The Abuse Of Moral Talk For Self Promotion | Justin Tosi | Modern Wisdom Podcast 221

So, morality is supposed to be about helping other people, being kind to them, about resolving important social problems. But what grandstanders do is they turn morality into just an opportunity to show other people how good they are and, you know, what an achievement for, for me to have such pure moral beliefs. But this is an empty achievement, and it's actually kind of pathetic if you think about it that way. (wind blows)

I am joined by Justin Tosi. Justin, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Chris.

Pleasure to have you on. Grandstanding. What is grandstanding?

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

Why do they do it?

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

It seems like there's kind of two types of grandstanding there. One of them is, like, defensive grandstanding, and the other is offensive grandstanding. Is that kind of right?