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 Public Discourse in these selfish egoistic ways, you know, its just pathetic. Its not what morality is for. Morality is not to try to gain social status, its not there to try to impress people, the point of morality is not to dominate people and shame them and make them power before you, its a cheap way to use morality. Its not the way morality is for. We think that egoistic motivated Public Discourse will lead to problems that we see. It sort of cases made easier if you look at Public Discourse. No one thinks its going well. I think we all said it could be going better and what we could counsel people how they are contributing and engaging in discourse for reasons, dutiful reasons and one way to simply test that of ourselves is just to ask before we type in twitter and facebook or something, just ask ourselves, am i doing this because i want to look good or am i doing this because i actually think its going to do good and we think that that sort of question is the kind of question we should be asking before we engage in discourse. I think if a lot of us tried to imagine examples of grandstanding many that we will come up with if not most of them is political sphere. It seems that people grandstand and im curious about the relationship between politics and grandstanding. On the one hand, is it easier to grandstand about political issues or in our current environment you get more engagement if you grandstand on moral issues or perhaps a the causation runs in the other direction that the kinds of issues that we tend to grandstand are the ones that then become politicized, moral outrage leads us to want to go politicize say the outcome of those issues . Yeah, great question, a lot of different ways to take that. One thing that people expect us to do in this book that we dont do is to really go after politicians because when you think of grandstanding the first things that you think of are probably politicians engaging in publicity stunts, but we see the matter a little bit differently, we actually think that the fault for political grandstanding lies mostly on the people who demand it, so here is the great thing about political actors in democracy, they tend to give us what we want. Why do politicians grandstand, because they are rewarded for it. So Politicians Face incentives that the rest of us, i mean, our friends like our posts, if we say things that are please to go them but our livelihood generally does not depend on the people around us, you know, our supporters if you really want to think of it that way. It doesnt depend on whether they think that we are good upstanding people. This caused a lot of problems, though, in politics and theres good reason for us to stop demanding that the politicians engage in these sort of attentiongrabbing uses of moral talk. One problem is that because we encourage our politicians to take moralized stances we see fewer cases of important compromise, so why is that . Well, because if someone takes a moral stance on an issue, people tend to really punish them and, you know, think of it as someone you cant trust at all if they then change their mind or even introduce some nuance into their position because, you know, they take that person to have been committed to that stance. By the same token, we expect politicians to be loyal to us, right, so we dont like it, at least the very partisan among us dont like it when they give in to the other side, all right, because that just makes you look like again they are going back on moral commitment and politicians have every incentive not to compromise. Another problem is that when we turn politics into a morality pageant, thats basically what we get. We get just a display of of everyones good intentions instead of policies that work, so brandon and i call this the expressive policy problem. Take rent control basically and every economists agree that rent control doesnt work. It causes housing shortages and yet politicians, many of whom call for introducing rent control measures, why did they do that . Because on the face of it, it looks like policies will promote some goal, making it easier for people to have a home. So sorry i lost my train of thought there for just a second. So why did they do this . Well, because its a lot easier to give people what they want by proposing these, you know, motherrally flashy policies than to sit down and explain them and you need to understand supply and demand and how markets work, no one wants to listen to that, they have their slogan how everyone deserves housing, matter of basic fairness and so we get policies that sound good and dont work. Its really easy for most people to see grandstanding on the other side as it were. Its easy grandstanding politicians, egoistic politicians motivated on the other side but every politician does it and i think we just have to be honest that people even our beloved if there are body politicians, even our beloved politicians on our own side are doing this and they do it as justin points out because we want it, right, we want them to affirm our value study after study shows that people vote because they think someone shares their values or cares about them and those are all well and fine, but the problem is when politicians as justin point out support and propose policies merely because they express those values not because they are actually going in thinking about the prevalence of grandstanding today, is there technological aspect to its widespread nature . Do we have more avenues to broadcast our virtues or ability to curate how we present to the world or has this been going on for a long time and maybe just less visible . Yeah, so we we argue in the book that the ingredients. Basic human ingredients for grandstanding are as old as society and the desire to impress people, the desire for status, those those very basic human desires have been with us. In many aspects of life we are able to overcome those desires. I mean, you might be at a dinner