@philosophyminis: Moral grandstanding is like virtue signalling, but on steroids. It's when somebody in the group chat says something decent and somebody else feels the need to outdo their decency. It's like the virtue signalling Olympics. In their book Grandstanding, the philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argued that grandstanding is when you use moral talk to establish some kind of higher status. It's when a person says the right things about justice, or kindness, or outrage, not because they feel that way, but because they want to be seen as somebody who feels that way. Tosi and Warmke identify lots of different kinds of grandstanding. For example, there is piling on, where everybody repeats the condemnation of somebody to be left out. 'You hate Nathan.' 'Oh, so do I. Total scumbag. Scumbag Nathan, I call him.' And then there's ramping up, where each person has to be slightly more outraged than the last person. 'I'm not going to talk to Nathan.' 'I hate Nathan. I'm going to smash Nathan's car.' And then there's trumping up, and it's where you invent a moral problem and then respond to that. You say something like, 'I heard that Nathan tortures cats.' 'Oh, that's so Nathan. I can't believe that Nathan does that to cats.' Tosi and Warmke worry that grandstanding cheapens moral talk because once we suspect that somebody is shopping for status, we stop listening to what they are saying, and we stop engaging critically with ethics and our own values. And so there is something that we can all check in this. If we're saying something good or bad about another person, do we actually mean that, or are we just saying something to look good?

Jonny Thomson

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Friday 30 October 2026 15:15:00 GMT