Virtue Signalling Can Be a Good Thing

Virtue signalling is supposed to be a bad thing. And it is. When we post something on social media only in order to show off what great moral beings we are, this is called virtue signalling. The dark side of virtue signalling is that it works by comparison. Posting something that shows what a moral saint you are often has the effect (sometimes the intended effect) of making the reader feel morally inferior.

But virtual signalling can also be a good thing. I am originally from Hungary, and I still have a lot of friends from there who I am in touch with on social media. After the war in Ukraine started, Hungary was flooded with Ukrainian refugees and as the government did very little to help them, people had to take things into their own hands. Many people opened the doors of their own houses to the refugees. And of course they posted about it. Some of my old friends who were among the most selfish people I have ever encountered started posting photos of Ukrainian refugees in their living room and around their kitchen table. Of course, it's possible that they have changed for the better over the years and they are now not as selfish as they used to be. But I suspect that what happens here is a positive side effect of virtue signalling.

These days of multimedia content, quality virtue signalling implies having to actually act virtuously. After all, nobody likes social media posts without visuals anymore, and virtue signalling with a photo or video only works if there is something to virtue signal about, that you can take a photo or video of. If you don't want to interact with Ukrainian refugees, there won't be a snapshot of Ukrainian refugees in your living room.

Human nature is not great. We have so many flaws. The propensity to virtue signal is just one of them. And it is really quite remarkable when a flaw in human nature can be harnessed to lead to positive consequences. Virtue signalling is a vice. But it has the virtuous byproduct of driving us to actually help people. So we are performing good deeds as a result of a vice. We are behaving unselfishly because without that, the genuinely selfish act of virtue signalling wouldn't work.

Does this make the help of my more selfish Hungarian friends genuinely good acts? Ethical theories differ on this point, but I'm pretty sure that the Ukrainian refugee families, who get to have somewhere to sleep as a result, don't really care.