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Four months into the Covid-19 crisis, America still doesn’t have adequate testing, consistent messaging on face masks, or sufficient PPE for medical workers. But our failures are not limited to failures of disaster policy and preparedness. The challenges Covid-19 presents have been exacerbated by our inability to have productive, good-faith discourse about how to respond to the pandemic.
This column is part of a series in which I examine how the humanities can help unlock our most urgent social problems, even problems rooted in science and medicine. I spoke with philosophers Justin Tosi (Texas Tech University) and Brandon Warmke (Bowling Green State University) about their new book, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, to understand why Covid-19 discourse has been so polarizing.
Tosi and Warmke define grandstanding as “the use of moral talk for self-promotion.” It ends up fueling a lot of polarization, cynicism, and outrage exhaustion.
“Public discourse about Covid is dysfunctional for lots of reasons, and grandstanding is one of them,” Warmke told me. Grandstanding, he explained, turns public discourse into a “moral arms race” in which people, even people on the same side of an issue, “rush to outdo one another by taking increasingly extreme moral stances on an issue.” If this dynamic sets in on both sides of an issue, he warns, public discussion abandons the search for common ground and instead races toward polarized extremes.
It’s important to note that Tosi and Warmke are not opposed to principled moral talk. Used appropriately, such talk informs and helps us refine our moral judgement. Grandstanding is different. It’s less about ethical discernment and more about elevating one’s status. People who grandstand speak in performative extremes because it’s the performance that sets one above the crowd. As a result, our social media feeds are “full of people trying to prove that they are on the right side of history,” Tosi and Warmke write in Grandstanding. “Thanks to them, public discourse has become a war of moral one-upmanship.”
Tosi and Warmke’s analysis helps us understand why, for example, the debate over face masks has become a circus. We could be having a productive national conversation—held in good faith and based on data—about where and when it most makes sense for us to wear masks to prevent spread of the virus most effectively. Such a conversation would recognize nuance pertaining to local circumstances and encourage thoughtfulness about tradeoffs. But once moral one-upmanship sets in, the race for the polarizing extremes ensues, with one side equating face mask requirements with fascism, the other equating non-compliance with murderous intent.
This is not the fault of a few bad actors. Through social media shares and viral fame we’ve incentivized grandstanding on a mass scale, rewarding people who speak in moral extremes. “When moral grandstanding is rewarded, people look for opportunities to raise their status by applying morality wherever they can,” Tosi explained. “That can lead to a kind of moral hyperactivity, with people raising every moral claim that comes to mind, regardless of whether it’s productive. This is why issues like whether we should all be wearing masks become moralized. People can raise their status with their in-group by expressing strong moral views about the issue, so they do, and public discourse becomes toxic as a result.”
The toxicity of our discourse is fueling the partisan divide. Recent Pew Research Center reports find that political polarization is increasing, defining not only the solutions we prefer but also who we identify as moral and immoral, and even which problems we see as most pressing. Pew finds, for example, that while 76% of Democrats say the coronavirus outbreak is a “very big issue” in the country, only 37% of Republicans say the same.
This divisiveness is making it harder for Americans to trust one another, which in turn, makes it harder to get things done together. As Tosi and Warmke write in Grandstanding, the abuse of moral talk “makes it harder for members of opposing groups to put aside their differences and make deals to solve problems on terms that enough people can accept.” When we use hyperbolic moral language to discuss pressing social problems, we begin believing everyone who disagrees with us is immoral. We dig our heels in, and we lose the ability to cooperate. We lose, in other words, a defining feature of a functional civil society.
There is some danger, of course, that in identifying the hazards of moral grandstanding Tosi and Warmke are giving us yet one more weapon to accuse and demonize one another. Careful philosophers that they are, they warn that principled moral talk can sometimes look like grandstanding, and vice versa. There is no foolproof test to tell the difference. And in any case, they say, there isn’t much to be gained by accusing others of grandstanding. “What you can do, however, is try not to grandstand yourself,” Warmke counseled. “When you’re about to contribute to public moral discourse, ask yourself: am I saying this to do good, or look good? Would I be disappointed if nobody thought better of me for saying this?” If it’s more about looking good than doing good, he says, “it might be better to sit this issue out, because you’re probably about to grandstand.”
When we resist the temptations of grandstanding, as we turn our gaze away from the polarizing extremes, the common ground comes into clearer focus. It’s there that we are likely to find those who are more interested in doing good than looking good. It’s in this company that we are more likely to find the solutions we’re looking for.
