In Defense of Virtue Signaling

or at least a critique of its use as a critique

Perhaps no term better captures the spirit of our time than virtue signaling. A simple two-word expression laden with an array of explicit and implicit social meanings that comports with our social media mediated lives. Interestingly enough, though the word virtue is definitionally tied to positive personal attributes and signaling is a generally neutral term, this compound phrase is universally deployed with a mixture of dismissal and derision. To this we can add the functionally equivalent term, performative, as another stock phrase suffusing the contemporary discourse. In effect, they are insults that speak to someone’s motivations and thus fit well within the ever-burgeoning realm of meta-commentary.

Alas, I am rising to the defense of all the virtue signalers out there! Indeed, as we are a species in large part defined by the elaborate modes we have invented to signal virtue, I see such a defense as part and parcel to a defense of humanity writ large. But of course, be that as it may, I can imagine that you may consider such a conceptual enlargement to be a semantic dodge. Surely, this is not how people are using the term in everyday language when they accuse someone of being a ‘virtue signaler’ or doing something ‘performatively’. Well, I would say yes and no. More importantly, drilling into this term a bit further reveals both its pitfalls as a mode of censure and its affiliation with some of the more degenerative aspects of contemporary social discourse.

Starting with the most obvious objection, it strikes me that calling someone else out for virtue signaling is itself a form of virtue signaling. This proposition is not advanced as some pedantic exercise of sophistry. Instead, it offers an excellent point of entry for exploring the virtue signaling put down and the defects bound up with its use. So if we are willing to accept that calling someone else a virtue signaler itself serves to broadcast certain virtues, then the question becomes, what virtues are being signaled by this call out?

In this sense, brandishing the virtue-signal-cudgel is a classic instance of a two-way expression that envelops both the target and the individual invoking the term. With this in mind, perhaps it is best to take them one by one. First, to the best that I can gather, labeling someone a virtue signaler (or alternatively, as engaging in performative behavior) is meant to impugn their motives. It signifies that someone’s main objective for espousing some political or social cause is merely to bolster their stature to third party onlookers. By implication, their real motivation emanates from self-regard rather than a genuine concern for the particular issues at-hand or those who may be suffering.

Taking this observation just a step or so further move us towards the frontier of philosophical existentialism. Here I am referring to the notion of authenticity which forms a central axis in the works of existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre or Albert Camus. From the existentialist perspective life’s ‘purpose’ is to live and express oneself authentically. Though I would hazard that most people bandying about the term virtue signaler are not conscientiously channeling the ideas of Sartre, I do think this notion of authenticity lies at the heart of such accusations.

For the charge posits a distance between a person who was authentically concerned with issue X and the mere virtue signaler who is simply acting performatively. Indeed, to perform, generally implies an intentional artificiality on the part of the performer. Thus, in this light, the person taking up the cause of X is primarily (if not wholly) driven by the desire to be credited with knowing and caring about X rather than operating from an authentic desire to substantively address it.

In some sense, labeling someone a virtue signaler is harsher then calling them a hypocrite. For at least the hypocrite retains the clarity of direct contradiction. By contrast, the virtue signaler exudes murkiness by cynically blending the moral authority of a righteous cause with a surreptitious desire for social praise, cultivating adulation for their right thinking. An even graver reproach is directed at the doubly inauthentic virtue signaler who neither truly feels any concern about X nor is seeking adulation per se but rather is simply publicly embracing the cause of X to placate the ever-looming social media scolds.

About this I would say two things: 1) this is a pretty weighty judgement to render upon another person and 2) it reveals a good deal of cynicism towards human motivations more generally. Of course, I would be the last person to forsake anyone a healthy skepticism towards human intentions, especially when acting in the public sphere. At the same time I do feel that an overly indulgent cynicism can be paradoxically deleterious to the public sphere in many of the same ways that virtue signalers are purported to be. To consider this point let’s turn the analysis in the other direction to better understand what exactly is being signaled when one employs the term virtue signaling.

Hopefully the previous discussion has gotten us some of the way there. I referred earlier to the phrase being bound up with the pervasive recourse to the realm of meta-commentary. By this I simply mean a commentary about the nature of commentary. I promise I am not trying to just weave webs that obscure, instead I think the notion of meta-commentary sits at the heart of what is exactly is being signaled when the term is used. In short, in indicates an elevated understanding of what is driving someone’s behavior that implies a more sophisticated or global apprehension of what is actually transpiring. In this way, calling someone a virtue signaler signals to others that one is in possession of the virtue of being ‘with it’, or a savvy consumer of the social discourse.

