Authors justin is an assistant professor of philosophy at texas tech university. Brandon is an assistant professor. At the State University he specializes in ethics, moral psychology and social philosophy. We will be taking audience questions online. Whether youre watching this event via Facebook Twitter or the website. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. What is grandstanding if you want the bumpers sticker description of grandstanding it is is using discussions of morality or politics as a vanity project. To make themselves look like moral paradigms. We want something a little bit more detailed. That grandstanding simply has two parts. They want them to think certain things about them. They come to believe that they have certain impressive moral properties we call this the recognition desire. They want to be recognized as having certain moral qualities. They the grant standards Say Something. And they stay something because they want to impress people. The thing that they say with a type into facebook or twitter that thing they say is what we call the grandstanding expression. And it is motivated in a significant way by this desire for praise to be seen on the side of the angels. Thats a very simple thing. These two parts. You can think of it in terms of a equation. It just says saying something in Public Discourse with the primary or significant motivation to be seen as morally impressive. What is the difference between grandstanding and another term that gets thrown around a lot. It is a good question. The first i will say these are related terms. Often when people talk about signaling they could just as will be talking about grandstanding. But nonetheless i think that the virtue signaling is not an ideal term for capturing what is going wrong when people use moral talk in the way that we described. One reason for this is a lot of grandstanding is not about virtue is typically thought to be an excellence of character and a lot of grandstanding is just about showing people that your decent enough. But even i know you dont treat women that way. They are not claiming any virtue for themselves. The other problem is getting more serious. Signaling is overbroad as a category to get the right kinds of in impressions. The signal any anytime you talk about morality at all if you make any moral claim at all you are signaling that you believe that thing. We dont object to every single instance. What people are complaining about when they complain about grandstanding. Typically they are using moral talk for the wrong reason. They are doing so intentionally. It is a narrower term. I just want to add to the comments there. When we started talking about grandstanding. It wasnt really on the scene. We started writing it was about a year after. It was sort of picking up there is just a lot of reasons why we think its not the most helpful terminology to pick out of selfinvolved legalistic moral talk. For all of the reasons he mentioned. The term has been picked up in the culture wars. Virtual signaling as a term tends to know a complaint there. But all of the research that weve done. It is equally bipartisan. People on the left door do it just as much as people on the right. People on the extremes to much more. Because the term has gotten caught up. Its best to avoid. The term itself is a bit ambiguous. I think what most people have in mind they are accusing someone of a grandstanding. Ive using moral talk for selfpromotion. As they know. It is that perfectly use. Whether you are trying to impress people or not. That sends a signal. This is one way you see this now had this discussion arguments about whether they are virtual signet signaling. Its a term that dates back to the 19th century. It came out of an 1888 book on baseball these guys in the outfield. They have a really show we catches. We think it captures a very intentional use of moral talk for selfpromotion. The idea of virtual signal signaling. The non vertical behaviors. They may not in picking up grandstanding if chosen to focus specifically on moral talk and conversation why the focus on speech. We think the Public Discourse is extremely valuable tool. It is the primary method as human beings to communicate that someone has been wronged. Public discourse is an extremely valuable tool for improving the world. Its also a very scarce resource. A very fragile tool. It is easy to take for granite. We think they would naturally want to take care of this. And preserve it and use it for appropriate purposes. It turns out you can also abuse this resource. Its like a resource in the collins. Like a public park. They can be used in it can be abused. It could be used for proper ends. Its one of those it uses up a moral talk that actually integrates the social currency. Degrades our ability to head conversations with each other about what matters. Grant standards find a way to turn these discussions of really important problems into discussions about themselves. We think that our focus on public conversation. Just to chime in a couple more quick things. One reason to focus on speech rather than to bring a lot of action into the conversation is that its reasonable to say the stakes change a lot when you Start Talking about action because say someone gives 100 million to some hospital. We might not care as much if the person does so partly after this. The amount of goods is so much greater. Then the amount of good you might do even a fairly major speech. Another reason to focus just on speech instead of action is the model for what were trying to do here a certain kind of a speech act. If you read a book you probably know if we go again and again with comparisons if you wanted to focus on dishonesty you could talk about all kinds of dishonest actions. Dishonesty and lots of form of expression. You learn a lot by talking about the case of dishonest speech. We took that as a model for proceeding. We hoped hope that it spread a lot of light. I think in the court of the book is the chapter where you set up a taxonomy above grandstanding which i think was a different section. A lot of it have us section of what