I personally do not expect parents, priests and politicians to be perfect but I have much more time for those who are more honest about their faults and failings. I am actually a Quaker and purely because I have a religious belief I have to deal with other people’s unrealistic assumptions(“But you’re supposed to be…”, “you’re not supposed to…”).

The snipers I referred to in my article often are people who make these sorts of assumptions about what claims people who espouse ideals are making about themselves. I might say “I’m a Quaker” but what they hear is “Ooh, look at me, everyone, I’m so good! Ooh, I’m so in touch with my own spirituality!”

So I have a lot of time for your carnivorous hunt sabbing friend. There is a wide range of moral schemas which could make a clear distinction between eating meat and fox hunting. You or I might not agree with the particular moral schema he has, but it is not for us to tell him what he is “supposed to” believe about eating meat, just because he is opposed to fox hunting. And practically speaking, fox hunting would now still be fully legal if the views of all carnivorous hunting opponents were somehow discounted.

This touches on my final point. Those of us who espouse moral values do not just face the charge of hypocricy from those I call the “snipers” -we also have to deal with inner critics. Last year, a few of us started a group called “Borrowed Planet” – a group of parents concerned about climate change and other environmental issues which will affect the generations to come. One of the main obstacles to getting other friends involved is what I took to calling “The Hypocricy Barrier” – it was people saying “I’d like to get involved, but I can’t really talk because I use the plane” or “drive a car” or whatever. So many people adopt this (non)position rather than engage with the issues that face us all. They fail to realise that by that token the only people who have the moral authority to talk about global warming are trees. And they can’t talk. Because they are trees, We have to persuade people that we all have to plunge into the hypocricy zone to prevent things from going horribly, horribly wrong.

rereading this ancient post, I’m struck by this

Perhaps I’m wrong — and others can feel free to point it out — but I see no similarity between opposing bloodsports (the willfully cruel use of animal death and torture as human entertainment) and eating meat or wearing leather.

Allow me to step up and be those others.

There is a very clear moral distinction between using animals to clothe and feed ourselves; versus torturing them to death for our personal entertainment.

Yes, but only when we have do that clothing and feeding out of necessity.

If – as you did at the time of your hunt sabbing, and indeed still do today – we live in a society where we can clothe and feed ourselves to a very high standard without resorting to killing animals then it’s a different moral question.

We only kill animals for our food and clothes because we want to. Either we really like the animal product, or it is easier to obtain.

Actually there’s a tiny group with a third option who dislike leather but believe the alternatives are morally worse. I know more than one person who wears second hand leather as the morally superior position to brand new oil-plastics, and there’s a case to be made that new leather would qualify.

But if that didn’t apply to you then – and as someone who accords animals rights I think it likely that it didn’t – then you only did it for the first two reasons, essentially for greed or convenience, certainly not out of necessity.

In our society (excepting the miniscule number who do it as a considered lesser evil), we consume meat and leather for precisely the same reason that we have bloodsports; we don’t need to, we just want to.

I definitely won’t be voting for him! I’m gonna give the Lib Dems a try… they need a chance (but will undoubtedly f*ck it up too).

If you really believe that:

There is a very clear moral distinction between using animals to clothe and feed ourselves; versus torturing them to death for our personal entertainment.

Then all I can say is that I disagree – but that’s a whole separate discussion…

… when a man puts that uniform on, he is the paid protector of things of the present time. he is here to see that things stay the way they are. if you like the way things are, then all cops are good cops. if you don’t like the way things are, then all cops are bad cops. there is such a thing as ALL bad.

Not making exactly the same point as you, but singing from the same hymn sheet, as it were.

The law prohibits the possession of cannabis. I admitted – under caution too – to being in possession of cannabis.

Of course, the problem would’ve come in proving my offence. Indeed, I asked the coppers if I could admit to nicking Shergar and abducting Lord Lucan if all they needed for a prosecution was my say-so. The standard of proof was surely better for those other crimes – we have evidence they actually took place, whereas the only evidence of the cannabis crime itself was my word!

It wasn’t just overzealous policing on the day. The Crown Prosecution Service went ahead with the case. The first time it came to court I got it adjourned because the police hadn’t served me a copy of my statement. The next time it came they still hadn’t given me the statement but the magistrate, probably unlawfully, wanted to go ahead with the trial anyway, seeing it as open and shut.

However, your type of trial depends on the amount of cannabis you were in possession of. A small amount is dealt with by magistrates. A larger amount, with the possibility of intent to supply, can be tried in magistrates or Crown court.

As my amount was utterly unspecified, it couldn’t be said to be under the small-amount threshold. So, I exercised my right as someone charged with an offence that’s triable either way; I elected to go to Crown.

They set a date but, as Crown trials cost an order of magnitude more than magistrates ones, two days before trial the CPS decided it ‘was not in the public interest’ to proceed and the case was discontinued.

This is not the same as an acquittal. I have a ‘drugs marker’ against my name on the Police National Computer, despite having been convicted of no drugs offences. Just one reason Why I Hate The Police.

Cameron’s not compelled to think it would have been better if he were arrested, he’s compelled to think he would have had no reasonable complaint (you don’t have to think every instance of enforcement of a general rule is valuable to think it’s a valuable rule – presumably there are drivers who could break a given speed limit safely, but that doesn’t mean that a given speed limit is not a sensible rule). And that’s a much easier position to occupy than the thought that it would have been better: there are plenty of things I’ve done that I would have had no reasonable complaint about if I had been punished for, but I’m not sure many of them would have resulted in betterness overall. I’m not sure I can even make sense of that thought about betterness really.

Jim,

it seems like your objection is to coercive hypocrisy, which then gets into questions about what counts as coercion. Clearly legal sanction counts as coercion. I don’t know about hunt-sabbing, because I don’t know about hunt-sabbing. It doesn’t seem radically implausible to me that physically interposing myself between you and some end of yours is coercion though, if not necessarily coercion of the same degree as legal sanctions – think of what you’d think was appropriate to do to someone who lay down in front of a bus so as to prevent the bus leaving, assuming the bus was doing something morally neutral so as to avoid issues about whether the coercion is legitimate, if indeed it is coercion. Your example of priests, at least, indicates that legal sanction does not exhaust the category of coercion. Either way, I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that either, the concept of hypocrisy needs to be narrowed so as to avoid condemning people who really have changed their minds, or hypocrisy in general, as opposed to what I’ll call present hypocrisy, shouldn’t be such a terrible thing. Whatever you think about whether Cameron is a hypocrite or not, he would surely be a much worse hypocrite if he were smoking weed now. None of which speaks to whether the policy is sensible at all, of course.