If You Are Often Late, Can You Still Blame Someone Else for Being Late?

A manager who arrives late every week harshly blames an employee for being late. The employee replies, “You do it too.” That response does not prove that lateness is acceptable. Treating a critic's own fault as a refutation of the rule is the familiar appeal to hypocrisy. Yet the employee may still be raising a different, genuine question: does the manager have the standing to blame in that manner?

Contemporary discussions of the “standing to blame” often treat blame as a form of moral address. The speaker does more than report that a rule was broken; they call on another person to answer to a norm shared between equals. R. Jay Wallace argues that a hypocrite demands compliance from others while exempting themselves, undermining that equal standing. Work by Kyle Fritz and Daniel Miller likewise suggests that the issue is not merely who behaved worse, but whether the blamer is willing to accept the same standard.

My judgement is that three levels should be separated. First, whether the employee acted wrongly depends on the commitment, the consequences and the available reasons; the manager's hypocrisy does not settle it. Second, the manager may still point out the roster, explain operational effects or apply a legitimate procedure. Third, if the manager refuses to acknowledge the same fault in themselves while shaming others from a position of moral superiority, their standing to blame is weakened. The sound reply is not, “You were late too, so I did nothing wrong,” but, “This rule must bind you as well; acknowledge your breach and accept the same accountability.”

https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1088-4963.2010.01195.x
https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12104