Professor for philosophy at Texas Tech University specializing Political Legal and moral philosophy. Brandon is assistant professor at Bowling GreenState University specializing in ethics and moral psychology and social philosophy. We will take audience questions online using cato events. Watching the event posted so they can find it. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having a. Great to be here. To be here briefly, what is grandstanding . The simplest Bumper Sticker description of grandstandin grandstanding, using the discussion of morality and Public Discourse as a vanity project with morality and justice and family values and tradition to draw attention to themselves to look like a moral paragon to think of morley in my end to care about the American Factory worker to be something more detailed thats very simple that it has two parts the grand standards want a certain audience a referenced network to have them come to believe with moral properties recall this recognition desire and want to be recognized with certain moral qualities by certain people in the audience the second is that they Say Something because they want to impress people and the thing that they say what they type into facebook or twitter or on the stump speech what they say is the grandstanding expression. That is motivated in a significant way by the desire for praise, to be seen on the side of the angels so its a very simple thing in terms of the equation grandstanding justice saying something in Public Discourse with the significant motivation to be seen as morally impressive. What is the difference between grandstanding and virtue signaling . Good question. They are related terms. I do think often when people talk about virtue signaling they could just as well be talking about grandstanding. But nonetheless we think that virtue signaling is not and i on ideal term to capture what is going wrong when people use moral talk the way we describe. As a catege right kinds of expressions. So you send a signal anytime you talk about morality at all. You make any moral claim at all youve are signaling to people that you probably believe that thing coming may be committed to it but you dont object to any instance of the communication people are using moral talks for the wrong reason and they are doing so intentionally. So, we think that this grandstanding is sort of a narrow term and south picks out these things to complain about. I want to add to the comments when we started writing about grand and standing the term wasnt really on the scene. It was about a year after the term virtues signaling, sort of picking up online and in sort of public discussions as a term to pick up this ostentatious behavior. And to mention theres lots of reasons why we think its not the most helpful terminology to pick out a discussion of selfinvolved moral talk. For all the reasons he mentioned and also the term has been picked up in the cultural war. Virtues signaling as a term tends to come though a complaint from the left. Buall the research that weve de over seven studies and 6,000 participants, all the evidence we have is that grandstanding is equally bipartisan. People on the left do it just as much as people on the right and we found people on the ideological extreme to do with much more. So because the term has gotten caught up in the cultural war. The perfectly innocent use of the term virtues signaling is that whenever you do some virtuous and public, whether you are trying to impress people or not, that sends a signal so theres a kind of a publication for the confusion that can result and this is one way you see this as now we have this discussion you may have seen of the signaling so theres arguments about whether someones virtues signaling so we think grandstanding is a much clearer term that dates back to the 19th century. It came out of the 1988 book, excuse me, a team 88 book on baseball and the idea was that these guys were in the outfield making claims play into the grandstands, so we think it captures the very intentional use of moral talk for selfpromotion in a way that the signaling kind of scares. The idea of virtues signaling is broader and can capture nonverbal behaviors choices, decisions that may not be made for political grandstand purposes. Perhaps someone just really does like the previous. In picking up the grandstanding you chose to focus specifically on moral talk conversations. Why that focus on speech . We think that the Public Discourse is an extremely valuable tool. Its our primary method to communicate that someone has been wrong and to identify justices to warn about threats and praise people worthy of trust. It is a very fragile tool and easy to abuse and take for granted so we think that this valuable tool you can also use this resource. Its like a resource in the comments were a public park. It can be used and abused for proper ends and other kinds of nefarious purposes. Grandstanding is one of those uses of moral talk is actually degrades the social currency and our ability to have conversations with each other they find a way to turn these discussions of important problems into discussions about themselves. So we think 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 converged. A couple of quick things, one reason to focus on the speech rather than also to bring a liveaction into the conversation i think it is reasonable to say the states change a lot when you Start Talking about actions. We might not care as much if the person wants to name after themselves because of the amount of data that they do is so much greater. If you read the book you probably noticed the gun again and again the comparisons to fly. If you want to focus on dishonesty, you could talk about all sorts of dishonest actions, dishonesty and lots of forms of expression into different areas of life. But you learn a lot by talking about the case of dishonest speech and intentionally misleading