The ethics of hypocrisy

Suppose you commit a bad deed, whose severity depends on your upbringing, culture, environment, and personal philosophy. What then?

Just because there are beggars everywhere asking for money, am I supposed to simply give them some? Of course not! They need to earn it somehow.

We humans are mighty adaptive, and it takes only a few repetitions to get used to something. The same applies to our own actions: you might feel guilty the first time and less guilty the second. That fading guilt comes from our internal justification, which always seems perfectly reasonable. It has to—after all, is it acceptable to feel bad every time it happens?

Killing animals is wrong, and eating them almost always requires an act of killing. But I’ve already done it many times; am I supposed to drown in guilt as well?

It’s painful to live with a broken personal philosophy. Your internal arguments stop making sense; it feels like arguing with someone who has memory issues. Sometimes it’s better to hand over a few coins to the beggars, or to acknowledge the guilt and push through it for a few minutes, rather than driving your mind into an early grave.