Transcripts For CSPAN2 Justin Tosi And Brandon Warmke Grands

CSPAN2 Justin Tosi And Brandon Warmke Grandstanding July 12, 2024

Justin tosi is professor in philosophy specializing in legal philosophy and brandon warme assistant professor of philosophy and specializes in ethics, moral psychology and moral philosophy. We will be taking audience questions online using the catoevents. You have a question for the authors or watching event in cato website posted with cato event hashtag. Justin, brandon, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. Great to be here. To begin, briefly what is grandstanding . So if you want the simplest sort of Bumper Sticker of grand grandstanding as vanity project. Grandstanders use discussion of morality, family values, tradition, draw attention to themselves an make themselves look like moral paragons, caring about the American Factory worker. You want something a little more detailed, the account of grandstanding we give in the book is a simple one. The grandstanding simply has two parts, the first part is the grandstanders want the Reference Network to think certain things about them. They want them to believe that they have certain recognition desires. Grandstanders want to be recognized and moral qualities by by certain people in the audience. The second part of the account is grandstanders say things and they Say Something because they want to impress what we call the thing that they say, what they type in facebook, twitter, what they say on cable news or speech with politician. The thing they say is what we call expression and the grandstanding expression is motivated in a significant way by this desire for praise to be seen as on the side of the angels and so grandstanding is a simple thing. Two parts. Think of an equation, grandstanding just is saying something in Public Discourse with the primary or significant motivation to be seen as morally impressive. Whats the difference between grandstanding and another term that gets thrown around virtual signaling . Good question. Let me focus on two differences. The first i will say these are related terms. I think that often when people talk about virtual signaling they could just as well be talking about grandstanding but nonetheless, brandon and i think that virtue well virtual signaling is not an ideal term for capturing what is wrong when people use moral talk in the way that we describe. So one reason to this is a lot of grandstanding is not about virtue, virtue is typically thought to be excellence of character, but a lot of grandstanding is just about showing people that youre decent enough, you might say, look, ive made a lot of mistakes in my life, but even i know that you dont treat women that way. When someone says that, they are trying to show people that they have certain moral qualities and want to be part as good person, but they are not trying to claim any virtue for themselves. The other problem is maybe more serious and its that signaling is overbroad as a category to pick out the right kinds of of expressions. So you sent a signal any time you talk about morality at all. You make any moral claim at all, youre signaling to people that you probably believe that thing and may be committed to it in certain ways but we dont object to every single instance of moral communication, what people are complaining about when they complain about grandstanding or virtual signaling, typically is that people are using moral talk for the wrong reason, they are using it to impress others and they are doing so intentionally, so we think that grandstanding is sort of or narrower term and takes out the right instances of these moral talks to complain about. Yeah, i just want to add to justins comments there, when we started writing about grandstanding in 2014 the term virtual signaling wasnt on the scene. We started writing it was a year after the term virtual signaling started picking up online and sort of public discussions to show moral behavior and to mention lots of reasons why we think its its not the most helpful terminology to pick out a discussion of of selfinvolved egoistic and also the term has been picked up in the cultural wars, virtual signaling sends to connote a complaint from the left, but all of all of the research that weve done over 7 studies and 1,000 participants, all the evidence that we have is grandstanding is equally bipartisan, people on the left do it just as much as people on the right although as we found people on the ideological extremes do it much more. So because the term has gotten caught up in the culture wars its best to avoid but also the term itself is ambiguous, its notes, so i think what most people have in mind with virtual signaling when they accuse someone of doing it is they are accusing someone of basically grandstanding, of using someone, of using moral talk for selfpromotion or fame purposes and that sort of thing but theres a perfectly, its perfectly innocent use of term virtual signaling too. Whenever you do something virtuous in public, whether you are trying to impress people or not that sends a signal. Theres a kind of confusion that can result and this is, you know, one way you see this as we have a discussion that you may have seen of vice signaling or arguments about whether someones virtual signaling so we think grandstanding is a term that dates back to 19th century. It came out of 1988 book, excuse me, 1888 book on baseball and the idea was that these guys in the out field making showy catches and playing to the ground they were playing to the grand stands and we think it captures a very intentional use of moral talk for selfpromotion in a way that virtue signaling obscures. So the idea of virtue signaling is broader and can capture nonverbal behaviors, choices, decisions that may not be made for political or grandstanding purposes, perhaps someone really just like it is pruus but in picking up grandstanding you have spoke specifically on moral talk, conversation, why that focus on speech . Well, we think that the Public Discourse is extremely valuable tool so its our primary method as human beings that someone has been wrong, warn of threats, praise people worthy of trust. Public discourse is an extremely valuable