Reference reading
Hypocrisy
Demanding disclosure, care or respect for human work while making unjustified exceptions for one's own uses.
Every contribution must disclose its tools. His contribution has a special flap.
Habitually demanding standards of others while making unjustified exceptions for oneself.
Different obligations or openly defensible differences in context can justify different standards.
How it takes hold
The disclosure rule is excellent for competitors. At home it becomes intrusive and insufficiently nuanced. Circumstances do differ, but the explanation repeatedly arrives where self-interest needs an exception.
Hypocrisy demands standards of others while making unjustified exceptions for oneself. It can concern attribution, privacy, safety, compensation or respect for human work. The defect is unjustified asymmetry, not simply failing to live up to an ideal.
Those carrying the burden discover that its advocate reserved a private exit. A defensible standard can lose credibility through the conduct of someone insisting on it.
Finding the distinction
Illustrative situation: a reviewer requires disclosure of consequential assistance.
Too self-exempting: matching assistance in the reviewer's work is privately exempt.
Fitting: the same relevant reason governs both cases.
Overcorrection: every contextual difference is prohibited.
Dishonesty misleads; hypocrisy can openly announce an exception while refusing to justify it. Venality trades commitment for reward; hypocrisy needs no transaction.
Different obligations can justify different rules. Admitting failure and accepting correction differs from insisting on exemption.
Counterfeit of Fairness: A disclosure rule becomes absolute for competitors and delicately contextual for its advocate. Genuine Fairness applies the relevant reason on both sides.
A response that restores something
A useful comparison states the relevant reason for the standard and asks whether it applies on both sides. Different treatment needs a difference bearing on that reason.
If the rule was unreasonable, revising it fairly is better than preserving it for others while escaping it.
Integrity lets the same grounds count when inconvenient. Fairness permits genuinely relevant contextual differences.
Other perspectives
We examine it as we imagine an impartial spectator would examine it
Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Smith offers a way to consider one's conduct without granting it automatic favorable treatment.
whether its likings or dislikings should be a law to individuals
John Stuart Mill · On Liberty
Mill questions personal preference promoted into authority over others, apt when a rule changes at the advocate's own door.
Read and compare
Would I accept this exception from someone else?
Integrity · Fairness · Honesty
These are constructive virtue readings, not a list of automatic opposites. This reference article does not score character or assign a vice to its reader.