Hypocrites are commonly taken to be people who say one thing and do another. Yet both this intuitive definition and traditional philosophical ones have failed to deliver a satisfying account of hypocrisy. In particular, they cannot not distinguish the hypocrite from the merely weak-willed, seem to produce the wrong result in a number of cases which we would intuitively judge to be hypocrisy, and do not explain the strength and importance of hypocrisy judgments in our moral discourse.

We present a new account of hypocrisy, on which a hypocrite is a failed moral authority. This account easily covers the intuitive cases and generalises to interesting new ones. Most importantly, it explains why and how judgments of hypocrisy play a distinctive role in regulating our everyday moral lives.