speech. So, we took that as a model for the preceding and we hope what we ended up doing sheds light on the talk for selfpromotion. The core of the book is this chapter where he set out the taxonomy of grandstanding which i think was for me, a deeply interesting section because a lot of us had this sense of what they called virtues signaling or whatever else. But separating it out is really good airplane so i was hoping maybe you could run through without taxonomthetaxonomy of is different kinds of grandstanding and the way people go about doing it. Sure. This is one of our favorite parts of the book. We run through what he called a field guide of grandstanding. One thing to note at the outset there is no foolproof test for identifying when someone is grandstanding. We talk about a lot of people the last few years and one of the questions we often get is tell me what grandstanding looks like. Later in the book they argue that isnt the way to go about solving the problem. But it can be helpful to have a roadmap for field guide about what kinds of discourse tends to exemplify grandstanding so i will run through each of the five. Piling on involves saying something other people have sa said. To show you what other people to think that you share their values. Not because they did something wrong but because they want to be seen as having certain kinds of values and they want to be seen as tough on the out groups and so on and the sort of pile on joining with others just to be seen as taking circumstance. Its what they call ramping up and its when it takes the forms of an arms race. So, we know from social psychology. Its how we match up to others. What happens in the Public Discourse is if i think of myself as caring deeply for the poor or the American Factory worker and someone in Public Discourse says something that implies that they care deeply, i have a choice to make. I cant allow them to be seen as important and impressive caring deeply for these things they need serious reform to abolish the police and about two days we went from masks dont help and if you wear a mask you are part of the cheapskate so there is part of the competition that can occur in Public Discourse where people are trying to outdo each other for the extreme demanding position to show how much they care or how sensitive they are about the certain considerations. A third form is no relation to the current president by the way. It has to do with charges. You take a morally innocent piece of behavior or maybe slight moral wrong and trumped up charges and make it something really big or important or egregious. Egregious. What that signals to others if you have a sensitive moral compass and or intolerant of any behavior and so a lot of grandstanding involves taking very innocent behavior and running it through this machine that make it a huge problem so others can see how impressive you are. It also takes the form of excessive emotions often in terms of outrage, so we know that from psychology to expressions of outrage signify your moral convictions if you get outraged about something that implies you care deeply about it. So they can exploit this background assumption and get outraged about all kinds of things. We know from psychology people get outraged to alleviate guilt and avoid suspicion about their own bad behavior and to show how morally impressive they are in the Public Discourse. Then finally, the final form grandstanding an can take is wht we call dismissiveness. Someone might Say Something like if you cant see hamilton the musical is the most morally egregious thing thats ever been produced on broadway, then i dont have time for you lets not talk anymore. Grandstanding involves a very dismissive attitude towards people, and the implication is i dont need to explain why this is wrong. Even if i did, you wouldnt understand it so these are the forms that it can take. We do think that they shed a light on the way that the grandstanding tends to rear its ugly head. In reemphasizing something brandon said at the outset this isnt a guide to spotting instances of grandstanding in the world so you can grandstand as brandon said without giving any of those five things and you can do any of those without grandstand. The point of getting this guide its just to help people understand what this account can explain and to help them see that if it is common, they should expect to see a lot of this behavior. As you were going through these your definition is almost like a mens rea requirement. It seems that a member of the kind of grandstanding we might see not so much are not necessarily as trying to get other people to think a certain way as you, but just in terms of it feels good to do these things, sometimes it just feels good to get outraged or it feels good to play along because it makes you feel better about yourself. Is that a distinct sort of behavior or is it grandstanding but just like your audience is your self . That is a nice question. I dont think there is a onesizefitsall answer to the question. You are right a lot of people behave in these engage in these behaviors into the domineering Public Discourse because it feels good. They are exercising their will to power. They just enjoy dominating other people. It gives them satisfaction. I dont think you have to be grandstanding to do that. Our view is not that its the only place in Public Discourse. Im sure theres a lot of behavior. There is a nice paper called moral outrage porn and the idea that people use moral outrage to satisfy their desires and make themselves feel good. 