When I first got wind of the term “virtue signaling,” it was as though I suddenly found a word that had been on the tip of my tongue for years. There were people, they were saying things that were annoying, I wasn’t sure why, or what to call the spade—only that it felt really scuzzy to be around. What was that stupid thing George Clooney was doing at his Oscar acceptance speech all those years ago? How come the more glowing character traits this job interview candidate lists about himself, the less I want to hire him? Why is that one lady always shouting “Amen!” after everything the preacher says? Yeah we know, Amen!
Thanks to author James Bartholomew, and an excellent elaboration by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Skin in the Game, those of us who were tired of hearing it suddenly had a name for the fallacy, if fallacy is a strong enough term. Sadly, it’s come under attack by—shockingly—a lot of people who had similar opinions to those being accused of virtue signaling. I believe the reason is that Bartholomew originally published his article in The Spectator, a British rag with a conservative bent. From there, it got heaped on a bunch of people associated with the social justice movement. That seems to have earned it anything from dismissal to scathing attack from the left. It’s a shame, because I think the term is useful. What we need is to separate it from partisan politics, understand what exactly it means, and apply it evenly to the whole biscuit of human behavior. But before I can (re)define it in a way that pleases no one, it’s probably a good idea to take a look at the thing the signal is meant to communicate to other minds.
Relatively Speaking
What is a virtue, anyway?
Ye olde dictionary says something to the effect of, “a quality considered good or desirable in a person.” Let’s agree on that and acknowledge up front that everything else I say about virtue is just, like, my opinion, man. Philosophers, theologians, and writers of internet articles have argued about it for millennia, and I don’t expect to put the discussion to rest. Besides, I like having a lot of different lenses through which to view something, as long as each has some interesting detail to reveal. Hopefully this one will.
The dictionary definition immediately begs me to ask a certain question: considered good and desirable to whom? A person, any one person? A certain number? If it sounds a bit subjective, that’s because it is. I’ve not seen any completely rigorous, end-of-story list of virtues that all human beings can agree on, which means it’s either subjective, or it’s absolute and only a few people know it, but don’t worry, they’ll be happy to tell you. For any set valued by one culture, one state, one Kiwanis Club, there is another list somewhere else that conflicts with most if not all. I’m comfortable with the subjectivity of individual virtues, but I’d like to take a stab at defining the category in a way that everyone’s list can be seen to conform to.
Per Taleb, (1) a virtue is a quality (a set of actions) that benefits the community that names it as a virtue. It may or may not benefit the individual. In fact, it may get him killed. (End: Taleb, and blame the following on me). (2) While subjective to the observer, a virtue is observed absolutely by the virtue holder*. In other words, if I am honest half the time, that means I’m a liar. Brave 90% of the time, a coward. We do seem to give partial credit in some cases, as no one is perfect, but in its purest state it isn’t an option that the person exercises when they’re in the mood. (3) Virtues are always demonstrated through action, not simply stated by the alleged virtue holder. In fact, verbally claiming a virtue is unnecessary, and negates the virtue, since (4) the actions that demonstrate a virtue are done for the intrinsic value of the action to the community, not for reputational gain. If the action has value, it should happen regardless of whether anyone is looking, regardless of whether anyone will ever find out. It may or may not improve one’s reputation. That doesn’t matter.
*Not true, actually! I’ll go over the exception, which turns out to be not really an exception, later.
Signal and Reputation
Virtue signaling, then, is (1) the public advertisement of membership in a certain group through words or no-risk action without reasonable expectation of consequences. (2) It usually carries the illusion of risk, (3) enjoys a premeditated popularity with the intended audience, and (4) is intended to solidify membership and raise reputation within that group at a low cost to the signaler.
It’s the signaling that’s key. We all signal things to one another all the time, usually with actions. If the virtue is real, it should be obvious. Describing it with words in the absence of historic action can hardly be trusted, which is why the job candidate extolling his honesty, courage, kindness, and resolve, would be better served by talking about specific past work experience. Maybe it’s the truth. My personal experience is that the more someone says they’re “something,” the more likely they are to be something else.
The proper way to signal is with what Taleb calls skin in the game—risk. The more you stand to lose through your actions, the more believable they are. UCLA film professor Howard Suber has said that there’s no such thing as an antihero. There only those who act heroically, and those who don’t. We may tend to think of the guy with a shadowy past who smokes and swears in front of the Department Head as an antihero, but if he risks his life on behalf of the community, none of these “vices” matter anymore.
