And that's what we have with our verbal environment, a sort of rhetorical pollution crisis. If almost every single car were using giant smoke-belching engines for simple grocery runs because people think it makes them look cool, we'd be choking on thick, acrid air. People today are doing a lot of grandstanding, using high stakes moral language that's really just intended to "try to make themselves look good." The problem isn't just that it's a false, vain way of communicating. Our shared societal tank of damn-giving is exhausted by people who resort to moralistic claims over irrelevancies. These days, we're running very low on giving-of-a-damn. While they are philosophers, Tosi and Warmke use as much research psychology as they do ethical theorizing, which keeps the book grounded-because the ways that grandstanding makes the world a worse place are not just theoretical. Look at this sentence from a New York magazine story airing the drama inside a progressive journalist email group: "Please for the love of all the babies, stop telling people how to process their own oppression and the offense that comes alongside it." Grandstanding is about the rhetorical and social dynamics that would make someone think writing that shriek of a nonargument is a good idea.
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