party and you really want people to know how much you make or where you went to college but youre able to sort of overcome temptations and keep your mouth shut. So those those motivations, those features of human psychology have been with us for a long time. I dont think theres anything unique about the present moment, what is different is that at no time in Human History have people been able to just get on their phones and immediately talk to hundreds or thousands or even millions of people and for a lot of human beings that temptation, the temptation to get the positive feedback to impress other people to be liked, to say things, maybe not because you think they are true but because you think itll raise your status in your political movement. Those temptations are going to be really hard to overcome and so we dont think theres anything new about human psychology. Whats new is that humans on a scale never before seen are able to talk to people. I mean, before even 100 years ago you had to stand in a Street Corner and convince people to listen to you and maybe preacher or politician to have an audience. Each of us now at the touch of, you know, our fingers has an audience greater than any of our ancestors could have ever imagined the common person to have and so its so much easier for each of us to grandstand, its also easier to find it so you can log on and just scroll through twitter and see probably see a bunch of grandstanding if you spent 20 minutes on twitter today you are probably going to see it and so social media allowed it easier for us to act on these desires for status, act on desires to impress others and also made it just much easier to find it. Just to interject with one optimistic note. You might think about this, oh, well, you know, finally bruised some technology that human beings cant use, theres no way we can live together with, you know, with easy platforms for grandstanding so inevitable always going to be each others threats so let me give you one reason not to think that. I think its plausible that this is just the case where the normals have not caught up with the social environment yet, so here is an example, if you look at medieval etiquette guides from the middle ages, youll see authors writing for adults not only read but they can afford books and theres a reason for them to buy books about etiquette. The advice is stuff like dont put it back on the serving dish, dont blow your nose into the table cloth, right, stuff that if anyone ever told me this i dont remember, seems so obvious. To these people this is like, whoa, we have a whole book to explain stuff to us. What happened . The norms caught up, so here is a case where, you know, maybe people did not have opportunities to blow their nose that often or they were mostly eating outside or, you know, not refined settings and then all of a sudden these have the opportunities to to gratify themselves and satisfy the strong urges, so they did, but people dont do that anymore and the reason they dont do those things anymore is because the norms caught up, so what brandon and i hoped is that eventually the norms will catch up for grandstanding also and people will come to see it when someone gets on facebook or twitter or a long caption on instagram about whatever, social justice or whatever issue they want to impress people and this would come to be seen in polite company. Im interested in the Practical Applications you guys imagined for this book, for the ideas that are set out in it particularly because i can see attention on how they are applied. The first way is going back to our discussion that theres a selfassessment like having this taxonomy in front of you and understanding what grandstanding is makes it easier for you to recognize when youre doing it, but the other way is call it like other diagnosis so those of white house had the experience of living underground with a roommate who with major know the woman would come home from class and immediately diagnose you and everybody with mental illness, whatever the lecture had been that day and i can see something similar happening with this that any time anyone disney moral talk someone can say, oh, thats an example of piling on or thats an example of trumping up, so what do you see, i guess, as, you know, the reader reads this, what do you expect them to do with it and ideally what would you like them to do with it . The entire last chapter to have book is called what to do about grandstanding and this is actually a hard to do as couple of philosophers. I mean, not in the business of telling people how to live their lives, so what they do about grandstanding, grandstanding is a tricky phenomena because as you rightly note is not something that you can just read off of someones text, you cant just look at a piece of text often and know whether someone is grandstanding or at least be certain enough to justify a public accusation and in this way grandstanding is kind of like, kind of like lying, demagoguery or humble bragging so its not clearly whether someone is doing it or not. So what do we do to solve this problem . One thing we argue in the last chapter we think its not a good idea to call people out for grandstanding even if you think someone is doing it, calling out someone for doing this is probably not a good idea. Several reasons we give. Some of them is reason and you probably dont have enough information to justify public accusation and this laids to moral reason because you dont know enough about this persons intentions and its probably unfair to them to make a public accusation and then theres also practical reason not to call someone a grandstander, hack them and thats because that will be counterproductive. Im going to accuse you, aaron of being grandstander and we will get in an argument of whats in your heart and whats in my heart. The first time that conversation, the next time that kind of conversation is productive will be the first time. Its just not a way to have a good they know better to