Is Virtue signalling a perversion of morality?

Aeon has an article of this title. I will first present my own position before examining that of the author's.

Signals are either protocol bound or they aren’t really signals. Credibility, i.e. overall Reception, has to do with the ‘extensional’ content of the signal and is determined contextually. Thus in considering the question ‘is virtue signalling a perversion of morality?’ we need to distinguish between protocol observance, on the one hand, and the broader, contextual, question of the gestalt of reception.

Suppose there is an overlapping consensus of an extensional sort re. virtue signalling such that this activity can be represented by a non empty set. Suppose further that there is a similar non empty set for the reception of ‘perversion of morality’. Now consider elements common to them. How might we categorize them? Firstly some ‘virtues’ may be ‘perversions of morality’ as might some ‘signals’. Wanting to kill people of a particular Faith is not a virtue. Wanting to protect such people is virtuous but signalling this only by incessant farting in a crowded lift would be considered a perversion of morality. Most of what is commonly termed ‘virtue signalling’ is of one or both of these types. The Virtue is not a virtue and the signal is a nuisance simply.

What of something everybody considers virtuous whose signal is itself pleasant and welcome? Could it be a ‘perversion of morality’. Certainly. It is virtuous to give to the poor. It is pleasant and welcome to be hugged and kissed by an attractive person. But it is a perversion of morality to get attractive young people to go around hugging and kissing strangers so as to raise money for charity. Why? Hugs and kisses are morally valuable because they signal a deep concern and affection for the recipient. Being hugged and kissed makes you want to be a better person- which is why my parents spent a lot of time in this sort of activity though, sadly, in my case, they failed utterly.

We may say, that being loved is a ‘first order good’. A signal that one is loved is ‘second order’. Its moral value arises in terms of increasing a preference towards a ‘first order good’. The big problem with such ‘virtue signalling’ as corresponds to an actual virtue and a properly crafted signal is that it has a crowding out effect. The production of the ‘second order good’ diverts resources from the production of the ‘first order good.’ Sadly this is what has happened to Moral Philosophy. Derek Parfit, Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbam, Peter Singer- there are so many people who have wasted our time and used up scarce resources which ought to have been used for the creation of the ‘first order goods’ they claim they want to see. This is a perversion of morality. It ignores the fact that mimetic effects swamp analytical effects because information processing is costly and Knightian Uncertainty is ubiquitous. Doing good silently is more effective than lecturing about why we ought to do good. Consider the Edhi foundation in Pakistan. It was started by a refugee who began looking after the sick. Others copied him. This was pure Tardean mimetics of a moral sort. By contrast, there are plenty of sub-continental Professors at Ivy League gassing on about Rawls or Levinas or ‘Effective altruism’. Consider the downfall of Abraaj Capital whose founder, a class mate of mine, teamed up with Bill & Melinda Gates’s foundation to use private equity to help poor countries meet the UN’s sustainable development goals. Gates discovered his Foundation had been cheated. His former partner in ‘sustainable development’ is facing extradition to the US on fraud charges. It seems that ‘effective altruism’ isn’t really effective at all. Meanwhile the work of Abdul Sattar Edhi- a refugee with little formal education- goes on because mimetics has a genuine moral effect. By contrast, an analytical approach to Morality is what is caricatured in ‘The Good Place’. Clearly, there is a ‘Kavka’s toxin’ here. Even if your training is analytical, follow the herd who drain Christ’s bitter cup- because it wasn’t, it isn’t, it will never be, bitter at all.

I suppose there was a time in the past when organized Religion exercised an unwholesome influence in the Academy. One can’t blame those who resented this. Yet, surely, our contemporary campuses are very different. They may feature witch-hunts and Inquisitions but the Clergy are more likely to be victims than perpetrators. Needless to say, from the point of view of ‘the City of God’, this is a wholly welcome development.

Consider the following proposition- ‘the animal who ignores a nearby intruder not only communicates to group members its belief that the intruder isn’t dangerous, but does so in a way that certifies the sincerity of the communication’.

