Can a smoker advise another one about the benefits of quitting smoking? Or can a leader insist on masking without wearing a mask?
It is the essence of the Tu Quoque (“you too”) fallacy. It involves treating an argument as invalid because you retort that the person who made the affirmation herself doesn’t follow it.
You may recognise the well-known idiom, “practice what you preach.” Hypocrisy may indeed be called out, but that does not make facts incorrect.
Another logical fallacy that is closer to this is Whataboutism. The key difference here is that the person who receives the criticism points to someone else who is not necessarily the person who delivered the original criticism. It is like saying, ” But the other group also did something similar” to justify one’s own mistake.
