Abstract
A novel account of virtue signaling and what makes it bad has recently been offered by Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke. Despite plausibly vindicating the folk?s conception of virtue signaling as a bad thing, their account has recently been attacked by both Neil Levy and Evan Westra. According to Levy and Westra, virtue signaling actually supports the aims and progress of public moral discourse. In this paper, we rebut these recent defenses of virtue signaling. We suggest that virtue signaling only supports the aims of public moral discourse to the extent it is an instance of a more general phenomenon that we call norm signaling. We then argue that, if anything, virtue signaling will undermine the quality of public moral discourse by undermining the evidence we typically rely on from the testimony and norm signaling of others. Thus, we conclude, not only is virtue signaling not needed, but its epistemological effects warrant its bad reputation.
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Notes
One could, of course, grandstand in non-moral ways (for example, when, after hitting a homerun, a major league baseball player flips his bat and slowly rounds the bases). Our focus will be on moral grandstanding, particularly within the realm of public moral discourse.
It should be noted, however, that Tosi and Warmke have reasons for preferring the term ‘grandstanding’ (Grubbs et al., 2019), and for them ‘virtue signaling’ and ‘grandstanding’ may not always be interchangeable. See Levy (2021, p. 9546, footnote 1) and Westra (2021, p. 157, footnote 3) for more on this issue.
Tosi and Warmke focus on grandstanding expressions that are either written or verbal (2016, p. 202). This makes sense given that they were originally concerned with grandstanding’s negative effect on public moral discourse. However, there can also be grandstanding acts such as when a celebrity makes an appearance at a children’s hospital because of her desire to be recognized as a caring person. Our focus will largely be on grandstanding language, which seems particularly problematic due to its low cost. Talk is cheap, whereas action requires time or money and, as a result, is costly to fake.
Note that this desire may be witting (that is, conscious to the grandstander) or unwitting (that is, an unconscious desire) (Tosi & Warmke, 2020, p. 173).
Tosi and Warmke make a similar but two-parted distinction in one of their responses to a PEA soup blog post, see (Coady et al., 2017).
This holds—perhaps to a lesser extent—for the half-hearted grandstander as well.
Here it is worth noting that, as in the case of virtue signaling, norm signaling may come in a variety of forms. One may norm signal merely by avowing belief in a given norm. Alternatively, one may norm signal by performing a costly act associated with upholding the norm (as we will see in the religious cases below). In each case, what norm signaling ultimately signals is that one is confident in or accepts a given norm. The evidence others take from this, though–as, again, in the case of virtue signaling–may depend on the form of norm signaling in question, as we’ll see below. More generally, what is important here is that for any form of virtue signaling, there is a form of norm signaling with all the same features except for the recognition desire. And so, more specifically, for any case of virtue signaling that Levy appeals to (whether it involves actual acceptance of a norm, a given amount of confidence in an expressed belief, a willingness to pay a cost, etc.), we can imagine a case of norm signaling with all the same relevant features but without the recognition desire. We thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing us to clarify here.
In fact, Jesus tells his followers not to virtue signal: “Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men” (Matthew 6:2).
We thank two referees for helping us with these points about cumulative benefits and harms.
For example, if the person who would otherwise respond tentatively in Directions was significantly motivated to impress you by providing directions, she may answer differently despite her evidence being exactly the same.
We would like to thank Thomas Mulligan for help with this point.
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Hill, J., Fanciullo, J. What’s wrong with virtue signaling?. Synthese 201, 117 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04131-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04131-4