treat Public Discourse that way and not impressed by other peoples grandstanding. How do we do that . We redraw work and the basic idea here is, one, set a good example, set a good example in how we each engage in Public Discourse and that means admitting when youre wrong, paying attention to the data and evidence, understanding that being outraged or expressing anger is not an argument. Being harder on yourself than you are on other people, its easier to treat ourselves with grace and gray and be critical of others but i think Public Discourse calls for a division of labor. We should be harder on ourselves and critical of others. Theres lots of tips for how to avoid grandstanding. You might think, well, suppose i stop grandstanding, how do we get other people to stop too if we are unable to call them out, how do we do that . Our advice here is to be withholding. Instead of calling out for grandstanding, if you suspect someone who is grandstanding dont give them what they see. Imagine writing a very detailed passionate, you know, criticism of something, whatever the case is and youre really trying to show people that you care about this issue and youre morally important and no one responds, no one likes it, no one says omg, youre so brave, thank you. If no one does that, at least for most of us its going to be im embarrassing. One way to change the norms to disincentivize selfcentered moral talk is to if you think you see it avoid it. Try to make Public Discourse a thing of the past to something embarrassing to engage. We find that a lot of people are dissatisfied with various parts of the book. This is the thing that people who are friendly with the project are least satisfied because they dont like being told that they shouldnt go after them, so here is what i tell people when they when they say this. Remember why we are here, remember what pick lick public moral discourse is bad, the point of public moral discourse is to figure out what to do and get people to to do what we ought to do. If you go around pointing out when people are grandstanding and trying to embarrass them like explicitly about in a way you are giving the grandstander exactly what he or she wants. Youre letting them make Public Discourse about themselves. Even if it did work and people see them as public joke or whatever, youre doing exactly what they are doing. Making moral talk about the wrong thing. Well, thank you for that. We are starting to run little low on time. I think its time to run to audience q action. Our first question has been asked actually by a couple of people, matthew and a couple of anonymous commentators asked how anonymity affects grandstanding expreses. We can see perhaps boast costs and payoffs of grand weapon standing would be lessoned if you were speaking anonymously. Yeah, thats a really nice question. Anonymity does change the story a little bit but we think not by much. You think about yourself on the internet, whether you have a name attached to it or not, its not like some random stranger, right, knows who you are even though if youre using a name, even if youre using your real name and so the fact that you might not attach your identity to i want to be seen as a certain kind of person even if my thinking is, man, the person who wrote that think is really awesome. When youre a grandstander, all that you might care about is just the other people think, the person who wrote it which happens to be you and you know its you is impressive and that might be satisfy to go you as much as anything else and the other thing to keep in mind as we mentioned earlier a lot of a lot of impression management. Impression management is a term psychologists use where we try to get other to believe that we are the way we think we are, morally impressive. A lot of impressive management is reflexive so its turned back on ourselves. They call this selfimpression management, so the basic idea is that a lot of grandstanding might be done with an eye to impressing ourselves as strange as it might seem or convincing ourselves that are good or taking through satisfaction and sort of satisfaction in moral greatness. Its true that politicians, doesnt mean much for them to incentivize to grandstand anonymously, but for lots of people that can still get the kick that can still get the satisfaction of the desire to just have people think that whoever wrote this thing is morally impressive. Hes got another one from nathanial snow who asked is there a correlation between the scope of issues up for public debate and intensity of grandstanding . If grandstanding is higher expected payoff or to motivate more grandstanding, right . Lets see. Justin, you want to take that one . I think i so i thought it was about two Different Things or on the one hand theres the scope of the issues and then theres the bit of rent seeking and how much is at stake. So let me try this. Grandstanders are entrepreneurial, so one way that you can grandstand is to do what brandon mentioned earlier and is to trump up moral concerns, so in other words, there is status to be had for people who are especially sensitive and can can find moral problems where other people see nothing. So the thought is that, you know, if you could spot the problem that everyone else overlooked then you must be like morally special somehow, especially sensitive or, you know, especially morally wise or Something Like that, so if that is right, then we should expect people to to do more when they are grandstanding, to look for the hyperspecializes and unrecognized issues. So you might think also what nathanial was getting at rent seeking, the more payoff there is, straight toward thinking, actors, the more of it we would expect to see, so thats the reason this is not ideal behavior. We think it is not a good use of moral talk or good outcome to have lots of people plotting exotic or recently invented claims and and blaming one another for violating them and we want to also maybe give people a little bit less credit for behaving this