“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.”
Matthew 23:27, King James Version
With this remarkably severe comparison, Christ exposes one of the deepest contradictions of human nature: the distance between what a person appears to be and what they truly are. Whitewashed tombs, immaculate and carefully maintained on the outside, conceal decay and death within. So it is with those who cloak themselves in virtue, piety and moral superiority, while behind that carefully cultivated image may lie self-interest, injustice and corruption.
There are two forms of hypocrisy worth distinguishing.
The first is conscious hypocrisy. A person knows who they are, what they are doing and whose interests they serve. Nevertheless, they choose to present a different image of themselves. They use morality as a mask, virtue as a form of self-promotion, and piety as a means of acquiring status, power or trust. They know they are deceiving others and, precisely because they know it, they remain aware of the distance between reality and pretence.
The second form is more complex and potentially more dangerous. It is hypocrisy that has evolved into self-deception. A person has repeated their falsehoods so often, and identified so deeply with the image they have constructed, that they eventually accept it as their true identity. They are no longer merely playing the part of a virtuous person. They are convinced that they are virtuous. They no longer pretend to serve the truth. They believe that their own understanding of things is the truth itself.
At this point, the mask ceases to be merely an instrument of deception and becomes part of the person’s identity. Self-criticism recedes, doubt disappears, and every opposing view is perceived as a threat. Such a person no longer feels the need to account for their actions, because they have convinced themselves that their intentions are good. And when someone takes the goodness of their intentions for granted, they may eventually find ways to justify even their most unjust actions.
Modern psychology offers us several tools for understanding this phenomenon. One of them is cognitive dissonance, a concept developed by Leon Festinger in 1957. When a person’s actions conflict with their beliefs or with the image they hold of themselves, psychological discomfort may arise. To reduce that discomfort, they may change their behaviour. But they may also take an easier route: reinterpret their actions so that they appear consistent with their supposed moral integrity.
In this way, injustice can be presented as necessary firmness, vindictiveness as the pursuit of justice, self-interest as public service, and coercion as the protection of the common good. The individual does not necessarily deny the facts. Instead, they alter the moral meaning of those facts so that they need not question themselves.
The psychologist Albert Bandura described related mechanisms through the concept of moral disengagement. People can disconnect their actions from the moral principles they claim to uphold by employing justifications, euphemisms or shifting responsibility onto others. In doing so, they may commit acts they would condemn under different circumstances, while continuing to believe that their moral integrity remains intact.
Yet this phenomenon has concerned thinkers for far longer than modern psychology has existed.
Socrates, as portrayed in Plato’s Apology, emphasises the importance of recognising one’s own ignorance. Awareness of the limits of one’s knowledge is a prerequisite for the pursuit of truth. Conversely, those who are convinced that they know what they do not actually know deprive themselves of the very motivation to question their assumptions.
Christian teaching presents a related, though distinct, concern. In the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector (Luke 18:9–14), the Pharisee prays by listing his virtues and comparing himself favourably with others. The tax collector, by contrast, stands at a distance and says:
“God be merciful to me a sinner.”
Christ concludes that it was the tax collector, rather than the Pharisee, who went home justified.
The essential point of the parable is not that the tax collector had necessarily been a better person throughout his life. It is that he recognised his moral condition, whereas the Pharisee regarded his own virtue as an established fact.
Here lies a deeper dimension of the image of the whitewashed tombs.
A person who knows they are capable of being wrong retains the possibility of correcting themselves. Someone who has elevated their own moral judgement to the status of unquestionable truth risks losing even the ability to recognise their mistakes.
But this raises a difficult philosophical question: if someone has genuinely convinced themselves that they are doing good, are they still responsible for the harm they cause?
The answer is not straightforward. Moral responsibility is connected, among other things, to intention, knowledge, freedom of choice and the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions. We cannot necessarily assign the same degree of responsibility to someone who deliberately deceives others and someone who acts under a genuine, perhaps involuntary, misconception.
There is, however, a crucial distinction between being unable to know the truth and being unwilling to seek it.
People are not always responsible for what they do not know. They may, however, bear responsibility for how they respond to their own ignorance, particularly when evidence that they are mistaken is available to them and they systematically choose to reject it.
Self-deception does not always arise from a conscious decision. It may develop gradually through fears, desires, social pressures and psychological mechanisms over which we have only limited control. But this does not mean that every form of self-deception is morally innocent.
There are circumstances in which people avoid examining their actions precisely because they suspect what they might discover. They refuse to listen to opposing views, make no effort to seek evidence that might challenge their convictions, and dismiss all criticism in advance as malicious.
At that point, ignorance ceases to be merely a limitation of knowledge. It can become a form of moral avoidance.
And here responsibility takes on a particular significance: it concerns not only the wrongs we commit, but also the effort we make, or deliberately avoid making, to determine whether we are truly doing what is right.
This does not mean that every doubt is a virtue or that every certainty is evidence of hypocrisy. Human beings need convictions in order to act and principles by which to orient themselves. But they also need the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that their beliefs may be mistaken and that good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes.
This distinction becomes even more important when self-deception is combined with power.
A person who deceives themselves may cause harm within their immediate circle. But when that person acquires authority over others, their private delusions can become a collective reality. The conviction that they are serving a higher purpose may be used to justify oppression, injustice and even the destruction of those regarded as opponents.
History offers numerous examples of individuals and institutions invoking noble ideals to legitimise actions that contradicted those very ideals. We need not assume that all of them knew they were deceiving others. Some may have sincerely believed that they were acting for the greater good.
But the sincerity of a belief is no proof of its truth.
Nor does invoking a noble purpose automatically absolve anyone of responsibility for the means they employ.
This brings us back to Christ’s original image.
A whitewashed tomb does not cease to be a tomb simply because its exterior is clean. And injustice does not cease to be injustice merely because the person committing it chooses to call it justice.
The outward mask may deceive others. It may even deceive the person wearing it. But it cannot, by itself, alter the reality it conceals.
Perhaps, then, the deepest warning we can draw from Christ’s words concerns not only the need to be honest with others. Above all, it concerns the need to be honest with ourselves.
For self-knowledge does not begin when we discover our virtues, but when we find the courage to acknowledge our contradictions.
True moral integrity does not lie in the conviction that we are always right, but in the willingness to examine whether we actually are. It does not lie in the absence of mistakes, but in our ability to recognise them, accept responsibility for them and attempt to put them right.
The conscious hypocrite knows that a distance exists between the mask and the face beneath it. The self-deceived individual has lost awareness of that distance.
The first whitewashes the tomb to deceive others. The second whitewashes it to avoid confronting what lies within.
And perhaps the greatest tragedy is not that the latter has forgotten what lies inside the tomb, but that they have stopped asking.
For the more thoroughly one whitewashes a tomb, the easier it becomes to forget what lies within. And when the whiteness of its surface becomes, in one’s own mind, proof of its purity, hypocrisy has completed its work: it no longer needs to conceal the truth, because it has extinguished the very need to seek it.