While a virtuous act can still bring benefit to the actor, virtue is only clear when it harms. Otherwise, it would be near-impossible to distinguish from fickle self-preservation. “I notice the lottery ticket on your desk matches the jackpot numbers. Is it yours?” “Why yes, yes it is.” Would anyone praise me for my honesty? I was honest. What if I had lied and said it belongs to the janitor who cleans the office, then tracked her down and handed it over? That’s a lie. Which act feels more virtuous? In the first instance, no one else was harmed or helped. In the second, I was harmed in order to help another. Virtue is beginning to enter murky waters.
A Counterattack on Those Who Attack the Term “Virtue Signaling”
A crucial point that those who attack the term “virtue signaling” miss is that it can occur irrespective of the virtue being signaled, it can occur even when the sentiment is truly held, and the same exact signal can be either a genuine act or cowardly virtue signaling depending on the context. The mistake is that people assume 1) all virtues sound really nice, and 2) virtues are absolutes, equally virtuous in all situations. Remember, a virtue isn’t “something I happen to agree with,” it’s a class of actions that seemingly benefits the community who is calling it a virtue. For one group, humility might be a virtue. Most people like humility. But for an MMA fighter promoting a fight, or for Egil Skallagrimsson, bragging and backing it up may earn more respect among one’s peer group.
Here’s an example of the context issue. A Missouri activist fighting the opioid epidemic makes a scathing argument on twitter, to all of her followers, that pharmaceutical companies manipulate trials, understate dangers, and engage in practices that knowingly and willfully encourage opioid addiction. That’s virtue signaling. If instead, she works for the pharmaceutical company and gives the same critique in a presentation to management, that’s a virtue to somebody, and it’s going to cost her job. Even positions most people despise can be seen as virtuous in some groups. A member of the KKK who gets on the mic at a rally and says, “I hate n******!” is guilty of virtue signaling. If he does the same thing at a rap concert, we can accept his last words as a genuine signal of his values right up until the end.
It’s the (usually verbal) signaling without risk, and with prior knowledge of positive reception and a reputational bonus that makes it virtue signaling. Even if you hold the same values as those being expressed by your peers, reaffirming them is at best obsequious. To signal real virtue, keep (mostly) quiet when you agree with those around you and speak up only when you don’t. Being the 77th person to stand up and proclaim, “I am not a racist,” however true that may be, is absurd. It should be evident in your actions, otherwise save it for the Klan rally when you’ve got something to lose.
A stealthier type of virtue signaling is when someone makes a statement in a public space presumably full of many different opinions, e.g. Twitter. It seems like you’re risking your reputation, if not your safety. But when the statement is often crafted to get a response from a specific group—it isn’t intended for everyone. Most of your followers likely support similar things. It was meant to give the illusion of risk, while actually speaking to your fellow members, your friends, your fans, your mom, all of whom are ready with an “Amen!”
At this point, it sounds like I’m saying no one should ever state an opinion in public, ever, unless surrounded by their enemies. Not quite. (1) Not all opinions signal virtues. (2) We need to be able to express opinion in order to do things like debate courses of action. When it’s virtue signaling, usually nothing is acted on, at least not in any way that involves risk to the opinion giver. The topic is often not some novel issue that requires dialogue, rather it’s pandering to some classical ideal. “The UN estimates 9.1 million people die of hunger every year. This has to stop, NOW!” Oh, so you already gave every morsel of spare food in your home and spent all of your money beyond that needed for basic subsistence on getting them food? Anymore giving and you’ll be starving on the streets yourself? No? Generally, this person makes a small monthly donation that doesn’t even come close to infringing on their lifestyle. Just enough, in fact, to be able to justify making a social media post for the reputational bump. In an honest debate, people express opinions, listen to others, seek information, and attempt to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, which may be different from what they initially thought. Hopefully, they follow it up with action, and put some skin in the game. Most of this is absent from virtue signaling.
And (3) generally, if opinions carry no risk, they should be held until they’re directly asked for.