There is no signal here. Why? The animal’s hardwired protocols for registering a threat have not been activated. If it is wrong, it gets killed and the herd runs off. Presumably, this species has not invested in a protocol for assessing the quality of each other’s signals because agents with defective protocols or poor reception get eaten while the others survive to graze another day.

It is tempting to compare members of a religious congregation to a flock of sheep. Indeed, this is precisely how the Bible describes the layperson. The Minister is the good shepherd in imitation of Christ. Christianity, like other major Religions- or, indeed, any Institution regulated by juristic processes- accepts certain types of certification of signals without questioning the motive of the certifyer. This is perfectly rational. We may feel an atavistic- a pagan- shudder of disgust when we read that the Priest who christened our child has been arrested for a horrible crime. It turns out the man was never a Christian but had simply played the part so as to more easily prey upon the vulnerable. However, Canon Law tells us that even a hypocritical and sociopathic priest can validly baptize. In other words, the signal is properly certified because a fault in the certifier does not reflect in any way upon the signaller.

Religion does not itself see signalling and screening behavior as compromized by the quality of certification. All that matters is that the protocols were observed. But this is also the case with any protocol bound juristic process. I may say ‘you are not a true Christian because xyz’ but this statement of mine has no soteriological effect whatsoever. Priests are advised to avoid ‘calumnia’ or otherwise giving ‘scandal’- the word signifies a ‘stumbling-block’- to the faithful but if they do so they do not automatically lose their priestly powers. On the other hand, there is a juristic process of excommunication which, however, may be radically unfair to our eyes. Yet, this is true of every law-bound branch of life.

Signalling and screening devices arise in coordination and discoordination games respectively. Regret minimization, as an evolutionarily stable strategy, requires hedging on discoordination games such that there is Baldwinian ‘channelization’ on the basis of ‘cheap talk’ pooling equilibria as well as ‘separating equilibiria’ corresponding to a more or less costly to acquire signal. This could be thought of as the damming of ‘capacitance diversity’. However, only the future fitness landscape decides whether either cheap talk or costly signals where indeed ‘virtuous’. Is this all we can say? No. We can identify ‘structural causal models’ and differentiate signals on the basis of whether they arise in a first order manner or are second order simply. Let us have no truck with the latter. By their fruit ye shall know them- not their fawning Festschrifts.

To conclude, I feel that virtue signalling is morally pernicious. A person doing first order good may become a mimetic target but that is not her fault. She is doing something which some other people receive as a signal. But she did not emit a signal. This is a purely ‘reception’ effect. Our ‘reception’ apparatus may itself be morally unsound. I come from a country where any charlatan with a long beard and a turban can amass money and, quite literally (till very recently) get away with murder. It is for this reason that my favorite mystic was clean shaven. He suggested that white beards are dyed in semen. Literary savants consider this rather coarse statement- which customary morality condemns- to have a salutary moral purpose. This is the trouble with the Moral Sciences (of which Economics was once a branch). A coarse phrase overheard in the street may do more to lead you to metanoia than the paranoia inducing homiletics of the great and good.

Let us know turn to Prof. Neil Levy's article.

 People engage in moral talk all the time. When they make moral claims in public, one common response is to dismiss them as virtue signallers.

 'Moral claims are normative—and any moral claim will either be a moral value claim or a moral prescriptive claim.' In other words, a moral claim is of the form 'x is bad' or 'x must not be done'. Signalling one has a virtue, however, would take the form 'I think x is yucky' or 'I hate it when people do x'.

Twitter is full of these accusations: the actress Jameela Jamil is a ‘pathetic virtue-signalling twerp’, according to the journalist Piers Morgan; climate activists are virtue signallers, according to the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research; vegetarianism is virtue signalling, according to the author Bjorn Lomborg (as these examples illustrate, the accusation seems more common from the Right than the Left).

The accusation here is that a nuisance is being created for a self-aggrandizing reason. These people aren't really saying 'x is bad' or 'x must be prohibited'. Indeed, they might find it very inconvenient if Society deemed x to be bad and prohibited that activity.

