intellectual origins of liberty of conscience in early modern politics and situating influential theorists of toleration in overlooked historical debates on religious dissimulation and hypocritical conformity, I demonstrate that infringements on conscience risk impeding political engagement, eroding civic trust, and inciting religious fanaticism. While this is a book about freedom, it is also a book about threats to freedom, specifically conformity, hypocrisy, and persecution. It considers the social, psychological, and political harms done by political refusals to tolerate religious differences and allow individuals to practice their religion freely in accordance with the dictates of conscience. By returning to a historical context in which liberty of conscience was not granted to religious dissenters –but rather actively denied – this book foregrounds Bayle’s argument that coercing conscience exacerbates religious fervor and inflicts significant psychological harm on dissenters, thereby undermining the goal of cultivating social cohesion in politics. In controversies on the politics of conscience, I suggest that we acknowledge that refusals to tolerate claims of conscience – while perhaps well-grounded in democratic laws and norms – might exacerbate conscientious fervor and empower resentment against the state. This Baylean intuition does not necessarily tell us where to draw the limits of toleration – what should be tolerated and what goes beyond the pale – but it does tell us something about how to approach invocations of conscience and what to expect when we deem something intolerable.

Hypocrisy is also closely related to irony (i.e., a disparity of word and deed) and this chapter advances the claim that hypocrisy is really a form of situational irony, especially as it relates to moral judgments (e.g., not practicing what you preach). Shelley reviews past theories in philosophy and psychology (e.g., moral hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance) that offer insights into how people detect hypocrisy in others and even excuse it in themselves. But he goes on to outline his “bicoherence theory of situational irony” in which a situation is judged as “ironic” when it displays a bicoherent conceptual structure, adequate salience, and evokes an appropriate configuration of emotions. Bicoherence is important because it shows that while incoherence can be minimized, it cannot be eliminated from people’s understandings, despite their cognitive prowess and best efforts. Shelley considers numerous examples of hypocrisy, including ones in which something is explicitly called out as “hypocrisy,” to show its effectiveness in criticizing people for their shortcomings.

As scholars and activists seek to define and promote greater corporate political responsibility (CPR), they will benefit from understanding practitioner perspectives and how executives are responding to rising scrutiny of their political influences, reputational risk and pressure from employees, customers and investors to get involved in civic, political, and societal issues. This chapter draws on firsthand conversations with practitioners, including executives in government affairs; sustainability; senior leadership; and diversity, equity and inclusion, during the launch of a university-based CPR initiative. I summarize practitioner motivations, interests, barriers and challenges related to engaging in conversations about CPR, as well as committing or acting to improve CPR. Following the summary, I present implications for further research and several possible paths forward, including leveraging practitioners’ value on accountability, sustaining external calls for transparency, strengthening awareness of systems, and reframing CPR as part of a larger dialogue around society’s “social contract.”

The transition from one culture of governance to another explains the character and timing of changes in the nature, location and scale of English executions from 1660 to 1900. Traditional landed elites adhered both to a “Bloody Code,” whose enforcement against common criminals could be regularly adjusted through consultations between trial judges and themselves, and to the occasional use of prolongedly agonizing execution rituals against traitors. The men who dominated England’s uniquely extensive and steadily expanding urban realms, and embraced new cultures of desacralization, feeling and reason, increasingly viewed the purposes, numerical extent and staging of executions differently. As the numbers and power of urbane people grew, first the extent and finally the practices of execution were adjusted accordingly. The many paradoxes of “feeling”, however, ensured their continued commitment to execution for murder, and some measure of hypocrisy in their views of executions and the people who attended them.

This chapter defines Andrewes’ position in terms of its opposition to a body of both religious and political opinion labelled puritan. While Andrewes’ anti-puritanism is shown to have been rooted in traditional conformist concerns about conformity and church government, it also, Hooker-like, encompassed wider issues of religious style and modes of being. Crucial here was what Andrewes identified and excoriated as the puritan cult of the sermon and view of faith centred solely on knowledge rather than practice or works. According to Andrewes, the result was hypocrisy on a heroic pharisaical scale and a histrionic, wholly performative, style of both preaching and piety.

This chapter homes in on the explicitly political, and allegedly anti-monarchical, effects of puritan error. Here what Andrewes presents as the integral connections between puritan presumption, hypocrisy and popularity – the latter defined as an obsession with getting and keeping the good opinion of the people, if necessary by defaming their rulers from the pulpit and in the press. Puritanism is thus presented as wholly inimical to monarchical authority in the state and episcopal authority in the church. Again, Andrewes is shown asserting the broad equivalence of the seditious doctrines and practices of the puritans and the papists. He placed special stress on the predestinarian roots of puritan hypocrisy and presumption and hence on the political consequences of what Andrewes took to be (typically puritan) predestinarian error.

