Double standards
The term “hypocrite” usually refers to someone who openly advocates an absolute moral standard that, generally in secret, or at least in a different context, does not observe himself. The fundamental problem with hypocrisy is its dishonesty; the hypocrite expects everybody else to conform to the strict standard he is promulgating while secretly violating that standard, himself.
The term “double standard” usually refers to a situation where the same person openly applies one standard to the behavior of nearly everybody but applies a different standard to some particular sub-group. The fundamental problem with a double standard is not dishonesty since it is usually openly admitted. Still, its unfairness: the double standard’s appliance generally allows lax and liberal freedom to most people while denying the same latitude of behavior to a particular, disfavored group. Sometimes this phenomenon is viewed oppositely, as expressing a willingness to grant special privilege toward one group, which is denied to other groups. And, while this is functionally the same thing, it usually gives the inaccurate impression that the privileged group is the small subset of everybody, rather than the other way around. In most societies, the “privileged” group is by far the majority, and it is various minority groups that experience a disfavored double standard. (In apartheid South Africa, though, the term “privilege” more accurately applies, since the privileged “whites” were a tiny minority in a mostly-black-African country, and used a double standard to suppress the majority as an underclass.)
One example of a hypocrite would be a preacher who gives fire-and-brimstone sermons condemning adultery, but who is having a secret affair on the side, himself. In contrast, if the same person were openly carrying on a love affair with a person, not his spouse, as part of an “open marriage” arrangement with his spouse. And simultaneously made arguments that condemned hurtful “cheating” on a spouse that focused on the intent and the result of the act, rather than the nature of the law itself, as the measure of whether it was moral or not, that would NOT be hypocritical; it would be an example of living what he believed and what he argued to be a harmless or even beneficial alternative lifestyle.
One example of a “double standard” would be the condemnation that much of the world community applies to Israel for doing things in its self-defense against violent attacks. The opinion-leaders of the world either applaud or ignore when other countries, including their own, do it. The double standard is rightly considered the US State Department has adopted one of the three main prongs of the current working definition of “antisemitism” as promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Mainly, this double standard does amount to hypocrisy. Suppose the person advocating it openly declares his opposition to any form of racism or unfairness, while nevertheless engaging in policies or opinions that meet the “double standard” definition of antisemitism. The UK Labour Party, for one, and the US Democratic Party, increasingly these days, Israel, but to wrongly condemn and demonize American Jews. For exercising their equal civil rights to support Israel in ways permitted to every other advocacy group in the country.
Another example of a double standard would be what has come to be called “white privilege” in the United States. A “white” person stopped by a traffic officer for a minor offense is far less likely to be deemed possibly armed and dangerous. Upon the same facts other than the color of his skin, a black motorist pulled in the same circumstance. The black motorist is far more likely to be arrested and booked than just handed a citation and is far more likely to be shot for making the slightest “false move” than the “white” motorist. That is a kind of “double standard” that is also much in the news lately. Whether or not it is also “hypocrisy” depends on whether the person arguing for stricter enforcement against black miscreants dishonestly claims that there is a justified reason for such “racial profiling.”