The central problem with morality is that its components contradict one another. This is not a matter of hypocrisy or individual moral failure. The contradiction is built into morality itself—into its very foundations—and it is, in principle, irresolvable.
Morality, at its most basic, is a set of rules meant to apply to everyone. That is the minimal definition. One might imagine a moral system in which its adherents hold themselves to higher standards than others. But a morality that says, “These rules apply to everyone except me and my closest allies,” is not a morality at all.
And yet, almost every form of moral thinking divides the world into the moral and the immoral. We, of course, belong—somehow—to the former; others fall into the latter. Once this distinction takes hold, the mind begins to operate selectively. We excuse the actions of our own and judge outsiders harshly, without even noticing the double standard at work. It feels self-evident that our side behaves more morally. How could anyone fail to see it? Anyone who does must be blind—or corrupt.
We recognize this double standard easily in others. In ourselves, we do not see it at all. Of course, there are limits. If someone on our side were to commit an atrocity—cannibalism, say, or the murder of a child—we would condemn it without hesitation. But those limits are farther away than we care to admit.
There is, in theory, a way out: to sever the link between a person’s identity and the moral evaluation of their actions. “I may like all of you, but what one of you did last night was reprehensible.” In practice, however, this stance proves unusable in many domains of life. In politics especially, the double standard is inescapable.
In short: we cannot do without it—and yet its application is fundamentally unacceptable.