How Grandstanding Undermines Genuine Dialogue
Moral grandstanding is rotting online discourse, cheapening essential words and rewarding performative cruelty over genuine dialogue.
No one likes a grandstander, but they’re among the most common characters encountered online.
The internet is a perfect environment for grandstanders. Anyone can describe their moral position in great detail and get the engagement they’re looking for from people who agree with them.
Those of us who got Facebook accounts in the late 2000s and wrote our first grandstanding posts about overcoming our mental struggles that wracked up tens of likes and comments know exactly what this environment is like. (In hindsight, those posts probably overshadowed people who had actual struggles worth social engagement.)
Philosophy professors Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke broke down the problem of grandstanding in their book Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Published in 2020 amid social justice unrest and years of online moral outrages, the book is a clear breakdown of how grandstanding we may take for granted online is rotting our discourse. Their definition of abuse of moral talk comes late in the book, but establishes the contempt the authors feel for this practice:
“We abuse the common resource of moral talk when we moralize excessively, make plainly false or absurd moral claims, or use moral talk in nakedly self-serving ways. These are all things that happen when people engage in moral grandstanding, and…they result in a degradation of the social currency of moral talk.”
Hiding Cruelty Behind Professed Kindness
Both authors value the role moral talk plays in our society. We can’t confront moral wrongs without a shared vocabulary to explain why certain actions are either abhorrent or desirable.
Grandstanding does not use our values for high-minded battles for reform. Instead, they’re used to cheapen the only words we have to fall back on to defend moral victories. Using them makes the grandstander sound like a righteous moral crusader, which gives them the leeway to impose harsh consequences on people who make minor mistakes or use a poor choice of words instead of spreading hate. The authors explain:
“Invoking sacred words—justice, dignity, rights, equality, or honor, traditional, faith, family—magically transforms your nasty, abusive, selfish behavior into something heroic and praiseworthy. Want to be cruel to those people you don’t like and have your like-minded peers congratulate you? Wrap your behavior in high-flying moral language. Voila! Brave, Admirable, Speaking Truth to Power.”
The danger of abusing moral talk is degrading it so that it isn’t taken seriously when a true moral emergency arises. If there’s already a backlash to using "racism” as a reason to fire a trucker falsely accused of using a white power hand gesture, then how can racism be invoked to advocate for criminal justice reform?
While we’re past the worst of online cancelling at the time of this writing, and the specific sacred words and issues used for abuse will change, the danger of devalued moral terms remains ever-present in the Trump era.
After DOGE, how convincing will “fiscal responsibility” or “program efficacy” be in arguing for cutting inexpensive government programs? For at least half the country, those words will ring hollow when a program genuinely should end.
Why Do We Reward Bad Behavior?
In the context of Grandstanding, abusing moral talk feels like a society-level threat. That hasn’t stopped us from rewarding moral crusaders who exaggerate harm and invoke sacred values with clicks, real-world consequences, and other forms of validation. The authors explain how we reward politicians for their grandstanding:
“The incentive for politicians is not to do the right thing, but to do what will gain them favor with the right people. If we offer them gains in status for making expressive policy proposals, they will give us what we’re asking for: policies that sound good and don’t work.”
Online, we’re often happy to throw a grandstanding post a like or a retweet, but that rewards words over actions. Part of the problem is platform design, but we can also disengage from grandstanding posts and save our engagement for stories about people who do real things instead of expounding on them.
It’s an easier ask than begging the worst offenders to filter themselves.