A snobbish person may say 'I think the proles smell bad. I wish the entire working class would just disappear from the earth'. We may suspect that the snob's own family isn't of any very exalted status. Even if this were not the case, we know the snob would be greatly inconvenienced if the working class ceased to exist.

Accusing someone of virtue signalling is to accuse them of a kind of hypocrisy.

Not necessarily. The snob may genuinely hate working class people. What we are saying is that the snob is not making a moral claim at all. She is simply advertising her own superior breeding and delicacy of constitution.

The accused person claims to be deeply concerned about some moral issue but their main concern is – so the argument goes – with themselves. They’re not really concerned with changing minds, let alone with changing the world, but with displaying themselves in the best light possible.

This is the crux of the matter. But hypocrisy need not play a part. After all, 'acting' (which is what the word originally meant) is a useful skill. At work, I make a conscious effort to appear of better class and education and technical expertise than I actually am. No one thinks me a hypocrite. I am acting out of rational self-interest in a way which best serves my employer.

As the journalist James Bartholomew (who claimed in 2015 to have invented the phrase, but didn’t) puts it in The Spectator, virtue signalling is driven by ‘vanity and self-aggrandisement’, not concern with others.

It may be driven purely by rational self-interest. Furthermore, it may be required of you by the Law or the Code of Conduct of your Profession or the Institution you work for.

Ironically, accusing others of virtue signalling might itself constitute virtue signalling – just signalling to a different audience.

How is that 'ironic'? It is what we would expect. Journalists are paid to pander to certain types of audience. The fact that a guy does the job he is paid to do represents no irony whatsoever.

Whether it should be counted as virtue signalling or not, the accusation does exactly what it accuses others of: it moves the focus from the target of the moral claim to the person making it. It can therefore be used to avoid addressing the moral claim made.

Nonsense! The moral claim 'x is a virtue signaller' does not entail any moral claim re. whatever cause it is that x is espousing.  Thus Islamists condemned Saddam Hussein for pretending to be a Syed intent on making his country more Islamic. Why? It is because Saddam wasn't a true Muslim at all. He was faking a virtue he very conspicuously did not possess.

 Here, though, I want to consider a different issue. In the only full treatment of the topic in the academic literature (that I know of), the philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke accuse the ‘moral grandstander’ (their term for the virtue signaller) of perverting the function of public moral discourse.

Moral grandstanding is different from virtue signalling. Tosi and Warmke say ''To grandstand is to turn one's contribution to public discourse into a vanity project.' Clearly one must already have a secure place in public discourse- by reason of the office one holds or generally accepted authority and influence one wields- in order to 'grandstand'. By contrast, everybody can- or may be forced to- virtue signal.

According to them, ‘the core, primary function that justifies the practice’ of such public moral discourse is ‘to improve people’s moral beliefs, or to spur moral improvement in the world’.

By contrast virtue signalling may be required to show compliance or subjugation.

Public moral talk aims to get others to see a moral problem they hadn’t noticed before, and/or to do something about it. But, instead, virtue signallers display themselves, taking the focus away from the moral problem.

They may need to display themselves in a particular light to thrive in their profession or social milieu.

Since we often spot virtue signalling for what it is, the effect is to cause cynicism in the audience, rather than to induce them to think the signaller is so great. As a result, virtue signalling ‘cheapens’ moral discourse.

Virtue signalling may have nothing to do with moral discourse. Its sole purpose may be to display subjugation and compliance.

 But Tosi and Warmke offer no evidence for their claim that the primary, or the justifying, function of moral discourse is improvement in other people’s beliefs or in the world.

Evidence is not necessary because the claim is reasonable and fits the 'structural causal model' we already have because lived experience has strongly confirmed it for us ever since we first learned to talk.  Thus when my computer fails to work, I speak of it as a bad computer. My family, sick and tired of listening to me scold the computer, suggest I send it to a Computer Repair shop where it will be persuaded to behave better.

That’s certainly a function of moral discourse, but it’s not the only one (as they recognise).

Probably because they get paid for chewing up and spitting out the pabulum of 'moral discourse' for Credential seeking cretins.

Perhaps, in fact, virtue signalling, or something like it, is a core function of moral discourse.

