grandstanding the use and abuse of moral talk

Sometimes people with the Recognition Desire simply want others to see them as being morally decent, or as sharing the political values of their social group. That reaction suggests that impressing others was a significant motivation for the expression, and that is enough to make it grandstanding. After all, how strong must you want others to think well of you for something you say to count as bragging? Here’s a simple test that gets us in the neighbourhood when it comes to grandstanding: the Recognition Desire must be strong enough that the person acting on it would feel disappointed if she found out that nobody was impressed by what she said. In our view, for an expression to count as grandstanding, the Recognition Desire must be fairly strong. Does that mean that grandstanding practically never happens, since motivation is complicated and people rarely act exclusively on their desire for recognition? Or does it instead mean that every instance of moral talk turns out to be grandstanding, since almost everyone cares at least a little bit about impressing others? Someone might want others to think she cares deeply for the poor, while also wanting to raise awareness about poverty. But more often, the Recognition Desire is just one motivation among many. In some cases, a person might contribute to public discourse entirely out of a desire to impress others. A person must not only express a moral claim to grandstand, but also be motivated to make that claim by a desire for recognition of her moral qualities. Grandstanders want to impress others and so our account needs a second part.

Grandstanding depends similarly on mental states. To know whether someone is a liar, we’d have to know things about the speaker’s mental state, like whether she knew her claim was false and intended to deceive her audience. Someone isn’t lying merely because they say something that’s false.

As an analogy, take the phenomenon of lying. Regrettably, many people think that grandstanding is just a matter of what someone says. I’ve been outraged every day since he stole the election.” He’s obviously the worst president ever, and I can barely bring myself to say his name” or “Bush is a lying piece of war-making scum. Someone might say “Obama is a criminal warmonger. This is what the grandstander says or writes, and it expresses some moral claim. First, grandstanding involves what we call a Grandstanding Expression.

Grandstanding the use and abuse of moral talk