Survival of the (Friends of the) Virtuous
The reason that virtues are held so high, and false signaling is so harmful, is that they confer an evolutionary advantage to the group. In a sense, what we call a virtue is a general map, symbolic of a class of actions that when taken together, give our fellow members a survival advantage. Take honesty, for example. I’m sure some den of thieves would scorn the notion of honesty as a virtue, but most societies and after-school programs are fond of it. What is “honesty”? An abstraction for actions like, “communicating information that corresponds closely to reality,” “sharing—never withholding—information that could harm in its absence,” etc., and the consistency of these behaviors over time. That helps a community, because we know that Wendy here is not going to waste our time and energy by misleading us, and that if there’s a threat, she’ll mention it and do so with as much accuracy as she can manage. Additionally, she costs us very little physical and mental energy to interact with, since we can pretty much take what she says at face value, instead of having an internal debate about what she really means, how much of that was true, what’s her angle, etc. Other classical virtues can similarly be broken down into constellations of actions, and those actions will also have value to the group on a basic physical level, not just in abstraction. A benefit to survival, at least as they perceive it.
What people consider virtuous changes with place and time, because survival needs change. The virtues themselves are subject to natural selection. Actions that harm the community fall out of favor. Those with small value to small groups are held in small esteem. And those of great value to almost everyone become the virtues that last, that span the globe, though none of them are immortal or absolute. They are Lindy-compatible, however. The older they are, the more likely they are to be of value, whereas a virtue held only recently by a single small group has a ways to go before it demonstrates a survival advantage. When in doubt, stick with the classics.
While the groups survive, the virtue holders don’t necessarily fare so well. Since they take risks, they can and often do suffer or die. It’s the group that survives. Their stories are praised, the young are trained and selected for virtues that proved valuable, and so others are encouraged to adopt those behaviors despite the risks. What they’re doing is absorbing risk from the higher order down to the lower order, taking the burden off the group and placing it on the individual. From system to component. Think of an electrical fuse. It’s job is to die if anything goes wrong, in order to protect the circuit from being completely fried. Fuses are easily replaced. The entire circuit is another matter.
Since there’s an evolutionary aspect, it should be obvious that virtues are divergent, not convergent. They branch out, try many different things, as opposed to funneling to a single perfect set. It may seem like a society training and selecting for a given virtue is evidence of convergence, but that’s only true within that group. Their set of virtues is proven over time, and as long as conditions remain the same, herding people into the same territory can be useful. Under disruption, things change. Former vices can become virtues, and vice-versa. The kind of actions that kept your people safe under Roman rule would need to change significantly a few centuries later when warlords were picking over the imperial carcass. The aforementioned Egil and the Norse had one response. British monks had another. Both worked pretty well.
The Man Who Could Not Lie
What do virtues communicate? They tell us quite a bit about the needs and the wants of the mind—individual or communal—that holds them, and the world they live in. Which is better, strength or turning the other cheek? Impossible to know without the context.
It was perfectly acceptable for a Norse hero like Sigmund to rob and kill people, so long as they are strangers. Or for raiders to kill, rape, and pillage, as long as it’s foreigners. It was absolutely not acceptable to do these things within one’s own community, and the consequences would have been swift and decisive. At home, things like honesty, generosity, and courage were valued. How could they engage in virtues in one context, and vices in another? They didn’t. All of their actions—one hundred percent—either helped or at least didn’t harm their community.
I mentioned earlier there’s an exception to a virtue holder holding a virtue absolutely, and that it’s not really an exception. Imagine there’s an honest man in your country, held in the highest regard, friends with all the movers and shaker and knowers-of-things, because he’s never been known to utter a lie under any circumstances, or withhold knowledge when asked for it. One day, he’s captured by the neighboring nation, your historical enemy. Since they asked about the state secrets we was privy to, and he held honesty to be an absolute virtue, he told them, which allowed them to overrun his country with relative ease. Admittedly, a fantastical example, but would you respect him for his honesty while the enemy gunned down your friends who tried to resist the inevitable? I think the gut reaction is to feel betrayed, angry. Maybe the reasoning mind comes in and tries to tell you honesty is more important than any one life, any one nation. I don’t buy it.
The secret-spiller failed to understand that honesty is held in high regard because usually, it benefits the community. In a different context, though, it proved harmful. He turned out to be no less a nuisance than a liar, arguably much worse.
Absolute virtue is nothing more than stubbornness. It’s allegiance to an abstraction at the expense of the practical. What should be absolute is skin in the game on behalf of one’s community, regardless of context. Failing to understand when the situation changes is a confusion of logical types. The particular action is confused with the category “beneficial actions,” when the context has moved the action into a new category, “harmful actions”.
