to get a bit irritated with all the virtue signalling on MN

[OTheHugeManatee]

Virtue signalling = going on really loudly about how much you hate something that's considered right-on to hate (eg UKIP, the Daily Mail) in order to tell the world how kind, compassionate and generally virtuous you are.

I see it all the time on MN. It's the moral equivalent of stealth boasting. Instead of saying 'Look at how much more kind and compassionate I am than most other people' virtue signallers claim really loudly to hate something 'bad', thereby hinting at their superior niceness rather than bragging about it out loud.

As well as being thoroughly in bad faith it creates a climate where sometimes quite difficult and nuanced issues can't be discussed, because any attempt to weigh different sides is drowned out by people using that issue to signal their own virtue.

I'm averagely right-on, averagely selfish/kind/whatever, generally fairly normal I suppose in my ethical views. But I find all this posturing hypocritical and very irritating. The internet seems to be making it worse. AIBU to wish it would stop?

I agree with the OP, though I don't think people do this only or even mainly to impress other people. I think they genuinely believe that holding the "right" views makes them better than people who don't. Expressing their views publically is a form of moral masturbation that enhances their self-esteem.

I give no credit to anyone for holding the "right" views. I judge people by what they actually do. Someone who actually takes in a refugee gets points. Someone who says they would gets negative points, because I immediately peg them as the kind of person for whom holding the right views is about making themselves feel good, rather than making the world a better place. The kind of person who actually would take someone in wouldn't boast about it, before, during or after actually doing so.

Virtue signalling = going on really loudly about how much you hate something that's considered right-on to hate (eg UKIP, the Daily Mail) in order to tell the world how kind, compassionate and generally virtuous you are.

Isn't that exactly what you have done by starting this thread? Virtue hating the haters.

Good post OP. Virtue signalling is the basis on which both Facebook and Mumsnet seems to function these days. You also correctly identified the classic cliche of the genre which is "I hate the Daily Mail". This is such a basic piece of virtue signalling that it's the one that is safest to express in an office environment where I've heard it countless times.

For proper super level virtue signalling you can't beat a post I saw on Facebook last week. Which went... "I am so moved by the refugee crisis that I'm going to be making a substantial donation to the Red Cross. I'd urge others to do the same and if you do I will match any donation you make, just PM me the details".

Translation: Not only am I more compassionate than you but I'm also richer than all of you put together.

At some point people will be announcing that they're swapping their spoiled western children for wonderful saintly refugees in an effort to out-virtue eachother.

Hilarious to watch.

Virtue signalling - every day a school day on MN. Great to know it's a thing.

I can sort of understand it when people do it amongst friends or new acquaintances, part of the tribal thing that gets everyone in a room comfortable with one another, but with strangers on the internet who you will never meet in RL? . Why bother? .

People have already pointed it out, but it's not an explicitly left-wing thing to do - right-leaning people, when in the right environment, signal their virtue amongst the in-group as well. 'Loony lefties'; 'socialism means you always run out of other people's money', etc. etc. With the implication that they're so much more clever and mature and grown-up and sensible, and that anyone espousing something other than the status quo means they're probably some sort of sixth-form debating-soc, bien pensant, granola-weaving, pie-in-the-sky loon who just doesn't get human nature.

It cuts both ways.

disconcerted I think you've hit on something I've been trying to get at. I think the reason this bugs me is that stating the 'right' opinions has very little bearing on whether someone actually does the sort of things that might mark them out as a good, kind person who tries to do the right thing.

To take an example. Imagine someone who is diligent, hard-working, honest, soft-spoken, modest, kind, volunteers several hours a week befriending lonely elderly people via their church, gives a portion of their income to charity every year, but believes homosexuality is a sin. According to the rubric of performance morality, that person is a bigot and their views may be discounted. In fact, should that person voice an opinion on any moral subject they may be 'called out' on their bigotry and told to be quiet.

To be clear, I don't agree that homosexuality is a sin. But I find myself wondering: Does this person's homophobia cancel out all their other virtues? Are virtuous opinions more important than virtuous acts? Or is it just that on the internet, where we can only see people's opinions and not their actions, that this seems to be the case?

I realise this is a bit of a digression from my OP but this thread has had loads of really interesting responses on both sides and it's got me thinking.

Another story on the subject of performance morality. Not long ago, a woman called Justine Sacco got on a plane to Africa. Before she took off, she posted a tweet that said 'Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding - I'm white!'. Now you could read that as a wry comment on the racial divide in equality of health outcomes in the developing world, or a dark reference to the unfair privilege of white people, or just as straight-out racist. Personally I think it's one of the first two, but lots of people thought it was the third, and pretty appalling to boot. They forwarded it on, and by the time she landed in Cape Town she'd been fired from her job and received millions of hate tweets threatening her with death and hoping that she would get raped by someone with HIV. Was what the Twitterstorm did to Justine Sacco - actually, in real life - really justified by what she said?

I realise that at the Justine Sacco point it's gone beyond virtue-signalling and become a sort of shame culture on steroids, that picks out scapegoats with 'wrong' opinions and pillories them as a form of public entertainment and with real-life consequences for the victims. But in my view it exists on a continuum. You only have to look at the way people get flamed to a crisp sometimes here for saying something the 'wrong' way.

"The kind of person who actually would take someone in wouldn't boast about it, before, during or after actually doing so."

Except those who do, of course. The Attenboroughs have been very public about growing up with Jewish refugees. But you're right, they're not boasting.

