Moral discourse is sometimes used to advertise the speaker's own moral quality rather than to persuade, which pushes positions toward the extreme.
Tosi and Warmke's account predicts specific patterns: escalation as speakers outbid one another, dismissal of reasonable positions as insufficiently committed, and claims of unique insight. Those patterns are observable even where the motive is not, which is where the useful content of the concept lies.
In practice
- A meeting in which each speaker states the previous position more strongly has stopped deliberating.
- A public consultation where no participant can afford to state a moderate view produces no moderate views.
- Possible explanations
- The proposed explanation is status competition within a moral discourse: speakers who gain from appearing committed outbid one another, which shifts positions outward and makes moderate claims look like defection.
- In its favour
- The predicted consequences are specific and testable, including escalation, dismissal of moderate positions and claims of unique insight, and survey measures of grandstanding motivation do correlate with reported conflict.
- Against it
- It attributes motive, which is unobservable, so the diagnosis is far easier to apply to opponents than to test, and sincere strong claims are indistinguishable from performed ones by the criteria given.
- Standing
- Attributes motive, which is unobservable, so the diagnosis is easier to apply to opponents than to test. The predicted consequences, including ramping and piling on, are more tractable than the underlying claim.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change