In a sense, it makes the matter of the specific point of advocacy secondary while making the motives of the speaker primary. In this realm of meta-commentary what is actually being advocated recedes from the center while the individual and their motives rise to the fore. To be sure, such a shift could be construed as an ad hominem attack that substitutes a personal critique for one targeting the position advanced. However, I prefer to be charitable in my assessments so let’s assume that lodging the virtue signaler critique is proffered in earnest and intended to convey something of substance.

Even then, the key question is still centers on what exactly does this form of criticism signal about the person invoking it? Well, if nothing else, that such a person is indeed not a virtue signaler themselves. Drawing from our very brief dalliance with existentialism we can distill this down to the claim that the person lodging the virtue signal critique is marking themselves as authentic. Or at least authentic to the extent that they have a more accurate understanding of what is actually ‘going on’ in a particular instance of political or social commentary. This insinuation of a heightened awareness of the very social dynamics and mental processes underpinning a given expression forms both the basis for the term’s attractiveness and the severe pitfalls bound up with it.

It bears noting here that I too find a good deal of behavior that may be termed virtue signaling to be bothersome, particularly when couched in the cadence of sanctimony—an almost universally off-putting disposition. This said, I plan to make the case that the deep integration of terms like virtue signaling or performative into our everyday lexicon tells us quite a bit about the forces afoot in our current politics and society more generally. To be more specific, I think the charge of virtue signaling is closely interlaced with an intellectual disposition that is more harmful than the actual instances of such transgressions.

To some extent, the charge of virtue signaling is closely tied with a central theme running throughout Machiavelli’s (in)famous sixteenth-century political treatise, The Prince. Of course, the work was addressed to princes (or would be princes) but in important ways Machiavelli’s focus on the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ in human affairs presaged the modern age and the kinds of meta-discourse discussed herein. In this way, he advises that:

it is unnecessary for a prince to have all the good qualities I have enumerated, but it is very necessary to appear to have them…For this reason a prince ought to take care that he never lets anything slip from his lips that is not replete with above-named five qualities, that he may appear to him who sees and hears him altogether merciful, faithful, humane, upright, and religious…because it belongs to to everybody to see you, to few to come in touch with you. Everyone sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.

From one angle, this could be construed as folding the virtue signaler in with the disreputable or hyper-cynical advice of Machiavelli and thus joining in the criticism. However, for me the real issue lies more with an adoption of the premises undergirding Machiavelli’s guidance. The suggestion to construct a false persona for public consumption is compatible with his view that in general human beings are “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, [and] covetous.” In this sense, a world riven with virtue signaling and performance is one in which these baser attributes form the underlying material shaping human action in the social world.

Moreover, lodging the critique of virtue signaling strikes me as both on offensive maneuver against the target but also a less perceptible means of striking a defensive posture against the yawning expanse of modern social discourse. While this may not be the overt intention, dismissing someone’s advocacy of a given cause (or virtue) as merely a performance shields one from the risk of being a sucker. Indeed, an abiding fear of being duped or drawn-in based on false premises seems to be an almost innate feature of modern existence.

Such a world view tends to bias our outlooks in a manner that holds conjectures built around dour assessments of humanity as more ‘realistic’ and thus scientifically rigorous. In short, the cynic exchanges trust for insurance against the charge of naïveté. Such an outlook is no doubt tied to a long-running, if often unarticulated, thread running across modern political and economic thought that fuses realism and rationality with an expectation of human self-possession and duplicity.

Certainly, this is one of the lasting legacies of Machiavelli’s (at the time) shocking pronouncements. Indeed, I would contend that a great deal of our social institutions are constructed around such an outlook (and look how well things are turning out!). There is a great deal more that could be added here, but at a minimum maybe it is best to call upon the always riveting moderation of David Hume who points out that while selfishness constitutes an important piece of the human puzzle,

representations of this quality have been carried much too far; and that the descriptions, which certain philosophers delight so much to form of mankind in this particular, are as wide of nature as any accounts of monsters, which we meet with in fables and romances.

Monsters? Fables and romances? Existentialism? Machiavelli and Hume?! I know, this all may seem strangely overwrought, or at a minimum, far too much consideration of what, in most cases, is simply a barb lobbed without much deep consideration. I would certainly acknowledge that this is the case more often than not. However, at the same time, digging into the very turns-of-phrase we employ somewhat thoughtlessly illustrates important features shaping the times. What’s more, the simple fact that such a weighty assessment about another individual’s true feelings and the intimation of inauthenticity are so cavalierly tossed about is quite revealing in and of itself.