To me they appear to be bearing witness, because it's important to do so. But maybe to some it's just empty "virtue-signalling", in search of approval.

Does this person's homophobia cancel out all their other virtues?

No of course not. Don't be so black-and-white. I haven't ever met a perfect person who doesn't hold a single opinion or do anything ever that no-one could possibly disapprove of. And nor has anyone!

God you are def NBU!! you're so right.

Oh, this is very close to home - I moan all the time about my PILs who are always quoting from the Daily Mail and who I'm sure vote UKIP! However they lead far more socially useful lives than I do - they spend huge chunks of their time helping out their family or their neighbours. At least I now know what I'm guilty of.

YANBU and who's the bestest feminist. Yawn.

YANBU

OTheHuge, I just don't have the same dilemma as you about your first example. Because I don't need to label someone as Good or Bad.

I'm able to look at members of my family who are pretty much exactly as you describe, and say, "They do good here, but I disagree with them vehemently there".

Sometimes of course there can be an overlap. Eg if someone using befriending to push their gay-people-are-sinners agenda on vulnerable people. So it's right to keep an eye open for that happening.

It does make me very sad when someone I believe to be coming from a good place, and doing excellent work in some fields, also says things I find abhorrent and harmful. But I don't find myself judging them as having "cancelled out" their good acts.

No of course not. Don't be so black-and-white.

But the black-and-whiteness of that view is precisely the issue I'm trying to get at, when it comes to internet morality. Of course it's absurd. IRL we all know people who have some unpalatable views but are broadly good, kind and virtuous, and most of us IRL are able to take the rough with the smooth. But in internet land it always seems so much more black and white, because the whole context - and the real person - is not visible. And, online, people tend to congregate with others like them, and it feels good to gang together with like-minded people and 'call out' those whose views or actions we find offensive.

In the course of thinking about this I've just read Jon Ronson's excellent piece about Justine Sacco, and also the public apology posted a year later by the guy who started the Twitterstorm that ruined her life. The apology particularly makes some interesting points about how the lack of the whole context makes online moral crusades extremely black and white.

Again, this is sort of a digression from virtue signalling, but it's also kind of not. I think it's not a digression because when in-group virtue-signalling turns aggressive and chooses a scapegoat it ruins people's lives.

Intimidating young men. Yep, you've bought the media scare stories

Not really. I don't rely on any single media source to form an opinion.

In this particular case, I watched Polish and Dutch footage of the young men throwing food and at Hungarian railway station.

They were well-built, clearly angry and demanding to go to Germany.

The pictures I have seen of Syrian refugees in situ (provided, not by any news agency but by a Lebanese friend who works in a camp there) show undernourished, badly-dressed groups of clearly traumatised families, accepting the food and water offered, along with the blankets and toys we have been collecting for the past few winters.

I was educated, and have lived and worked in that region for decades. I'm more than capable of forming an opinion of my own.

For what it's worth, I think perhaps a little more consumption of ALL media, instead of an undiluted, unquestioning sucking up and spewing out of the British left-wing media, with its recent, highly successful emotive visuals, might be useful all round.

I believe it would be particularly helpful for those who want to make practical contributions to this, and the less publicised humanitarian crises worldwide to broaden their opinion past our cheap shot crocodile tears politicians making capital out if this appalling situation.

But this more general point about the dangers of groupthink is, well, more general. And I personally think the dangers of such behaviour are too often looked at in isolation, rather as happens when people talk about the risks of over-using heuristics (rules-of-thumb) rather than doing bottom-up critical analysis. What is typically ignored is that these behaviours are a way of managing the complexity of the world. There simply isn't the time to examine each decision we make fully. So we find ways to make good-enough decisions by relying on the thinking of others. That's the essence of how a brand works, and it's also how political parties work, and why people say "I don't like the DM". Congregating with like-minded people means you spend time with people who tend to make decisions the way you would be likely to have made them yourself, if you had the time to analyse the issues fully.

Do such shortcuts go wrong? All too often. Are they therefore either morally suspect or unhelpful. I don't think that follows at all.

itsmine

YANBU OP

It's the black & whiteness of the attitude of some posters that makes sensible discussions difficult - there are shades of grey in almost every debate but these are rarely acknowledged.

And what JohnC said^

So here is a post showing what could reasonably be interpreted as more right-of-centre virtue-signalling on MN:
"For what it's worth, I think perhaps a little more consumption of ALL media, instead of an undiluted, unquestioning sucking up and spewing out of the British left-wing media, with its recent, highly successful emotive visuals, might be useful all round."

Statements that the British media are irredeemably left-wing, and that we all ought to be more critical of what we read, are frequent both on MN and elsewhere. It is arguable that they are intended to signal: "I'm an independent thinker; I'm bright enough to recognise the lies being fed to me by the media" etc etc.

For what it's worth, the latest set of images about refugees and in particular the image of Aylan Kurdi were, famously, first widely distributed on social media, and later by the Sun and the Mail. Neither social media nor those newspapers could possibly be said to represent "British left-wing media". But the power of a narrative is strong, and Olivepip is convinced by the narrative that this is a story pumped up by left-leaning journos, even if the facts don't fit.

My point isn't about groupthink. It's about morality, when done in the context-free way facilitated by the internet, which encourages black-and-white thinking and replaces judgement on an individual's deeds with judgement on their words.

About performing and signalling acceptable morality taking precedence or being given more weight than getting on with moral acts?