Which is a good reason to avoid the thing like the plague.

Signalling is very common in nature. The peacock’s tail, for instance, is a signal of evolutionary fitness.

No. It is a sign of 'relative fitness' but reduced 'absolute fitness' and results from a 'Fisherian runaway' based on a heritable quirk in females which however initially increased their reproductive fitness which caused their daughters to have a 'sexy son' preference. Where humans dominate they may protect peacocks for religious or aesthetic reasons.

It’s what biologists call an honest signal, because it’s hard to fake.

 Peacocks being notorious cheats. Come to think of it, my computer was probably assembled by peacocks. It isn't a genuine iMac at all! Fuck you peacocks!

It takes a lot of resources to build a tail like that, and the better the signal – the bigger and brighter the tail – the more resources must have been devoted to it.

Unlike the shoddy components those cheating peacocks used to build my fake iMac.

Stotting – a behaviour seen in some animals, involving leaping straight up in the air, with all legs held stiffly – is probably also an honest signal of fitness. 

The gazelle who stotts vigorously demonstrates to potential predators that it’s going to be hard work to run it down, which might lead the predators to look for easier prey.

This is the Zahavi handicap theory. It is an example of a correlated equilibrium which is mutually beneficial.

Humans also engage in signalling: wearing an expensive suit and a Rolex watch is a hard-to-fake signal of wealth and might help to communicate that you’re a suitable trading partner or a desirable mate.

Humans have 'theory of mind' and thus signalling is much more complicated. Bill Gates doesn't bother with an expensive suit because he knows we know he is as wealthy as Croesus.

In the cognitive science of religion, it is common to identify two kinds of signals. There are costly signals and credibility-enhancing displays.

There is no 'cognitive science of religion'- there is only worthless shitheads running a Credentialized Ponzi Scheme.

The peacock’s tail is a costly signal: it takes a lot of energy to build it and drag it around, and it gets in the way when fleeing predators. Credibility-enhancing displays are behaviours that would be costly if they weren’t honest: for example, the animal who ignores a nearby intruder not only communicates to group members its belief that the intruder isn’t dangerous, but does so in a way that certifies the sincerity of the communication because, if the intruder was dangerous, the signalling animal itself would be at risk.

I have previously dealt with this point.

Lots of religious behaviour can be understood as costly and credibility-enhancing signalling. Religions mandate many behaviours that are costly: fasting, tithing, abstinence from sex except in certain contexts, and so on. All of these behaviours are costly not only in everyday terms, but also in evolutionary terms: they reduce opportunities for reproduction, resources for offspring, and so on. Religious activities are also credibility-enhancing displays of religious belief: no one would pay these costs unless they really believed that there was a payoff.

Nonsense! Religions recognize a principle of 'economia'- or discretionary and pragmatic governance- such that protocol bound 'akrebia' is depassed. Thus the Church is always willing to condone anything if it is its interest to do so.

Speaking generally, the big Religions only require compliance not Faith.

Why, from an evolutionary point of view, would someone signal religious commitment?

For the same reason they would signal any other sort of commitment- access to a 'high trust' network where contract enforcement costs fall thus enabling economic activity to burgeon.

A likely explanation is that the function is to secure the benefits of cooperation. Cooperation with others is often a risky activity: there is the constant possibility that the other person will free-ride or cheat, making off with the benefits without paying the costs. The more complex the social group, and the easier it is to move between groups, the higher the risks: whereas in small groups we can keep track of who is honest and reliable, in a large group or when interacting with strangers, we can’t rely on reputation.

This is not a problem for open market transactions or contracts of adhesion. It is only 'incomplete contracts' which require 'strains of commitment'.

Signalling helps to overcome the problem.

No. Screening overcomes the problem. Costly signals lower screening costs and thus enable 'separating equilibria'.

The religious person signals her commitment to a code, at least of cooperating with the ingroup. She signals her virtue. Her signal is, by and large, an honest signal. It is hard to fake, and religious groups can keep track of the reputation of their members if not of everyone else, since the pool is so much smaller. This kind of explanation has been invoked to explain the prominence of Quaker business people in the early years of the industrial revolution. These Quakers trusted one another, in part because involvement with the Society of Friends was an honest signal of willingness to abide by codes of ethics.

