Very few people are willing to speak up for hypocrisy. As a rule, to use the word at all is to position oneself against it. I am no more likely to identify myself as a hypocrite than I am to call myself a cannibal, although I may do either so long as I invoke a rhetoric of confession or conversion that separates my present identity from the past one I name and thereby disavow. When I call someone else a hypocrite, I point to a gap between what she says and what she does. I sometimes also attribute to the hypocrite a broader, more pervasive deceitfulness whose practice can include the insincerities associated with self-control and good manners. In the last case, if the mask of politeness is sufficiently flawless, I may find it difficult to distinguish the hypocrite from any other member of civil society. Indeed, if everyone suddenly stopped lubricating social interactions with politeness, the consequences for the institutions of daily life – families, schools, religious organizations, companies, governments – would likely be catastrophic.

Insofar as the charge of hypocrisy assumes a discontinuity between motive and action, the sophisticated hypocrite poses problems for conventional arguments about character and behavior. The belief that close scrutiny will always expose the hypocrite's true self depends on the highly questionable assumption that any given individual can be considered simply as the sum of a set of words and deeds that represent an ‘authentic’ self inside.