Virtue Signalling to Signal Trustworthiness, Avoid Distrust, and Scaffold Self-Trust

ABSTRACT

Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke argue that virtue signalling – saying things in order to improve or protect your moral reputation – has a range of bad consequences and that as such there is a strong moral presumption against engaging in it. I argue that virtue signalling also has a range of good consequences, and that as such there is no default presumption either for or against engaging in it. Following from this, I argue that given that virtue signalling is sometimes bad and sometimes good, we should avoid virtue signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be bad, and we should press on with signalling when we can be confident that the consequences will be good. For the most part, I focus on three good consequences that are related to trusting dispositions: signalling trustworthiness, avoiding distrust, and scaffolding self-trust. I also highlight some additional positive consequences that are unrelated to trust.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtue signalling
• trustworthiness
• distrust
• self-trust

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Tosi and Warmke use the label ‘grandstanding’ rather than ‘virtue signalling’. They give two reasons for this (2020b). Firstly, they say that whereas virtue signalling can come in a strong form – ‘someone is saying or doing something because (they think) it signals virtue’ – and a weak form – ‘someone is saying or doing something that happens to signal virtue’ – grandstanding only comes in a strong form. This implies that grandstanding is a subset of virtue signalling. Secondly, Tosi and Warmke say that virtue signalling suggests that one is trying to signal virtue, which is an excellence of character. The grandstander, by contrast, doesn’t necessarily want their audience to think they’re of excellent character; rather, they might just want others to think that they’re a minimally decent person. But the way the term ‘virtue signalling’ is popularly used is not to pick out someone’s attempt to communicate possession of some philosophers’ notion of excellence of character (nor is that how Tosi and Warmke define it), rather it’s used to pick out someone’s attempt to communicate that they are morally impressive in some way, including ways that fall short of being of excellent character. Thus ‘virtue signalling’ is not ambiguous in this way. I’ll stick with ‘virtue signalling’ because it’s the more familiar term and is the term that’s used in the recent literature spawned by Tosi and Warmke’s arguments. See, e.g. Levy (2021), Westra (2021), and Hill and Garner (2021).

2. See also Coady, Tosi, and Warmke (2017) for discussion of this point.

3. See Lawford-Smith and Tuckwell (2020) for discussion of the difference-making problem for consequentialism.

4. The argument in this section builds on the argument that I made in Tuckwell (2019), which is the predecessor of this article. I should note the similarities and differences between my argument in this section and a recent argument made by Neil Levy (2021). Whereas Tosi and Warmke argue that virtue signalling undermines a core function of moral talk, Levy convincingly argues that a function of moral talk is to solve coordination problems by signalling our commitment to certain norms, thereby marking ourselves out as trustworthy co-operators, and helping us to secure the benefits of social co-operation. My argument in this section overlaps with Levy’s in that I also claim that virtue signalling is a way to signal trustworthiness and facilitate co-operation. However, I go further than Levy in suggesting that virtue signalling is a way to fulfil obligations to signal. I also respond to two objections that virtue signalling can be a way to signal trustworthiness and situate the argument within the philosophical literature on trustworthiness.

5. Jones (2012) has a different account of trustworthiness from Hawley’s. On Jones’s account trustworthiness requires having a particular motivation. The trustworthy agent is disposed to act on another’s behalf because they’re being counted on to do so. On Hawley’s account, no particular kind of motivation is required. The concept of rich trustworthiness can be paired with any account of trustworthiness. Jones’s formulation of rich trustworthiness takes it to be a relation that obtains between two agents: ‘B is richly trustworthy with respect to A … ’ (2012, 74). In the Rashford case, rich trustworthiness is a relation that obtains between an agent, Rashford, and the numerous different agents who receive his signal. Thus it’s more accurate to say that in virtue signalling Rashford was globally richly trustworthy: ‘For all agents, B is globally richly trustworthy to the extent that (i) B is willing and able to reliably signal to others those domains in which B is competent and willing to take the fact that others are counting on her, were they to do so, to be a compelling reason for acting as counted on and (ii) there are some domains in which she will be responsive to others’ dependency’ (Alfano and Huijts 2020, 2–3). Global rich trustworthiness is a generalization of rich trustworthiness that measures not only how B is disposed to some particular agent, but how B is disposed to a range of agents.

6. Another interesting possibility here is that a collection of virtue signals that are each individually cheap to produce add up to being costly enough to signal trustworthiness. I only mention this possibility in a footnote since even if it is correct, there is a difference-making issue that means it does not provide a consequentialist reason to virtue signal.

7. For helpful comments and discussion I would like to thank Mark Alfano, Tony Coady, Stephanie Collins, Ten Herng-Lai, Karen Jones, Holly Lawford-Smith, Sun Liu, and Kate Phelan. I would also like to thank audiences at the Trust in a Digital Age Workshop at the Australian National University and at the online Philosophy & Activism Workshop convened by David Killoren and Amy McKiernan. This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship and a Society for Applied Philosophy Postdoctoral Research Grant.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Society for Applied Philosophy.

Notes on contributors

William Tuckwell

William Tuckwell is a postdoctoral research fellow at Charles Sturt University in Australia. He recently completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne. He works in epistemology and social and political philosophy. His work has been published in Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, The Oxford Handbook of Consequentialism, and the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective.