Yes. The key is that Wilberforce is making a distinction between opposing the slave trade and immediately abolishing slavery itself. That distinction can seem morally uncomfortable to a modern reader, but it is central to his argument.
What Wilberforce was defending
In A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1807), Wilberforce is responding to an objection along roughly these lines:
If abolitionists really believe slavery is unjust, why don't they immediately free every enslaved person they themselves own—or demand the immediate emancipation of all enslaved people in the British colonies?
His answer is that the moral wrongness of slavery and the question of what political action can responsibly be taken at a particular moment are not identical questions.
He says that abolitionists had not been advocating immediate emancipation of the existing enslaved population. Rather, their immediate objective was to stop the machinery that was continually bringing additional Africans into slavery. The abolitionists regarded Africa as their "primary" object: the slave trade was producing an ongoing stream of kidnapping, violence, displacement, and death. PProject Gutenberg+1
So Wilberforce's position was essentially:
- The slave trade is intrinsically wrong and should cease immediately.
- Existing colonial slavery presents a different practical and political problem.
- Ending the trade would prevent the enslaved population from being continually replenished from Africa.
- Once the trade stopped, the condition of existing enslaved people could, in his view, be improved and the institution eventually brought toward a different future.
This is why he rejects the charge that abolitionists were logically inconsistent merely because they were not simultaneously demanding immediate emancipation.
But what about an abolitionist who personally owned slaves?
This is where your question gets particularly interesting.
Wilberforce does not simply excuse the slaveholder because he happens to support abolition. In fact, elsewhere in the book he is quite explicit that slave ownership entails serious moral responsibilities and that the West Indian system is riddled with abuses. He even distinguishes between proprietors whose conduct is humane and those whose economic interests encourage cruelty. PProject Gutenberg
His argument is instead that a person's participation in an existing institution does not necessarily make his opposition to the institution hypocritical.
Imagine someone who inherits a slave plantation. Wilberforce's reasoning allows for the possibility that this person might say:
"I believe the system in which I possess this property is morally wrong. Nevertheless, I cannot simply emancipate everyone tomorrow without considering what will happen to them, to the plantation, and to the wider society. But I can work politically to prevent the system from acquiring any more enslaved people."
That person is morally compromised, in Wilberforce's framework—but not necessarily hypocritical.
Why isn't that hypocrisy?
Because Wilberforce understands hypocrisy as pretending to believe a moral principle while deliberately acting against it, rather than simply being unable to live up to one's principles perfectly.
The distinction is roughly:
Hypocrisy:
"I claim slavery is wrong, but secretly I think it is perfectly legitimate and I oppose abolition because I want to preserve it."
Moral inconsistency or imperfection:
"I recognize that slavery is wrong, yet I remain entangled in an institution I inherited or cannot immediately dismantle; nevertheless, I sincerely work to prevent its continuation and reform its abuses."
For Wilberforce, the second person can be morally inconsistent in some respects without being a hypocrite.
And this is actually characteristic of his broader moral reasoning. He repeatedly acknowledges that human beings are affected by their circumstances, interests, inherited prejudices, and existing institutions. He notes, for example, that many absentee proprietors inherited their estates just as British people inherited other forms of property, and that their circumstances naturally shaped their perceptions. PProject Gutenberg
That doesn't mean Wilberforce says, "Therefore their behavior is fine." Quite the opposite: he asks humane proprietors to use their position to help reform the system rather than defend it. PProject Gutenberg
The deeper principle: abolition versus complicity
I think the most important thing to see is that Wilberforce is separating personal purity from political efficacy.
If he demanded:
"No one can advocate abolition unless he has already completely disentangled himself from slavery,"
then many people who had the power to help abolish the trade would be disqualified from participating in the movement.
He instead thinks we have to ask:
What does this person's conduct contribute to the continuation or destruction of the evil?
Someone who owns enslaved people but works to abolish the trade that continually creates new enslaved people is, in his view, morally different from someone who owns enslaved people and works to preserve the trade.
That distinction becomes particularly important because Wilberforce believed that gradual abolition could actually become a means of perpetuating the evil. He criticizes those who advocated gradual measures because such measures could give people "the complacencies arising from an act of justice and humanity" without requiring the sacrifice needed to end the trade. CClassic Literature
So he is not saying:
"It's okay to own slaves as long as you call yourself an abolitionist."
He's saying something subtler:
A person's involvement in an unjust institution does not by itself prove that his opposition to that institution is insincere. What matters morally is whether his actions are directed toward maintaining the injustice or dismantling it.
And there is an important tension here
From a modern perspective, you can reasonably challenge Wilberforce on this point.
If someone says, "Slaveholding is profoundly immoral," while continuing personally to profit from enslaved people's labor, there is an obvious moral tension. Calling that tension hypocrisy isn't an unreasonable judgment.
Wilberforce's response is essentially that moral culpability and hypocrisy aren't the same thing. A person can be genuinely committed to a moral cause while still being entangled in the very system he is trying to destroy. Indeed, Wilberforce's own book repeatedly recognizes that people are capable of self-deception and that economic interests can distort moral judgment. CClassic Literature
So I would summarize his argument this way:
Wilberforce doesn't defend slaveholding as morally innocent. He defends the possibility that an individual can be morally opposed to slavery while remaining temporarily or involuntarily implicated in it. For him, hypocrisy requires insincerity; mere inconsistency between one's moral ideal and one's present circumstances does not necessarily establish insincerity.
And that distinction is especially important in understanding why Wilberforce could simultaneously condemn the slave trade as an enormous moral evil, criticize abuses by slaveholders, and yet defend some slaveholders who cooperated with abolitionists rather than treating their ownership itself as proof that their abolitionism was fraudulent. PProject Gutenberg+1
If you'd like, I can also unpack the specific passage where Wilberforce makes this argument line-by-line, because his reasoning there is considerably more subtle than the modern "ends vs. means" summary suggests.PC
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