The Abuse Of Moral Talk For Self Promotion - Justin Tosi - #221

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello, friends. Welcome back. My guest today is Justin Tosi, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University and author of Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Moral grandstanding is the easiest way to signal your virtue without actually having to do anything virtuous. So given that it's so plainly transparent, why has it recently become so prevalent? Expect to learn why wishing that someone would get cancer isn't a good debating tactic, the different forms that grandstanding takes, why it is a moral problem, how hierarchies play into people's desires to grandstand and much more. I must have had five or 10 conversations or episodes to do with this very topic. Why is everyone shouting and no one is listening? Why can't we just have conversations that have got nuance or complexity in them anymore? And this book, I think, is up there with the best of them in terms of breaking down what happens, but I really don't want there to have to be any more of these books. Like, it shouldn't be the case that we are so self-defeating as a species, that we can't even talk to each other without bare-faced lying. So yeah, it's a wonderful breakdown by Justin. The book's fantastic as well and really gives you a great overview of exactly sort of what's going on with language and communication, especially in the age of social media. But I really hope that this is like the back end of needing to write these books because otherwise there is no way that we're going to make it into the 21st, the 22nd century. We might even not make it out the 21st, who knows. But for now, please give it up for Justin Tosi.
Grandstanding, what is grandstanding?

**Justin Tosi** (2:02)
Yeah, so if you want just a bumper sticker description of the idea, moral grandstanding is the use of moral talk for self-promotion. So if you see people on your social media feeds, or you just encounter people in everyday life who are walking around talking like corporate press releases or sounding like politicians giving these carefully crafted statements about how they've long stood on the side of the disadvantaged and so on, and kind of making moral talk about them and turning it into a vanity project or a big show where they're the main character, that's grandstanding.

**Chris Williamson** (2:40)
Why do they do it?

**Justin Tosi** (2:43)
So human beings care a lot about what other people think about them. We're all impression managers. So there are really fun social science studies showing that if you tell people, I'm going to leak to the university community that you got this really bad score on this implicit association test that reveals perhaps racial bias, they will do horrible things that you'd see on Fear Factor or whatever, sticking their hands in a bowl of worms and nasty stuff like that, because they care a lot about what their communities think of them. They don't want to be ostracized, and they all know that if people think that they are not very good people morally, that they run the risk of being kind of run out of their friend groups or their political groups, things like this. People are also self-enhancers, so we all like to think that we are morally good and morally above average, all of us.
So, we kind of have this impression of ourselves as, you know, I'm better than the average person, my heart is really in the right place, and we want other people to share that impression. So, we take steps to present a flattering picture of ourselves to the world. And that's why we engage in grandstanding, because it's a very easy way to show people that our heart is in the right place, so why not do it?

**Chris Williamson** (4:12)
It seems like there's kind of two types of grandstanding there. One of them is like defensive grandstanding, and the other is offensive grandstanding. Is that kind of right?

**Justin Tosi** (4:21)
Yeah. So, psychologists talk about two different ways that people seek status. On the one hand, people sometimes seek status through prestige. So, this is when people try to present some characteristic of themselves that actually deserves praise, that is impressive. So, in the non-moral realm, this is people who, you know, post flattering pictures of themselves on Instagram or...

**Chris Williamson** (4:54)
This is my new bench press PR. This is my new... My fast car, my big house, my good-looking girlfriend.

**Justin Tosi** (5:01)
Yeah, yeah. So, these are things that it's actually, you know, like that makes sense that people would admire these things. So, people will sometimes seek status in this way. They'll seek prestige status. Sometimes people will also seek status through dominance. So, they'll present themselves as someone not, or someone to be reckoned with, someone not to be messed with. So, they'll go after people. They'll, you know, try to embarrass or humiliate people that they don't like. And their hope, implicit or not, is that people will stay away from them, not mess with them, think, this is not someone I want to piss off. I want to stay on this person's good side. And this is another way of kind of gaining respect, of gaining the esteem of others through being really aggressive. So, you can grandstand in both of these ways. The prestige way is often a bit more defensive, as you put it. So, sometimes people won't be setting out, really, to impress people, but an opportunity will arise and they'll think, well, I don't want people to think that my heart is not in the right place about this issue. So, I'd better say something, right? Where I don't want to be accused of remaining silent or something like this. And so, doing violence or whatever people are saying now, white silence is violence or whatever. So, they'll do a little bit of grandstanding because, hey, what's the harm? But then there are people who will go out and go looking for a fight. Look for someone who's straying from the pack a little bit, making themselves vulnerable. The person who doesn't put their fist up at the restaurant outdoors. It's happened in Washington DC recently. And these are the people you go after. So, you can do a bit of grandstanding about, look, I'm out here leading this group of people, all making this gesture. Why aren't you doing it? What's wrong with you?