tool for improving the world. Its also a very scarce resource. Its also a very fragile tool and easy to abuse, its easy to take for granted and so we think this really valuable tool. You might think that people would naturally want to take, you know, take care of this and preserve it and use it for appropriate purposes, but it turns out you can also abuse this resource, you know, its like a resource and pasture and public park. It can be used and can be abused. It can be used for proper ends and used forker kinds of nefarious purposes and in our view grandstanding is one of those uses of moral talk that degrades the social currency and degrades our ability to have conversations with each other about what matters. Grandstanders find a way to turn these discussions of really important problems into discussions about themselves and so we think that our focus on public conversation and given the rise of social media and how many conversations are occurring now, we think that its the time to have a conversation about how we converse. Just to chime on a couple more quick things. One thing to focus on speech rather than also to bring a lot of action into the conversation is that, i think, its reasonable to say the stakes changed a lot when you Start Talking about action because, you know, say someone gives 100 million for hospitals for Cancer Research or Something Like that, we might not care as much if the person does so partly out of vanity and they want a wing named after themselves because the amount of goods that they do is so much greater than the amount of good that you might do simply by saying something or even giving a fairly major speech. Another reason to focus just on speech instead of action is model of speech act and so if you read the book, well, you probably notice we go again and again comparisons to lying, so, you know, if you we wanted to focus on dishonesty, dishonest actions, dishonesty in lots of forms of expression and different areas of life but you learn a lot by just talking about the case of dishonest speech, intentionally misleading speech, so you took that as the core of the book is this chapter where you set out a taxonomy of grandstanding which for me was an deeply interesting section because a lot of have sense of what the frankedstanding thing is even though we call it virtual signaling and Everything Else but the separating it out is really clarifying so i was hoping maybe you guys can run through the way people go about doing it. Sure. We one through what we call a field guide of grandstanding, one thing to note at the outset is theres no fullproof test for identifying when someone is grandstanding. We talk about grandstanding a lot with people in the past few years and one of the first questions that we often get, tell me what grantstanding look like. They want to start calling people grantstanders or Something Like that. Thats not the way to go about solving the problem. I will quickly run through each of the five here. One of them we call piling on, so piling on involves saying something that people have said to get in on the action to show your heart is in the right place and the primary motivation here is just to show that youre one of the big guys or that you want other people to think that you share their values, so people who engage in these huge shaming pileons, for example, theres research that show that people engaged in these activities not necessarily because they believe someone actually did something wrong but because they want to be seen as having certain kinds of values, they want to be seen as touch on the outgroup and so on, so a lot of grandstanding involves pileon of people joining with others just to be seen as taking a certain stance whether theyve they believe the stance or not. A second form of grandstanding is what we call ramping up and when moral discourse takes a form of arms race. We know from social psychology that a lot of the way that we think of ourselves is in terms how we match up to others an we think of ourselves in relation to others and so what happens in Public Discourse is if i think of myself as caring deeply for the poor or caring deeply for the American Factory worker and someone says they care deeply, i have a choice to make. I can allow to be seen as important, caring deeply for these things, perhaps more than i care or i can try to outdo them. Theres lots of examples of this in recent discourse. We went from police need serious reform to abolish the police and about 2 days we went masks dont help and to if you wear a mask youre part of deep state and in about 2 days and so theres this sort of competition that can occur in Public Discourse for people who are trying to outdo each other to take a more extreme or demanding position to show how much they care or show how much how sensitive they are about moral considerations. Another one trumping up, no relation to the current president , by the way, trumping up has to do with trumping up charges, you take a morally innocent piece of behavior or maybe a slight moral wrong and you trump up the charges, something really big and really important. Something morally egregious and what that signals to other you have moral compass that you are intolerance of any moral behavior and so a lot of a lot of grand standing involves taking very innocent behavior and moralizing and running it through this machine that makes this huge problem so others can see how impressive you are. Grandstanding also takes the form of excessive emotions often in terms of outrage so we know from psychology that expressions of outrage signify your moral convictions and you get really outraged about something that implies deeply about it and you have lots of moral convictions and so grandstanders can exploit this background assumption and outraged about all kinds of things. I mean, we know from psychology that so what we call divisiveness and someone might Say Something like that if you cant see the hamilton, the musical, is the most, you know, egregious morally egregious thing thats ever been produced on broadway, then i dont have time for you, lets not talk anymore and do better. A lot of grandstanding involved in dismissive attitude towards people and the implication