it was. The separating it out is really clarifying. I was hoping maybe you guys could run through that taxonomy a bit. The different kinds of grand standing in the way people go route about doing it. This is one of our favorite parts of the book. We run through what we call a field guide of grandstanding. There is no foolproof tests of identifying when someone is grandstanding. One of the first questions we often get is tell me what it looks like. I think often because they want to get out on facebook and twitter and call people grant standards or Something Like that. We argue that thats not the way to go about solving the problem. I can be helpful to have field guide about what kind of discourse tends to exemplify grandstanding. One of them we call piling on. It involves saying something that other people have said to get in on the action just to show that its on the right place. To show that youre one of the good guys. Or that you want other people to think that you share their values. People who engage in these huge shaming pylons for example there is research that shows that they engage in these activities not just because they believe someone did something wrong but because they wanted to be seen as having certain kind of values and they want to be seen as tough on the group and so on and so forth. The pylon of people joining with others just to be seen as taking a certain stance. Whether they believe it or not. A second form of grandstanding is what we call it ramping up and it is when moral discourse takes the form of an arms race. We know from social psychology that a lot of the way that we think of ourselves is in terms of how we match up with others. And so, what happens in Public Discourse 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. It can make them be really important were impressive maybe more than i care or i can try to outdo them. There is a lot of examples of this. We went from police needs we went from masks dont help to if you wear a mask europe part of the cheap state. I cant occur in Public Discourse. They will take a more extreme or demanding position to show how much they care or how sensitive they are about these certain moral conditions. The third form is trumping up. No relation to the current president by the way. It has to do with trumping up charges. You take an innocent piece of behavior or maybe a slight moral wrong and you trumped up the charges. You make it something really big or really important and what that signals to others is that you have a really sensitive moral compass you are intolerant of any moral behavior. A lot of grandstanding involves taking the moral behavior and immortalizing it. Running it through a machine that makes a really huge problem. It also takes the form of excessive emotions. We know that from psychology that expressions of outrage signify your moral convictions. Grant sanders can exploit this assumption and get outraged about all kinds of things. People get outraged to alleviate guilt. They avoid specific suspicion about their own bad behavior. They use it to show how much they care and how morally impressive they are with Public Discourse. The final form that they can take. Is dismissiveness. Something if you cant see that hamilton the musical is the most egregious thing that has ever been produced on broadway and then i dont had time for you lets not talk anymore. Its very dismissive attitude towards people in the implication is that i dont need to explain why this is wrong. These are the five forms that they can take. They are not meant to be exhaustive. They shed a light on the way that it tends to rear its ugly head. Let me just book in that answer. This is not a guide to actually spotting instances of grandstanding in the world. So you can grandstand it grandstanding without any doing any of those five things and you can do any of those five things without grandstanding. The point of giving this guide is to help people understand what this account can explain and help them to see 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 your definition has a mens rea requirement you are trying to use moral talk to accomplish something. A number of kind of grandstanding that we might see not so much is 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 its just feels good to get outraged. It makes you feel righteous and in better about yourself. Is that a distinct sort of behavior or is it grandstanding but just like your audience is yourself. You make. Thats a nice question. I dont think there is a onesizefitsall answer to that question. A lot of people engage in these behaviors like excessive outrage and domineering Public Discourse simply because it feels good. They are exercising what they need to call their will to power. They really enjoy dominating everybody else. I dont think you have to be grandstanding to do that. Our view is not that it is the only poison in Public Discourse. I think there is surely lots of behavior. They have this really nice paper crawled called moral outrage. A lot of people use moral outrage to satisfy their desires and make themselves feel good. All that being said i do think one reason why these things feel good to us is because they reaffirm to ourselves how good we think we are. Decades of Research Show most people think they are morally better than the average person we all give ourselves pretty high grades morally speaking. We typically want others to believe that way about it too. The visions of ourselves reaffirmed in public. Its not just the other person reading my post online. What people say about me on twitter afterwards. We are also our own audience at times. I think we are plain to ourselves to convince ourselves reassure ourselves that or reassure ourselves that we are as good as we think we are. Just to add. We recognize of course that motivations are really complicated. People almost never act out of one pure motivation. Even if we are often because it feels good if were trying to fight our will to power we might also be trying to promote her social status. You might think when someone goes after somebody and tries to shame them. They