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 they are. Decades of Research Shows people think they are better than the average person. We all gave ourselves pretty high grades, morally speaking, and we typically want other people to believe those things about us, too. It feels good to have these visions reaffirmed in public. You are right that its not just the onl only audience isnt juse 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 is in the only audience. They are also our own audience sometimes and we are sort of playing to ourselves, to convince and reassure ourselves we are as good as they think they are. We recognize that its really complicated and people almost never act out of one tear motivation. I just want to point out even if we are often acting because it feels good or because they are trying to satisfy our will to power, they might also be trying to promote our social status. So you might think when someone goes after somebody, tries to shame them, they are also trying to show i am someone to be reckoned with. [inaudible] this is a friend i want to have and so on. Taking this sort of mens rea element, how should we distinguish grandstanding from the attempt to lead by example when you feel youve can act as a moral guide for others and by demonstrating the correct course of action in your personal life others will follow along . Thats good. Motivations for our behaviors are complex and varied. But heres a simple way to think about the different ways that we might be motivated to engage in Public Discourse. One broad category of motivation might be altruistic. We engage in Public Discourse and to say what they say because we truly care about other people. They are trying to help and Say Something that will promote understanding and promote seeking the truth and will provide good evidence. Youre saying things because you have a good reason to think this is going to be helpful. Thats one kind of motivation you could have and i think those are perfectly innocent and laudable motivations. Another kind of motivation that you might have could be called for motivations for things to do with beauty. Maybe you are not trying to help but trying to promote the right moral principles and articulate the moral truth. You are trying your best to give reasoning or evidence to discover what they ought to do or we ought to get together, and i think those are often virtuous motivations for discourse, too. The third category in motivations is the one that causes a lot of trouble and those are ego motivations come up with for this to engage in discourse. For selfinterested reasons and the reasons we primarily are interested in the buck having to do with social status. When you engage in Public Discourse for these reasons, selfserving reasons, that doesnt just hold constant what you say. Its going to motivate and caused you to say things they wouldnt otherwise say and do things you wouldnt otherwise do if you were not selfishly motivated and so for lots of reasons that we discussed in the book, these motivations in the Public Discourse caused all kinds of problems. They lead to cynicism about the Public Discourse. It causes outrage exhaustion and its often disrespectful. It treats people as a means, come scripting them into the morality to show people how good your using discourse and free rides on other peoples wellintentioned uses of Public Discourse. And also we think that using Public Discourse in these selfish ways is just pathetic. That isnt what morality is for. Its not try to gain social status or to try to impress people. The point of morality isnt to dominate people and shame them and make them cower before you. That is a cheap pathetic way to use morality. So for all those reasons, we think the motivated Public Discourse is going to lead to a lot of the problems we see. Our case is made easier if you look at the Public Discourse no one thinks it is going well. We all think it could be going better and we counsel people to think about how they are contributing. Are they engaging in discourse for altruistic reasons, and one way to simply test that is to ask, just ask ourselves am i doing this because i want to look good or because i actuallyy think it is going to do good and we think that is the kind of question we should be asking before we engage in discourse. If we try to imagine the examples of grandstanding, many of the ones we will come up with if not most of them will be in the political sphere, but it seems people grandstand quite a lot on political issues so im curious about the relationship between politics and grandstanding if on the one hand is it easier to grandstand about political issues and in the current environment you get more engagement if you grandstand on political issues, or is there perhaps the causation on the other direction, the kind of issues that we tend to grandstand on are the ones that then become politicized, like the moral outrage leads us to wanting to politicize the outcome of those issues. Thats a great question in a lot of different ways i could take that. One of the things people expect us to do in this book that we dont do is to really go after politicians because when you think of grandstanding, but first things you think of are probably politicians engaging in [inaudible] but they see the matter of little differently. We actually think that the fault for political grandstanding lies mostly on the people who demand it. So heres the great thing about political actors in a democracy. They tend to basically give us the font. What we want. So why do politicians grandstand . Because they are rewarded for it. So Politicians Face incentives that the rest of us our friends will sort of like your posts maybe if we say things that are pleasing to them, but our livelihood generally does not depend on the people around us, our supporters if you want to think of it that way. It doesnt depend on whether they think that we are good upstanding people. This causes a lot of problems in politics and there is good reason for us to stop demanding that politicians engage in these sort of attention grabbing uses of talk. One problem is that because we encourage our politicians to take these moralized stances we see fewer cases of important compromise. Why is that . If someone takes a moral stance on an i