way. Our next question comes from joe cobb asking how we can best respond to expressions of grandstanding and wondering whether suppression of response would be sufficient. The idea is he proposes it is that one might listen to a grandstander in silence and not give them any indication of whether you approve of what theyve said or not. How would we imagine this as a general response affecting grandstanding . Yeah, so this is a very nice practical question, thanks for the question, so we we do give some advice in the book about how to respond to grandstanding in general. I dont think we addressed this question in particular like if someone says Something Like that you think is grandstanding what should you say in response. We are doing a lot of social science with a psychologist named joshua grubs, so far we have done several studies with a thousand participants and one of the things we want to get to is to figure out what kind of interventions are effective but also respectful in in dealing with grandstanding you see. So im going to say all of that to say that this is an open question and i want to be sensitive to those empirical interventions and what might actually work. One thing i suspect is helpful in these kinds of conversations is to so to try to gently move the conversation the topic of conversation away from the speaker, whether its me challenging the grandstander or the grandstander herself to try to take the conversation away from it being personal, not make it personal, not about whether you care about the poor, its not whether i care about the poor, its about the issue, okay, so what what are relevant issues. One thing you can do to ask grandstanders, can you refrain the question for me and would you tell me about the moral principle that you have in mind here. Whats the relevant principle . Or lets think about the negative consequence that is might come from the proposal or do you have any good data that you could share about the question. Im not promising any of those things will work but i do have the suspicion that sort of gently and kindly away from personal attacks, personal selfpromotion, moving away from those topics and making it about as it were the issue at hand, i suspect that might be helpful way to do it but as i mentioned earlier, these are empirical questions and we are engaged in a very longterm empirical what kind of interventions that might actually be helpful. And one i think we have time for one more question, this time coming from i suppose the side of potential grandstander, someone named mike who is a little worried about this. If someone is using moral language to signal their moral views to encourage wider norm changes, is this motivation distinct from what motivates grandstanding . What moral intervention would you recommend for somebody expressing moral views online in support of the cause . Great question. So one, you know, we dont actually get that many questions from people about how they can avoid grandstanding themselves and how they can get those annoy ing grandstanders they want to go after so i really like this question. So one test that brandon and i proposed in the book is what we call the you can ask yourself, you know, suppose i type up post or i say this thing and no one cared at all about me, right, i got no nobody was impressed and ask yourself would you be disappointed and if the answer is yes, thats good evidence that maybe you care a little bit too much, at least in this one about what this instance of moral talk will be doing for you and then what it would do for other people. Its supposed to be helping. Now, look, it could be that you just happen to be in a case where its so important that that someone Say Something that even if youre grandstanding its still the right thing to do but you should even in that case i think go in knowing that, you know, what youre doing is is not optimal, right, it would be better if you werent motivated to seek status for yourself and you were primarily going for helping others. But its good to ask. Yeah, yeah, justin is right that i mean, one thing we didnt point out yet that we discussed in the book is that is that it might be okay in some cases to grandstand. I think we are perfectly comfortable with that. Grandstanding is maybe no different than lying in this respect. Most moral philosophers sometimes say its okay to lie but doesnt mean its great or choice worthy or laudable but might be the best of a set of bad options and so the thought is not that grandstanding is not to be done and although we shouldnt give ourselves license to do it but may be cases where its the thing to do, you just have to do it. Well, we argue in the book that theres a strong presumption just like theres a strong presumption against lying or maybe bragging, theres a strong moral presumption against grandstanding and so here is the thought, if you can do all of your advocacy and activism and protesting, those are wonderful things but if you can do them without trying to seek for yourself status, youre going to be more morally above bored and more effective than trying to seek status for yourself and trying to make moral discourse and moral project. Well, i think thats an excellent note to end on. And its available in print today, so you can find it on amazon, on oxford, anywhere else you like to find books. And there will be additional materials posted on this event page and the recording of this lecture. So thank you again to all of our guests and our audience and have a wonderful afternoon. Booktv continues now on cspan2, television for serious readersful. Good evening, everybody, and welcome. I direct events here at the strand. We are so happy to have everyone here. Before we launch into a discussion of taras new book, strange rites, id like to share a little bit of history about the strand. The strand was founded in 1927 by benjamin bass on fourth avenues book row stretching from union square, book row eventually dwindled from an eventual 48 stores until, after 93 years, the