Everybody's a Hypocrite!

History is filled with all sorts of sages who give us moral advice and ethical guidance. But it seems that each of these sages has his own dirty laundry: Marcus Aurelius gave us an impassionate personal Stoicism, yet allowed the blood-thirsty polytheists in his empire to execute Christians by the thousands; Cicero discovered the principle of Natural Law, upon which most later legal systems are founded, yet was a mercenary lawyer who did whatever dirty work was needed to win his latest political encounter; Octavian-Augustus, the first Roman emperor, prevented the empire from social disintegration by strengthening the fellowship of the basic family unit (mom, dad, kids), yet he may have had a fling or two with a woman who was not his wife. And so it goes: great moral advice given by individuals who do, in some situations, the very opposite. They're all hypocrites! Shall we then simply ignore them and their advice?

All humans are, however, hypocrites. This is, in fact, part of the human situation: we are by nature imperfect. And it is this nature which makes us seek, and give, ethical guidance. So we can't really blame our philosophers for being hypocrites; in fact, they have to be - if they weren't, they wouldn't be human, and they wouldn't be able to help us with our dilemmas.

We must separate the advice from the advice-giver; Cicero's Natural Law, Octavian's civil doctrine of marriage, and Aurelius's Stoicism can help us - but we must, in the same breath, condemn their actions even as we embrace their words. And if we condemn their actions but embrace their words, what then shall we do with the men themselves? Neither condemn nor praise them, but simply view them as our fellow humans, flawed, yet having those flashes of creative human insight which are, along with our flaws, a necessary and unalterable aspect of being human.