It’s a bit complicated to get into here, but essentially a chronic confusion of contexts and logical types leads to madness. Blind adherence to a perceived virtue divorced of benefit to your community is literally insane.
Name Who You Serve
If all of that isn’t confusing enough, the good news is that it gets more complicated. People have a habit of transposing virtues and vices from individuals to communities. Big mistake. Some things are vices at a low level and virtues at a higher one, or (and I hate to use a bad pun again, but) vice-versa. Selfishness is almost never held in high regard, but a community might be selfish, gobbling up and hording resources within the group, while encouraging individuals to be generous with one another. Isn’t that hypocritical? While generosity within the group is surely helpful to that community, were it to give generously to every other tribe in the area, it might quickly overextend and overshoot its resource base, which is a poor survival strategy. A virtuous person would never harm the community to observe a virtue absolutely. To share would mean they consider the second group a part of their community. Many people do make this argument, that our community is the world. That would require incorporating more and more smaller communities into one very big one. On the other hand, how many charities give the contributions they receive to other charities? How many countries that distribute wealth within also distribute it to their rivals? The Utopian scenario would require integrating the whole world, and anything less requires drawing the communal boundary at some point.
The latter is helpful, because as I mentioned, virtues are divergent. A bunch of different and separated communities try out what they think works, and hopefully if disaster strikes the species, at least a few of them survive. If we converge on one set of virtues for all of Man, we are praying that conditions on Earth never, ever change, even though that’s all they’ve ever done for the entire history of the planet. If they do, and we are unified in our virtues, it’ll be very tough to sort out what behaviors benefit such a huge community on such short notice.
I’ll admit, it’s an interesting question: is it possible to consider the whole species your community? What about the whole biosphere? And if so, what virtues would you hold? How, at such a gargantuan level, would you know they’re valued? I don’t have answers for those questions. My suspicion is that such a high order (link: 005) is almost completely unfathomable by our little minds. It’s certainly possible that our individual virtues are shaped at that level, but the feedbacks would be too slow and too seamlessly built-in for us to glean any actionable information as individuals. One thing that we can see fairly well is that both the species and the biosphere benefit from diversity. If the goal is survival, maybe the only real virtue is adaptability. Maybe coupled with a refusal to harm when harm is obvious, and a refusal to plunge blindly into unknowns that potentially carry great risk for the higher order communities. In other words, antifragility. A preference for situations when risk to others is low and the potential reward high, along with an allergy for situations when the reward is known and tightly bounded, but the risks remain a mystery.
At any rate, it’s worth everyone asking themselves, “what is the highest community I serve?”, and at every turn, making sure our actions help and never harm that group, whatever smaller communities we may serve from time to time. When the same virtues resonate with all of your communities, all the way up the totem pole, that’s when you know you’re really humming.
Equal Opportunity for Virtue Signalers
One final point I want to address is the assertion made by those who don’t like people calling their friends “virtue signalers” that anyone who calls “virtue signaling” is himself signaling virtue. This is fallacious. It’s no more true than saying someone who calls out a liar is virtue signaling honesty. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. What makes it meaningless signaling is if he doesn’t take risk for his beliefs, and if his own actions are obviously dishonest. We would expect someone who’s honest to state the truth, especially in bringing false information to our attention.
Calling someone else a virtue signaler is certainly not virtuous—other things are required for that to be the case. But we need people willing to call out liars, frauds, hypocrites, and those to make a pretense of virtue but act to harm the community. Pointing them out benefits the community. What’s required is that the pointer points even when doing so carries great risk—especially then. If you spot someone picking pockets at the Policemen’s Ball, it’ll be hard to manufacture any risk in pointing it out. Some may say you’re virtue signaling, but it still seems like a good idea. Just don’t post about it later on Twitter.
Finally, we need to divorce accusations of virtue signaling from partisan politics. Everyone has been guilty of empty virtue signaling at some point in their lives. Me, you, every Democrat and Republican, every dog and every pony. We’ve done it to seize the moral high ground, we’ve done it to share opinions, to win arguments, or because we just wanted to feel like we belonged to something. We’ve done it out of sloppy thinking, tiredness, laziness, fear of risk. When we do it, we should all be called out, regardless of our beliefs. When we call out others, we should first make sure they really are giving empty signals, so as not to dilute the meaning of the term.
When in doubt, talk is for virtue signaling. Actions + risk that benefits the community signals virtue.