But what does it reveal? Well, I would not be so vain as to make any definitive conclusions, but given the conscientiously exploratory nature of the essay (as format) I will propose a few possibilities. To revisit a point made above, my chief contention would be that it is not so much the specific term ‘virtue signaling’ nor the individuals using it, but the nature of the ethical context bound up with such terminology that is at issue. Put differently, it insinuates a very high degree of confidence that one’s interior motivations and exterior behavior are clearly divisible and, even more boldly, that one is able to precisely discern the distinctive operations of one from another (often in a person that is not even known directly). Of course, this does not mean that behaviors that comport with the common understanding of virtue signaling do not occur, indeed they do. Rather, the call here is for more wariness when it comes our own propensities for making clear distinctions between authentic social action and mere performance.

In a speech delivered at Columbia University in 1946, Albert Camus summarizes his suggestions for confronting the crisis of humanity by advising “that one must be modest in one’s thoughts and action.” This line especially struck me in that that term, modesty, has turned up so rarely (if at all) along my journey across modern political and social thought over the last several decades. As our times are driven by a quest for certitude and the corresponding definitive proclamations, words like modesty or humility strike one as oddly discordant or out of step. Camus further goes on to extoll

the Socratic spirit of leniency towards others and strictness towards oneself

From this guidance we can look to another potential suggestion emanating for our meditation of the notion of virtue signaling. Specifically, a consideration of how much our own interior states and external actions are attuned. Or, perhaps even more importantly, the extent to which we are genuinely able to fully glean this even in the realm of our own beings. Such considerations, I believe, would go a long way towards engendering the very Socratic modesty and gentleness that Camus calls us to embrace.

Alas, if we may even struggle ourselves (I certainly do) to clearly distinguish our behaviors that are authentic and those that are performative (certainly a task that has become all the more difficult in the social media era) then we may indeed be more circumspect and, dare I say gentle, in our proclamations about such compatibility, or lack thereof, in others. It bears noting here that I think it is of some import that the charge of virtue signaling or performance is not the exclusive domain of any of the antagonistic parties to what we commonly dub ‘the culture wars’. That perhaps this dour and cynical view of human nature, which intuitively doubles as an assessment of ourselves, is something that we share across political and social divides, to our great detriment.

Recognizing the allure (and entrenchment) of this prevailing recourse to selfishness in the human sciences what could serve as an attractive alternative? Though he was addressing historians and their craft I have a great affinity for E.H. Carr’s stress on the central import of imaginative understanding when evaluating the thoughts and motivations of others, particularly our adversaries. This concept has the merit of calling upon us to channel our most creative mental faculties in pursuit of genuine understanding while, as he notes, avoids the potential for implied agreement bound up with terms like sympathy. Such a notion draws a bridge between the dour study of human affairs and the passion to create, to instantiate abstractions, driving the arts.

I write all this with a healthy appreciation of the depth of the pathologies we are currently pinned beneath and realize that such pining for a modesty-driven politics of mutual care could strike one as naïve. However, as the shovel of cynicism and the quest for a ‘realistic science of humanity’ has played a central role in digging these holes, I am skeptical that it is an implement useful to reversing this course we are on. By contrast, a politics and ethic of modesty countermands these impulses in important ways and thus has a crucial, though certainly not exclusive, role to play in movement towards a different direction. Nor do I think this negates bold and assertive political action. This is not a sermon preaching a retreat into the self, but rather seeks to conjure a strength of the sort described by St. Francis de Sales when he sagely observed that:

There is nothing as strong as tenderness, and nothing as tender as true strength.

So to close I wish to offer my ‘defense’ of virtue signaling. Drawing from the discussion above, I think there is a case to be made that the act of virtue signaling and the cultivation of authentic virtue itself are two sides of the same coin. If we jettison the very notion of a distinct interior and exterior then we are able to posit our conscientious display of certain virtues as an endless series of forays to express and learn, however imperfectly they may represent what we ‘truly’ think or feel. That virtue signaling is just that, a signal like any other to communicate with our fellow beings. Informing someone that they are signaling or acting in ways not fully in accordance with their authentic selves is most likely merely telling them something they already know. Certainly, it may have struck the reader that my critique of virtue signaling as a critique was itself partly an effort to communicate some virtues on my part, to which I would say, guilty as charged.

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