Wherefore by their virtue signals ye shall know them ?
Neil Levy has an article in Synthese arguing for the virtues of virtue signalling (HT: Jared Oliphint). Levy’s article is written as a response to a 2016 article by Tosi and Warmke critiquing moral grandstanding. As Levy notes, “‘Moral grandstanding’ seems to be identical to, or at any rate to overlap very considerably with, virtue signalling…”. (Tosi and Warmke also released a book in April which develops their critique further.)
Levy doesn’t deny that virtue signalling can have the negative effects that Tosi and Warmke list, such as piling on or claims of self-evidence.[1] Instead, Levy argues that these negative effects don’t necessarily follow from virtue signaling per se and don’t outweigh the positive functions that virtue signalling serves.[2]
Setting aside most of the points, I want to focus on the higher-order evidence claim. Levy states that “Whereas first-order evidence bears directly on the truth of a proposition, higher-order evidence is evidence about the reliability of the processes that generate belief. … Virtue signalling provides higher-order evidence by conveying confidence and the numbers of people who share a judgment” (emphasis original). So, for example, If I’m the only one among my epistemic peers who believes that ‘x’ is morally acceptable, the fact that I’m alone in this moral judgment is a reason to doubt the truth of that judgment.
Another recent article in Synthese, The Role of Testimony in Mathematics, sheds light on why the judgments of our epistemic peers (or superiors) can play this higher-order role. But it also exposes a potential problem in Levy’s case:
“Let us assume that we are right that the experts who testify that they have checked the proof of p have done so thoroughly and are being truthful. We take this to imply that the testifiers more or less independently of each other have a chance better than random of making a correct judgment on whether the proof of p is correct. Let us also assume that the testifiers have an equal chance of making a correct judgment on whether the proof of p is correct. Given these assumptions, it follows from Condorcet’s jury theorem that the judgment reached by the majority of the expert testifiers on whether the proof is correct or not is more likely to be correct than the judgment of each individual testifier and that the probability of a correct majority judgment approaches 1 as the number of testifiers increases (see List 2013, sect. 1.1 and 2.3). Under the stated conditions, the majority of the expert testifiers is good at tracking the truth about whether the proof of p is correct (see List 2013, sect. 1.1).
(Emphasis original.) In general, Andersen et al. found that mathematicians tend to treat testimony regarding proofs as weighty if it is widespread and from trusted or expert sources. Testimony being widespread has value in that “different experts will validate the proof in different ways because they know different things and have different preferences” but it also protects against the sorts of mistakes that any individual expert might on occasion make. Trusted or expert sources are those which we take to be in a position to know. Levy, correctly noting that virtue signaling can function as a sort of testimony, also mentions some relevant features that overlap with what Anderson et al. found among mathematicians: “its prior plausibility; how well placed the person is to know what they say; evidence that they might have ulterior motives, and so on”, but these are only mentioned in a parenthetical and his focus is on the degree of confidence with which the testimony is given and the number of people.
The problem, as I see it, is that Levy skips over the most relevant features for why virtue signaling is seen as a problem in political social media discourse, while giving all of his attention to those which are less relevant. This is what Anderson et al.’s example, quoted above, and interviews make clear. If the sources aren’t trusted — if they aren’t in a position to know —or if we suspect they have ulterior motives or if they run counter our prior plausibility structure, the number and confidence of the virtue signalers is virtually meaningless.
But perhaps at a broader level, it needs to be pointed out that Levy is abstracting “virtue signaling” from the contexts that gave birth to the virtue signal worry to begin with. This is where Matthew 7:20 comes into play. Levy’s concept of “virtue signal” is so broad that we could cut and paste the term as a substitute for “fruits” in Matthew 7:20. In response, perhaps he would point out, correctly, that he’s giving an analysis of the concept that is unconstrained by our political social media discourse. Yet that would seem to trample all over the cultural context embedded in the term — why ‘virtue signaling’ exists in the first place. This is not to say that Levy’s analysis has nothing to contribute to that specific context or that it has no valuable insights per se. But it is to say that I doubt Levy’s analysis will alleviate the worries of Tosi and Warmke or of those who make accusations of virtue signaling the way that we might make an accusation of cheating.
The “proof signaling” of mathematicians only matters to other mathematicians when they take signaler to be an epistemic peer or superior who has independently checked the proof. Virtue signaling only matters to us when we take someone to be our moral peer or superior. While evangelical Christians have theological reasons to be skeptical of the moral compass of our culture in general (cf. Romans 8), our political climate is such that even at the secular level, fellow citizens have political and moral reasons to be skeptical of who counts as their moral peers. Virtue signaling, as practiced on social media, tends to undercut rather than strengthen the independent check that Anderson et al. mention as a criterion that grounds the value of peer testimony. And it surely would make little sense to tell a ‘Bernie Bro’ that a ‘Trumpkin’ has “an equal chance of making a correct judgment on whether” universal healthcare is a human right.
There seems to be an interesting interplay in mathematics insofar as the value of the testimony depends on the fact of many mathematicians having not relied upon testimony. The more mathematicians are simply relying upon testimony, the less confidence any individual mathematician could have in the testimony of a proof. If this applies to virtue signaling, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t, then the greater role virtue signaling plays in forming our moral judgments, the less confidence we can have that our moral judgements are correct.
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[1] Levy: “Virtue signalling almost certainly has some negative effects; those that Tosi and Warmke identify among them.”
[2] Levy: “Though there are indeed cases in which virtue signalling will likely lead us to worse beliefs, vulnerability to such problems is the price we pay not (just) for allowing the expression of moral claims to play their signalling function, but also as the flip side of the epistemic benefits of such signals.”