Quakers were trusted by non-Quakers. That's why they succeeded once the Economy became increasingly Market based. Zoroastrians in Iran were despised but trusted. They started to do well once Modern Education and Modern Commercial methods spread in that country.

Religious signalling is already moral signalling.

No. There are many Religions which are not 'universal' in that they do not proselytize nor think that restrictions that apply to them should apply to everybody. Furthermore, orthopraxy and true descent- not moral behavior may be the sine qua non of membership in the Faith.

It is hardly surprising that, as societies secularise, more secular moral claims come to play the same role.

Secular moral claims predate all known religious moral claims for Scriptural Religions.

Virtue signalling is supposed to be signalling to the ingroup: it shows that we are, by their lights, ‘respectable’ (in Tosi and Warmke’s word).

No. It is signalling directed against the out-group. That is why we think it a nuisance.

That’s not a perversion of the function of morality; it is moral discourse playing one of its central roles.

How? If people change their views as result of a signal, or if the world changes because of it, they don't call it a 'virtue signal'. They speak of it as a Revelation.

If such virtue signalling is a central – and justifying – function of public moral discourse, then the claim that it perverts this discourse is false.

If a dog were a cat then nobody in their right mind would call it a dog. If virtue signalling is generally received as a worthwhile contribution to public moral discourse- in that our beliefs or the world has improved as a result- nobody in their right mind would dismiss it as 'virtue signalling'.

I may say, 'Bill Gates is actually a hobo. He gives billions to charity simply to disguise the fact that he is a smelly homeless dude who survives by giving blow jobs at the truck stop.' Who would believe me? Nobody at all.

What about the hypocrisy claim?
The accusation that virtue signalling is hypocritical might be cashed out in two different ways.

Nonsense! It cashes out in only one way- the guy doing it is just play-acting.

We might mean that virtue signallers are really concerned with displaying themselves in the best light – and not with climate change, animal welfare or what have you.

In which case we would say 'virtue signalling is vainglorious' not 'virtue signalling is hypocritical'.

That is, we might question their motives. In their recent paper, the management scholars Jillian Jordan and David Rand asked if people would virtue signal when no one was watching.

Sure- actors recite their lines and strike attitudes so as to prepare themselves for their appearance on stage. However, it is likely that they will put more passion and effort into their role when they know important people are watching. This is not to say that actors- amateur or professional- might not recite a monologue just for the fun of it.

What Jordan & Rand were saying (though their methodology was classic 'junk Social Science) was this ' Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers.

This is nonsense. There has never been a Society where the hangman has been considered a particularly trustworthy fellow. Indeed, in the old days, the fellow wore a mask and made sure that his neighbors remained ignorant of his dreadful avocation.

There are, it is true, plenty of sociopaths who clamor for jobs where they can inflict 'moralistic punishments'. Indeed, some would pay for the privilege. In general, this is a good reason to deny them such employment. It is likely that their sadism will increase and that, sooner or later, they will break the law so as to sate their blood-lust.

However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching?

Punishing others can feel oh! so good. Some people will pay to do it

We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation concerns can shape moralistic outrage and punishment even in one-shot anonymous interactions.

This is a foolish argument. It says 'people are stupid'. They know there is no reputational advantage but, by reason of stupidity, have a 'heuristic' that they should ignore this knowledge.

It would be more sensible to say that these people are reducing cognitive dissonance by acting as if they were being observed. Pretending that there is a 'heuristic' of a stupid sort is silly. People who have such heuristics would not be able to cross the road safely when no one was watching. Thus they would already have died under the wheels of a truck.

We then support this account using data from Amazon Mechanical Turk. In anonymous experiments, subjects (total n = 8,440) report more outrage in response to others’ selfishness when they cannot signal their trustworthiness through direct prosociality (sharing with a third party)—such that if the interaction were not anonymous, punishment would have greater signaling value.

But this suggests there is a reputational advantage in being merciful!

Furthermore, mediation analyses suggest that sharing opportunities reduce outrage by influencing reputation concerns.

