Bryan Caplan argues that social conservatives should prefer libertines to hypocrites, contrary to the common meme that “at least hypocrites have moral standards.” The argument is pretty simple: hypocrites seem to share your values, but when you least expect it, they will betray you. So far as it goes, the argument is pretty convincing.
But libertines and hypocrites aren’t the only two possible types of people who fail to live up to putative moral standards. A true hypocrite doesn’t actually have moral standards but merely pretends to them. After all, if one has moral standards, they should affect your behavior appreciably, but the hypocrite simply does what (s)he wants anyway while feigning belief in a stricter standard. That’s what makes hypocrites so dangerous.
The third type of moral failure is weakness of will. The weak-willed believe in moral standards and generally live up to them, but occasionally fail due to weakness of will. The weak of will acknowledge their flaws and try to do better, but you know they will sometimes fail. Unlike the hypocrite, the weak-willed is open about his/her failings, and therefore when dealing with them you know better what you’re dealing with. Unlike the libertine, the weak-willed often actually do live up to moral standards, so long as it isn’t too hard to do so.
Therefore, social conservatives should rank moral failures thus: 1) weakness of will, 2) libertinism, 3) hypocrisy. What some social conservatives praise when they praise “hypocrisy” is probably actually weakness of will, if they took some time to reflect on the distinctions.
I thought about these distinctions while considering the case of corrupt socialists. In the Spanish news today is the number-three man at Podemos, the extreme-left party in Spain (more or less their answer to Greece’s Syriza – the relations between the two parties are extremely close). This man, Juan Carlos Monedero, took half a million dollars from left-wing governments in Latin America (most particularly the Venezuelan dictatorship) for “consulting” and failed to pay taxes on it. He also defrauded his university, a technical college in Madrid, which was contractually guaranteed 20% of his consulting contracts.
Does this fraud evince hypocrisy or weakness of will? After all, Podemos has taken the lead in denouncing corruption in other parties, whom they call “la casta.” Withholding taxes from the government has to be a cardinal sin for socialists. Can true-believing socialists excuse the act on the grounds that “at least he has principles”? Or is he really pretending at having socialist principles at all?
It’s difficult to answer this question, because socialism attracts the unprincipled. If you want to enrich yourself through government, there’s no better way to do it than to denounce corruption and promote populist measures against the rich in order to get elected, and then once elected, use state-controlled companies to feather your own nest. When the state controls the economy, it controls wealth, and it will be extremely tempting to funnel some of that wealth to yourself and your friends.
Not knowing more about the man, it’s difficult to know whether Monedero – and quite possibly the other leaders of Podemos – are hypocrites or merely weak-willed. But that fact alone shows one of the inherent problems of socialism: really existing socialism either brings about rule by the already corrupt or corrupts those who rule.
PILEUS 
Hypocrites are important for maintaining social norms. We follow norms that we observe others following, even when those are dodgy observations of hypocrites who have not been found out.
Gibbon uses a twist on this to explain how ancient Christians came to believe ridicolous miracle stories — true beleivers and hypocrites alike made it dangerous to express skepticism, so it was best to become one or the other.
In the long run, hypocrisy undermines social norms. Those who are uncertain about those norms point to high-profile examples of exposed hypocrites as reasons to believe that the norms are unattainable – or even worse, that all of morality is nothing more than a power play by the rhetorically gifted, and those who follow its prescriptions are suckers.