Consider, for example, infidelity. According to a recent study, 16 percent of all Americans engage in some form of adultery (although for older men, the number is as high as 26 percent). Presumably, the people who provided the answers for this survey believed that what they were engaging in was “cheating” of some sort. Otherwise, they would have answered “no” to the question of whether they were unfaithful to their spouses. In other words, they recognize the moral legitimacy of the principle of faithfulness itself, but chose to act otherwise. That makes them hypocrites.
But does that, therefore, mean we have good reason to question whether adultery is, in fact, wrong? Let’s say, for example, that it will never be the case that 100 percent of spouses will be faithful—that it’s an impossible standard to live up to. Fine, but so what? Just because some people deviate from a principle they say they believe does not mean that principle is wrong. In the case of infidelity, we do not ask whether we should be faithful by observing others’ behavior. We ask whether it is good to be faithful.
The answer is true even regardless of whether people live up to the moral standard. Consider the golden rule, for example. Hypocrites, all of us, right? Yet following the logic of the presence of hypocrisy meaning the absence of moral legitimacy, we would have to conclude that the golden rule is wrong. What should determine whether something is good by asking whether it is true, and true in such a way that it remains true whether anyone — or no one — behaves accordingly.
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