Hello friends, welcome back.

My guest today is Justin Toci, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech University

and author of Grandstanding, The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk.

Moral grandstanding is the easiest way to signal your virtue without actually having to

do anything virtuous, so given that it's so plainly transparent, why is it recently

becomes so prevalent?

Expect to learn why wishing that someone would get cancer isn't a good debating tactic,

the different forms that grandstanding takes, why it is a moral problem, how hierarchies

play into people's desires to grandstand and much more.

I must have had five or ten conversations or episodes to do with this very topic, why

is everyone shouting and no one is listening, why can't we just have conversations that

have got nuance or complexity in them anymore?

And this book, I think, is up there with the best of them in terms of breaking down

what happens, but I really don't want there to have to be any more of these books.

Like it shouldn't be the case that we are so self-defeating as a species that we can't

even talk to each other without bare-faced lying.

So yeah, it's a wonderful breakdown by Justin, the book's fantastic as well and really gives

you a great overview of exactly what's going on with language and communication, especially

in the age of social media.

But I really hope that this is like the back end of needing to write these books because

otherwise there is no way that we're going to make it into the 21st, the 22nd century.

We might even not make it out of the 21st, who knows, in other news.

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