Chapter 1 considers the fear of atheism that gripped early modern thinkers, assessing its nature and extent and seeking to explain its rationale; in the course of this, its association with trends in the thought of the period such as naturalism, secularism and Deism is considered, as is its supposed link with immoralism. The chapter also asserts that the few well-documented examples of actual atheists that are known from the period were characterised by the ‘assurance’ that they showed in propagating their views, in contrast to the doubts suffered by Christian believers, a point that is illustrated by recourse to the history of emotions. The remainder of the chapter summarises the content of the rest of the book, paying particular attention to the Cerne Abbas enquiry of 1594 and to the apostacy of Christopher Marlowe and of John Eliot in Edinburgh in 1694.

‘Cancel culture’ is a new variant of an old phenomenon. The growth or spread that we associate with the contagion of cancellation has ‘making’ at its heart. The initial judgment plants the germ in Inventive mode. Causing the judgment to increase in consequence and extent makes it grow in Creative mode. Giving the judgment the air of publicity makes something new of it in Productive and co-Productive mode. Making a mistake triggers a whole series of making processes, and our language reflects this. The dominance of ‘making’ language in relation to individual errors and collective responses to those errors indicates that in social contexts an individual’s fracture of the social fabric is more than made up for by the fabricating impulses of society at large. The clustering of criticism operates in this sense almost like the cells of a body that rush to heal cuts in skin and breakages of bone – sometimes leaving the re-created tissue stronger than it was to begin with. On the other hand, where judgments are made hypocritically, too quickly, or with an inadequate grasp of the materials, the Product can be as shoddy as the original infraction.

This book revives a contested moment in the history of aesthetic theory when Romantic-period writers exploit the growing awareness of irresolutions in Kant’s third Kritik, especially in his critique of judgements of the sublime. Read with hindsight, these openings can be seen to have generated literary opportunities for writings that explicitly embraced the philosophical significance delegated to the aesthetic by Kant, but then took advantage of the licence he had conceded. Romantic writing claimed a wider significance of its own that philosophy now had to learn to rationalise. Consequent aesthetic reorientations, in which splendours and miseries become interchangeable, reflect political instabilities already exploited by feminist and nationalist writing. Falling becomes a kind of rising, and literature’s unregulated power of metamorphosis persuasively challenges hierarchies of all kinds, including its own.

As the century progressed, there was an increasing emphasis on more moderate forms of discourse and behaviour that rejected the divisive social and religious attitudes of the previous century. Supporters of the primacy of the Established Church now needed other weapons, beyond legal recourse and vituperative argument, to challenge the position of Dissent. As all parties tried to work out their shifting roles in the wake of legislative change, religious prejudice began to find its expression in new forms. Chapter 3 argues that politeness, in particular, became a mode of behaviour through which tacit religious exclusion could be reframed in new, more socially acceptable, ways. Focusing particularly on how the idea of politeness interacted with the accusation of Dissenting hypocrisy, it highlights how this discourse did not wholeheartedly reject the religious divisions of the previous century, but rather re-configured them for a new era of supposed moderation.

When Tom Brady throws an interception, he yells at himself and pounds his fists on his helmet. When Serena Williams misses a shot, she breaks her racket. When Tiger Woods misses a long putt, he falls to his knees and shakes his head. These athletes are clearly blaming themselves. Surprisingly, though, current theories of blame have a very hard time accounting for such cases. Most theories of blame take other-blame – directly expressed dyadic blame – as their paradigm, typically thought to be a response to poor quality of will or moral wrongdoing and consisting of some kind of relationship modification, communication, or protest. None of these features seems to apply in the cases of athletic self-blame. Recently, some theorists have taken self-blame to be a more fundamental paradigm than other-blame, but they are focused on self-blame as guilt, which again can’t capture the athletic cases, because Tom, Serena, and Tiger aren’t feeling anything like guilt when they blame themselves. As a result of these problems, I offer a new theory of self-blame, one that starts by theorizing directly about the athletic cases. I draw from some fascinating recent psychological work on the phenomenon of self-talk to make the case that the emotional core of self-blame is in fact very different than that of other-blame, as is evidenced in a new puzzle I introduce about hypocrisy and its limits.