Virtue signalling got a bad name during the woke years. It is associated with behaviour designed to make you look morally superior and, as such, it is synonymous with insincerity or naivety.
Think of tech companies flying rainbow flags outside their offices as they dismantled legal and democratic institutions for economic gain. Or think of universities deplatforming controversial speakers while proclaiming to uphold freedom of inquiry.
But not all virtue signalling is hypocritical. Committing publicly to a moral standpoint can encourage someone to act on their stated position. Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez provides an example. He broke ranks with EU leaders by publicly criticising the US-Israeli war on Iran and has backed up his words with a decision to withdraw Spain’s ambassador to Israel. Whether or not you agree with the decision, one can see how signposting virtue increases the likelihood of concrete action.
Within the Trump administration, the definition of virtue is quite different. Secretary of war Pete Hegseth demonstrates his virtue by posting workout videos and images of him doing push ups and lifting weights. At the same time, he fantasises about bombing enemies with an intensity beyond “politically correct wars of the past”. It seems like the more he shows off his muscles, the more bloodthirsty he becomes.
READ MORE
Virtue signalling serves as a “commitment device” in the words of Leda Berio, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at UCD. It can, she says, have the “consequence ... of changing our own mental states and possibly scaffolding moral growth”. Or, indeed, moral decline. Berio explains further as this week’s Unthinkable guest.
Social media is full of judgy comments but why do we express moral viewpoints at all? Is it to persuade others, or is something else going on?
Berio says: “Virtue signalling is itself a quite loaded term. Sometimes we do make these declarations to persuade others ... but some philosophers have pointed out that these public declarations can shape the public discussion for the better: they help us normalise innovative ideas that would otherwise be too far from the status quo to get momentum.
“In my own work, I have also argued that we do something else: sometimes, we shape our own identity by making our commitments public. We project models of the social agents we would like to be, and adapt ourselves to conform to that model, because the stakes are now higher. People are watching us, and the way we tell others about ourselves inevitably ends up being part of how we see, evaluate, interpret our own identity and decisions. So our public expressions of virtue can be good for us – and make us better.
“Of course this does not eliminate all the risks. For example, we aspire to being anti-racist: but we should not end up identifying being anti-racist with occasionally posting against racism on social media. There is more to it than that.”
Publicising your moral commitments also carries a risk that you’ll stubbornly cling to positions that are no longer justifiable. How do you avoid that trap?
“One of my favourite quotes is by the [American prisons system] activist Mariame Kaba: hope is a discipline. She thinks being hopeful is not about having a specific feeling, it is about believing in social change despite the evidence being against us ... I think this is a form of good stubbornness: it is transformative, it is productive. Idealists, revolutionaries are stubborn: they resist material conditions.
“Then there is a different kind of stubbornness, which does not resist the world, but rather resists people. It feeds on our many biases ... We might want to stick to a reasonably challenged opinion for a variety of reasons: to simply save face, for example. It is not always, but often, also a matter of identity. For this latter kind of stubbornness, I think a productive approach might be what Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones recommends: abandon what she calls ‘arrogant perception’ and try to ‘travel to the world’ of others.”
As you suggest, there are good and bad forms of stubbornness. Is there a way of telling whether someone is showing moral courage rather than closed-mindedness?
“An Aristotelian look at these themes would entail that we can identify a happy medium between being excessively concerned with others’ opinions – swayed constantly by what others think – and being, on the other hand, so entrenched in our own opinions and perspective that we become blind to any different point of view.
[ In Ireland, we’ll talk about anything except the meaning of lifeOpens in new window ]
“One possible way to look at it might be in terms of self-possession. Philosopher Adam Sandel has a book on how the self-possessed person is the one that relates to others meaningfully and attentively but also remains sure-footed on their own beliefs and system; they resist the pressure of social conformity. I think a useful element to add to this is curiosity, the way Rutgers’ philosopher Daniela Dover describes it, as a process of discovery that is valuable per se, independently of what it brings to.
“Here is a way to think about it: moral courage does not prevent you from engaging meaningfully with others and their perspectives but close-mindedness does. A curious mind can be courageous and loyal to its moral convictions but in valuing being challenged by others – in seeking to understand as well as being understood – it will necessarily avoid being entrenched in its convictions.”
