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Is virtue signalling a perversion of morality?

Rejected submission by aristarchus at 2019-11-30 07:44:18 from the SoylentPerversionsOfMorality.exe dept.
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You know, it may be doing this to even mention this, but I think it is of service to the Soylentil Community to offer up the thoughts of philosophers, of which I am one, on questions that plague our on-line community. So here is a in depth and philosophical treatment of "virtue signalling". I trust some of you will immediately logout, to avoid self-incrimination.

The article is to be found at Aeon.co [aeon.co], which is not such a bad place.

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. 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).

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

Here we go. Posers, or prophets? Not sure how it will turn out.

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

Oh, burn! Exactly what you are trying to do is the exact opposite of what, well, the intention, and well, "Squirrels"!!!!

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. 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’. 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. 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.

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

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

Well, as Capt Mal Reynolds and TMB would say, "There it is."

Virtue signalling is virtue. Moral superiority. The High ground. Non-khallow and definitely not TMB.

The take away? Let me show you my tail-feathers, you perverse Soylentils!

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. 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. While some virtue signallers might be hypocritical, the majority probably are not. So on the whole, virtue signalling has its place in moral discourse, and we shouldn’t be so ready to denigrate it.

[Eds, feel free to reject this. I have no more faith in you, and no expectation of anything but continued censorship. So just reject this. Don't even give me a reason, I know, as you know, that just being an aristarchus submission is enough. You will all burn in Azumi's hell, at least one of them.]


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