Virtue Signalling

The concept of performative morality is old. François de la Rochefoucauld wrote in the 17th century that "hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue"5. But the specific phrase "virtue signalling" is a product of the 2010s.

The Oxford English Dictionary records its earliest known appearance in a 2013 article in the *Vancouver Sun*3. Boston Globe columnist Mark Peters traced isolated uses back to at least 2004, though these early instances never gained traction2.

The term's breakout came on April 18, 2015, when James Bartholomew published "Easy Virtue" in *The Spectator*1. Bartholomew described a pattern he saw everywhere: people publicly declaring approved opinions to establish moral credentials without doing anything that required effort or sacrifice. He pointed to Whole Foods posters proclaiming "values matter," to BBC presenters attacking UKIP to prove they weren't racist, and to people who announced "I hate the *Daily Mail*!" as shorthand for caring about the poor1. The core insight, as Bartholomew put it, was that "virtue signalling does not require actually doing anything virtuous"6.

What made the phrase sticky was its precision. Bartholomew framed moral posturing as a "positional good" in economic terms, something you acquire to differentiate yourself from others1. When George Osborne proposed a £7 minimum wage, you had to demand £8 to maintain your position. If he went to £8, you upped it to £10. The bidding war for moral superiority could spiral away from any genuine concern for the people involved1.

The speed at which "virtue signalling" moved from a single opinion column to global political vocabulary was striking. The OED's addition of the term in 2021, with frequency data showing steady use across major varieties of English, confirmed its place in the modern lexicon3.

The phrase changed how people argue online. Before "virtue signalling" existed, you had to actually engage with someone's moral claim. After it, you could dismiss any expression of concern with two words. Shariatmadari at *The Guardian* warned that this was dangerous: "Anyone who makes an argument that casts them in a good light can be accused of virtue-signalling. Anyone"2. The implication is that sincere moral expression and strategic social positioning can't coexist, when research suggests they almost always do5.

The academic C.S. Lewis quote surfaced repeatedly in discussions of the concept. Lewis argued that we cannot competently evaluate the moral blameworthiness or praiseworthiness of others' actions because we don't know their internal framework6. This insight cuts both ways: we can't know if someone is "really" virtue signalling any more than we can know if they're truly virtuous.

In political practice, the term took on partisan coloring. Though both sides use it, right-leaning outlets adopted it more systematically5. This created a perception that the accusation itself was a conservative rhetorical tool, which in turn made left-leaning users less likely to employ it against out-groups and more likely to deploy it against perceived in-group failures8.

The deeper story of "virtue signalling" is really about how a useful concept got stretched until it became the very thing it was meant to describe.

Bartholomew's 2015 article didn't emerge from nowhere. The idea of cheap moral talk predated his framing by decades. C.S. Lewis, writing in *Mere Christianity*, warned against judging others' moral sincerity based on external actions alone, arguing that "God judges them by their moral choices" while humans can only see the surface6. The *Ordinary Times* blog connected virtue signalling to this older tradition: it's a modern form of the sin of pride, compounded by our poor ability to judge either our own or others' true virtuousness6.

The term gained academic legitimacy quickly. By March 2021, the OED had added "virtue signalling" as an official entry, noting it occurs roughly 0.5 times per million words in modern written English3. The Word Spy site tracked early citations, including one from 2015 where a commentator described Republicans referencing Reagan as a form of virtue signalling on their own side: "Republicans all agree 100 percent that we are pro-Israel, pro-Life, pro-gun. So why do we spend so much time on these issues? It's just pandering"7.

The Colin Kaepernick kneeling protest in 2016 became a defining case study. Kaepernick stated clearly that he was protesting police brutality. A significant group of people decided he was an anti-American radical11. What followed was a counter-wave of virtue signalling from the other direction: "Everyone seemed to compete for the right to proclaim they loved America, stood for the National Anthem, and hated Colin Kaepernick with every fiber of their being"11. The irony was thick. People calling Kaepernick a "virtue-signalling America hater" were themselves virtue signalling about patriotism, nationalism, and their own moral superiority11.

This symmetry became central to academic analysis of the term. In 2019, psychologists Jillian Jordan and David Rand published research in the *Journal of Personality and Social Psychology* showing that even genuine moral outrage is "inherently interwoven with subconscious concerns about reputation"5. Their work challenged the binary framing. The question "Is she genuinely outraged or just virtue signalling?" often had a straightforward answer: both5. Language Log's Mark Liberman connected this to philosopher Harry Frankfurt's theory of bullshit, where the speaker's relationship to truth is one of indifference rather than opposition. But Liberman noted that virtue signallers are usually not indifferent to morality; they just layer social strategy on top of real beliefs5.

Franklin Veaux, writing in 2022, identified a structural asymmetry in how the accusation works across the political spectrum8. Conservatives, who tend to value hierarchical social structures, typically aim the charge at out-groups and opponents. Liberals, who lean toward egalitarian norms, are far more likely to turn the accusation on their own members for perceived failures to uphold group standards8. This explains the "eating their own" pattern visible in progressive subcommunities, where using the wrong terminology or displaying insufficient commitment to causes can trigger intense backlash from within8.

Veaux cited a telling example: when a woman complained on Tumblr that polyamorous people using "poly" made it harder to search for Polynesian content, parts of the polyamory community turned viciously on members who used the term8. This infighting, driven by a desire to demonstrate commitment to marginalized groups, is itself a form of virtue signalling, just pointed inward rather than outward.

By the 2020s, the accusation itself had become the subject of counter-accusations. Critics argued that calling someone a "virtue signaller" was its own form of signalling, broadcasting "I'm too sophisticated to fall for performative morality"2. One writer called this "cynicism-signalling" and "too-cool-to-care signalling"13. The charge had become recursive: accusing someone of virtue signalling was virtue signalling about your own clear-eyed realism.