that i dont need to explain why this is wrong and even if i were to explain it you wouldnt understand it and you wouldnt understand the moral gravity of it. These are the five forms that grandstanding can take. They shed a light on the way that grandstanding typically shed over the course. So let me just look into the answer and reemphasizing something that brandon said at the outset and that is that this is not like a guide to actually spotting instances of grandstanding in the world so you can grandstand as brandon just said without doing any of those five things and you can do any of the five things without grandstanding. To the point of giving this guide is to help people understand what this account can explain and to help them see that if grandstanding is common they should expect to see a lot of this behavior. As you were going through these, the thing that occurred to me is so youre definition of grand standing has requirement. You have to have the intent to do it and youre trying to use moral talk to accomplish something and it seems that a number of kinds of grandstanding trying to get other people to think a certain way as you but just in terms of it feels good to do these things like sometimes it just feels to get outraged or it feels good to pile on because it makes you feel righteous and better about yourself. Is that a distinct sort of behavior or is it, is it grandstanding but just like your audience is yourself . Its a nice question. I dont think theres a one size fits all to that question. Youre absolutely right that a lot of people engage in these behaviors like accessive outrage and domineering discourse, simply because it feels good. They are exercising what they call wheel of power. They just really enjoy dominating other people and gives them satisfaction. I dont think you have to be grandstanding to do that. Our view is not that grandstanding is the only poison in Public Discourse. I think theres surely lots of behavior that engage simply because it feels good. They have this really nice paper called moral outrage porn and the idea is that a lot of people use moral outrage to kind of satisfy their desires and make themselves feel good. Now, all that being said, i do think that one reason why these things feel good to us is because they reaffirm to ourselves how good we think we are. I mean, decades of Research Show that most people think theyre morally better than the average person. We all give ourselves pretty high grades morally speaking and we typically want others to believe those things about us too and so it feels good to have these these fissions of ourselves reaffirmed in public and so i think youre right that, you know, its not just the only audience is not just the other person reading my post online or, you know, if im a cable talk show host, what people say about me on twitter afterwards, that isnt the only audience. We are also our own audience sometimes and so sometimes i think we are sort of playing to ourselves to convince ourselves and reassure ourselves that we are as good as we think we are. Yeah, just to add, so we recognize, of course, that motivation is really complicated, people almost never act out of just one pure motivation. I just want to point out even if we are often acting because it feels good or if we are trying to satisfy our will of power as brandon points out, we might also be trying to promote our social status, so you might think when someone goes after somebody, tries to shame them publicly just to feel good, they are also trying to show people, look, im someone to be reckoned with. You dont mess with him. This is a friend i want to have and so on. So taking this element, how should we distinguish grandstanding from attempts to lead by example when you genuinely feel that you can act as a moral guide for others and by demonstrateing correct course of action in your personal life others will follow on. Just to mention motivations for our behavior are complex and myriad but here is a simple way to think about the different ways that we might be motivated to engage in Public Discourse so one broad category of motivations we have might be ultraistic so we engage in Public Discourse, we say what we say because we truly care about other people, we are trying to help, we are trying to Say Something that will promote understanding, that will promote seeking the truth, that will provide good evidence, youre saying things, you know, because you have some really good reason to think this is going to be helpful, okay. Thats one kind of motivation you could have. I think those are perfectly innocent and motivations to have like discourse. Another reason, another kind of motivation, family of motivations that you might have might be dutiful motivations having to do with duty. Maybe youre not so much trying to help but youre trying to promote the right moral principles, you are trying to articulate the moral truths and youre trying your best to give reasons or evidence to discover what we ought to do or what we ought to do together and those are perfectly motivations for discourse too. The third category of motivations is the category that i think causes lots of trouble and those are egoistic motivations, those are motivations in engaging discourse for selfinterested reasons, right, and the reasons that we primarily are interested in in this room are reasons having to do with social status and so our worry is that, you know, when you engage in Public Discourse for egoistic reasons, for selfserving reasons, that that doesnt just hold constant what you say, its actually going to motivate and cause you to say things that you wouldnt otherwise say and do things that you wouldnt otherwise do if you werent selfishly motivated and for lots of reason that reasons that o into the book cause all kind of problems, they lead to polarization, cynicism of Public Discourse, it causes outrage exhaustion and then, you know, its also just disrespectful, it treats people as mere means, right, simply, you know, conscripting them and using discourse for these purposes, free rides on other peoples wellintentioned uses of Public Discourse and also we just think that using P

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