About 25 years ago, I heard columnist William Raspberry speak at Wittenberg University about our need for more hypocrisy. His opening line shocked me so I began to pay close attention to his reasoning. He introduced me to a quotation from the French philosopher Francois de La Rochefoucauld, “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” Then he said that we have come to justify behaviors that we know are wrong by pointing out that others do the same things and therefore finding them to be acceptable.

According to Raspberry, we should be ashamed when we do things that we know are wrong. And we should still be teaching others that those things are wrong, even though we have done them ourselves. It is particularly hypocritical to do that when we are so ashamed that we make a secret of what we have done. And that hypocrisy may be better than pretending that what we did was ok.

Raspberry pointed out that our knowledge of right and wrong is like an electric fence around our behavior. When we touch the fence we get shocked by our consciences. Hopefully we learn from that and don’t make the same mistake again. But a modern trend is to believe that it must be ok because others are doing it or because it is legal. That amounts to moving the electric fence beyond the line between right and wrong to encompass pretty much anything we want to do.

As I began to understand Raspberry’s logic, I found myself listing commonly accepted actions that most of us would agree are wrong. Most of us (yes, including me) have done at least a few of them with little or no guilt: People make on-line purchases without reporting and paying the sales tax; drive after drinking only a little more than they should; dodge taxes through offshore accounts; become parents but don’t take responsibility for nurturing their children. Some make their livings cheating others with predatory loan and financial practices. Some spy on others and deny it until they are caught, then justify it by claiming that others are doing the same thing. Every reader could make a list of common activities that are legal or easy to get away with but that most of us know are wrong. When such behavior becomes publicly accepted there is no shame. Hypocrisy disappears. The electric fence is down and no barrier to bad behavior remains.

There are consequences to bad but legal behavior. It contributes to our ills, large and small. Some observers believe that the failure of many large financial firms like AIG stems from years of unethical and unashamed (but mostly legal) behavior. The wide variety of ethical breaches that I have described are alike in the sense that all of them represent decisions to get fast, easy profit or pleasure without accepting the associated responsibility and without regard for the effect on others.

Hypocrisy is disappearing because so many forms of wrongdoing have become socially and morally acceptable. Whether it is financial institutions taking unfair advantage of customers or fathers not supporting children or businesses seeking cheap illegal labor, it is something that people justify by noting that “everybody else is doing it”. The fence of conscience is moved. Maybe William Raspberry was right. Maybe there should be enough social pressure to bring back hypocrisy and the message “Do as I say, not as I have done”.

There is something that we can do about this blight on our national character. We can recognize and talk about the fact that we rely on ethics and values even more than we rely on laws. We can praise the good and support them; and we can avoid the bad. If a business is one of the good ones, we can stick with them and recommend them to friends. We can praise and encourage the young family that may struggle financially but is doing the right things for their children. We can recognize and support good ethics. Likewise, we can criticize and oppose misbehavior. If a business has misbehaved we can spend our money elsewhere. We can tell the non-supporting dad to his face what we think of his actions. We can confront dishonesty and bad behavior wherever we find it.

In other words, we can talk about our values, about right and about wrong. We can reward the good and stay away from the bad. And when we find ourselves on the wrong side of the ethical fence, we can hustle back to the right place even before we get caught. As a result, any among us who are not well guided by their own consciences will find that a bit of hypocrisy is a necessity. I always thought hypocrisy was a bad thing but when it is the homage that vice pays to virtue, perhaps we could use a bit more of it.