This 'mediation analysis' is not just Junk Social Science, it is acutely imbecilic! What is the structural causal model here? Is it not that we like to be seen as merciful? Equally, there is a free-rider element. Why have 'moral outrage' when someone else can shoulder that burden?

The fact is what other guys in some stupid Social Psy experiment think of you doesn't matter in the slightest. Your reputation depends on stuff you do for yourself or useful stuff you do for others. Being known as a guy who drools over the prospect of punishing some other poor sinner isn't good for your reputation- unless you are actually part of a Mafia gang. 

Prof Levy is not calling out Jordan & Rand for their stupidity. He says-

They found that their participants’ responses were sensitive to opportunities for signalling: after a moral violation was committed, the reported degree of moral outrage was reduced when the participants had better opportunities to signal virtue. But the entire experiment was anonymous, so no one could link moral outrage to specific individuals. This suggests that, while virtue signalling is part (but only part) of the explanation for why we feel certain emotions, we nevertheless genuinely feel them, and we don’t express them just because we’re virtue signalling.

The trouble here is that what Jordan & Rand report is that the 'virtue' being signalled is 'mercy' whereas when there is no opportunity for signalling, then mercilessness is displayed. In other words, two completely different values are at work. We feel one emotion when we are alone. We display something quite different in company. But who does not know this. When I'm alone I scoff the whole pizza. In company, I press others to take a slice though this means there will be less for me. Even small kids display this behavior. I always used to insist that Mummy have first go with my new bow and arrow. I also bought her very nice Spiderman comics for her birthday though, for some unknown reason, she would return them to me for safekeeping. Still, nothing is too good for my dear old Mumsy!

The second way of cashing out the hypocrisy accusation is the thought that virtue signallers might actually lack the virtue that they try to display.

It is obvious that a virtue signaller lacks that virtue- which is why they divert resources from the provision of the 'first order good' in order to invest in a supposedly 'second order' piece of vainglory.

Dishonest signalling is also widespread in evolution. For instance, some animals mimic the honest signal that others give of being poisonous or venomous – hoverflies that imitate wasps, for example. It’s likely that some human virtue signallers are engaged in dishonest mimicry too. But dishonest signalling is worth engaging in only when there are sufficiently many honest signallers for it make sense to take such signals into account.

Nonsense. Evolution does not work that way. An aposematic phenotype may survive long after the mimetic target has disappeared. There are plenty of evolutionary 'spandrels'.

I recall my father making fun of me for wearing jackets with a 'ticket pocket'. Originally, only country folk had this type of pocket. Its appearance in English business suits was a relatively recent innovation of no utility whatsoever. Of course, a genuine Englishman might actually live in a cottage in the country though forced to commute to the City so as to make a living. The 'ticket pocket' was a reminder that once he retired, he could spend his days in tweeds and wellington boots buggering all the sheep in the vicinity. On the other hand, a dark skinned 'Paki' like me had no business aping the sartorial eccentricities of merrie olde English yokels. Anyway, my parents had arranged my marriage with a goat (or so it appeared from the photograph they showed me) rather than a sheep.

While some virtue signallers might be hypocritical, the majority probably are not.

The vast majority of people who have a virtue do 'first order' good on its basis.  That is why it is considered a virtue rather than a nuisance. True, there may be some who are too old or weak or stupid to do 'first order' good. We feel sorry for them and accept the 'second order' good that they are doing because, clearly, it is only their disability which prevents them from the better course of action.

So on the whole, virtue signalling has its place in moral discourse, and we shouldn’t be so ready to denigrate it.

Neither virtue signalling nor denigrating virtue signallers has a place in moral discourse because no actual change in beliefs or the world results from actions.

Moral discourse occurs where a respite must be taken from doing first order good. If it is clear that it arises by reason of a disability, then it may itself be considered a good- albeit of a derivative and 'second order' type. Sadly, Professors of Moral Philosophy aren't doing any first or second order good whatsoever. They are advertising their own imbecility and the worthlessness of those who, careerist or not, seek Credentials from their Ponzi Scheme.