Philosophically based moralities of ends also presume that achieving the standard is a relatively rare accomplishment. Not everyone is equally suited to moral excellence, just as not everyone has the combination of natural capacities and contingent opportunities to become a first-rate basketball player or theoretical physicist.

To insist that we only affirm standards that we can achieve with perfect consistency is, in effect, to drastically lower those standards from something that we strive for (while often failing) to something within much easier reach — which probably won’t be much different from what we would do in the absence of any standard at all. It’s a license for us to go easy on ourselves: to aim low and succeed.

A moral world in which no one was guilty of hypocrisy would be one divested of the entire vertical dimension of morality. In such a world, we might all respect each other’s rights, but no one would strive to accomplish great, rare, exacting moral deeds.

I’d much rather live in a world filled with hypocrites.