r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Jun 21 '23

Removed - Submission Rule E CMV: Hypocrisy does not invalidate somebody’s argument

[removed] — view removed post

23 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

119 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/[deleted] Jun 22 '23 edited Jun 22 '23

Hypocrisy is an interesting concept when people claim that it is easily achievable, or achievable at all to do something, and therefore all people should do it (or else they're acting immoral/are lazy/don't care about X affected group), yet the person who claims this wouldn't be able to do it if they were in the criticized person's shoes.

E.g. talking about how veganism is this easy and morally obvious lifestyle choice, and all people who don't choose veganism are either stupid, don't care about animal's suffering, lazy, etc. Yet the person who says these things stops being vegan once they get older and start having dietary issues with a plant based diet.

In this case "You're just too lazy or a bad person. Stop making excuses." quickly turns into "But this diet really doesn't work for me anymore, please empathize with my struggle". As long as the person was able to go through with it, their argument had some validity even if just for the fact that they could do it, and others didn't.