are also trying to im someone to be reckoned with. You dont mess with him this is a friend i want to have and so forth. Taking this mens rea element has should be distinguished grandstanding from the attempts to lead by example. When you genuinely feel like you can ask as a moral guide. For others. Demonstrating a correct course of action in your personal life. Others will follow along. Motivations for our behavior are complex in myriad. Here is a simple way to think about the different ways we might be motivated. One broad color might be ultra realistic. We engage in Public Discourse. We truly care about other people. We are trying to help. Were trying to help Say Something that will promote understanding. Seeking the truth. You are saying things because you have some really good reason to think this is can be helpful. That is one kind of motivation. Maybe dutiful motivations. Maybe youre not so much trying to help but you are trying to you are trying to promote the right moral principles. You are trying your best to give reasons or evidence. I think they are virtual motivations for this also. The third category is category that i think causes a lot of trouble. Those are motivations to engage in discourse. For selfinterested reasons. In the reasons that we are interested in this book. The reasons i have to do is social status. Our worry that doesnt just hold constant. What you say. It will cause you to say things that you wouldnt otherwise say and do things you want to otherwise do. If you werent selfishly motivated. For a lot of reasons we discuss discussed in the book. It causes all kinds of problems. Its just disrespectful it treats people as mere means they are prescriptive them. To show people how good you are. Using discourse for this. And we just think that using Public Discourse in these selfish ways it is just pathetic. Its not to try to gain social status. As not to dominate people. And make them cower before you. It is a cheap way to use morality. For all of those reasons we think that those Public Discourse is just can lead to a lot of the problems we see. Our case is made easier at Public Discourse. What we would counsel people is just to think about how they are contributing. Are they engaging in discourse. And one way to do that. Just ask ourselves. My doing this because i want to look good or is it in my doing it because it is its actually going to do good. That kind of question is the one that we should be asking before we ask the discourse. Many of the ones we come up with will be in the political sphere they grandstand quite a lot on issues. Im curious about the relationship between politics in grandstanding. Is it easier to grandstand about political issues were in our current environment we get more engagement. Is there a case that runs in the other direction. They then become politicized. The moral outrage. The outcome of those issues. One thing people expect them to do. Is to really go after when you think of grandstanding the first things you think of our probably politicians engaging in publicity stunts. We see the matter a little bit differently mostly on the people who demand it. Heres the great thing about political actors in democracy. They tend to basically give us what we want. Why do politicians grandstand. They face incentives that the rest of us are friends will like our posts. Our livelihood generally does not depend it is not depend on the people around us. It doesnt depend on whether we think they are good upstanding people. A lot of problems in politics. That they stop acknowledging them. One problem is because we encourage our politicians to take moralized stances we see fewer cases of important compromise. If someone takes a moral stance people tend to really punish them. Someone you cant trust at all. If they then change their mind or even introduce some new ones. By the same token we expect them to be loyal to us. We dont like it. They dont like it when they given to the other side. That makes it look like again they are going back on that. Have every incentive not to compromise. Another problem is that when we turn politics into a morality packed thats basically what we get. We get a display of everyones good intentions instead of policies that work. To take rent control. Every economist agrees the rent control doesnt work. It is a make housing more affordable. And yet many of whom must know this continue call for rent control measures. On the face of it it looks like the policies will promote some goal. Why did they do this. It was a lot easier to give people what they want by proposing these policies than it was to sit down and explain to them you need to understand supply and demand. They have their slogan about how everyone deserves housing and so because the issue is so moralized we get policies that sound good and dont work. Its really easy for them to see them at the other side. The politicians. Everyone every politician does it. Even our beloved. On our own side. They do it because we wanted. People vote because they think someone shares your values. Or cares about them. Those are all well and fun. But the problem is when politicians as justin points out they support for policies. They support the values not because theyre actually going to vote for them. With the prevalence of grandstanding today is there a technological aspect to widespread nature do we just had more avenues to broadcast our virtues for a security how we present ourselves to the world. Or is it often going on for a long time. We argue in the book that the ingredients for grandstanding are sold as a society. And a desire to impress people. The basic way. They were able to overcome that. If you want you want people to know how much you make. But you are able to overcome those limitations and keep your mouth shut. Those motivations and those features of human psychology had been with us for a long time. If theres anything intrinsically unique about the present moment what is different is that at no time in Human History had people been able to just get on their phones in immediately talked to hundreds or thousands or even millions of p