Philosopher Neil Levy writes in 2019:
The accusation of virtue signalling is typically understood as a serious charge. Those accused usually respond (if not by an admission of fault) by attempting to show that they are doing no such thing. In this paper, I argue that we ought to embrace the charge, rather than angrily reject it. I argue that this response can draw support from cognitive science, on the one hand, and from social epistemology on the other. I claim that we may appropriately concede that what we are doing is (inter alia) virtue signalling, because virtue signalling is morally appropriate. It neither expresses vices, nor is hypocritical, nor does it degrade the quality of public moral discourse. Signalling our commitment to norms is a central and justifiable function of moral discourse, and the same signals provide (higher-order) evidence that is appropriately taken into account in forming moral beliefs…
Animals use signals for a variety of purposes. For instance, gazelles famously signal their fitness by stotting (jumping up and down on the spot) in front of predators (FitzGibbon and Fanshawe 1988). Peacocks even more famously signal their fitness with their spectacular tails (Zahavi and Zahavi 1999). Good signals are hard to fake signals: if a signal is cheap, then defectors will co-opt it and it will rapidly lose its value. Stotting is a hard to fake signal because it is costly. The gazelle who can afford to waste energy it might have saved for fleeing is probably not worth chasing. The peacock’s tail is an even more reliable signal, because the more spectacular the tail the more resources have been devoted to it and the better the health of the bird. A good signal of trustworthiness, too, will be hard to fake…
3. Numbers do not make a difference in either kind of way if additional agents are non-discriminating reflectors of a single individual (Goldman 2001). A non-discriminating reflector holds whatever opinion their guru holds, regardless of its plausibility, and therefore their agreement adds no independent epistemic weight to the initial opinion. In the actual world, agents are never or almost never non-discriminating reflectors of a guru, for at least two reasons. First, even if some agents are non-discriminating with regard to token opinions, the fact that they regard someone as a guru is good evidence that they take them to be reliable in general. Second, there is extensive evidence that agents are rarely genuinely non-discriminating. Even young children filter claims for plausibility, and will reject testimony from a familiar person, even a parent, in favour of more plausible testimony from an unfamiliar informant (see Harris 2012). The degree of independence of individual informants from one another varies from case to case, but we can be confident that each filters testimony for plausibility to some degree.
12. Anecdotally, the accusation of virtue signalling is typically directed by the political right at the political left. Nothing in the account given here predicts that it will be politically partisan, however, and the available empirical evidence suggests that it is at least as prevalent on the right. Expressive responding—reporting factual beliefs that are congenial to one’s political ‘side’ in order to express support and not because they are sincerely held—is very common, and amply demonstrated on the right. See Bullock and Lenz (2019) for review, and Schaffner and Luks (2018) for an extremely convincing demonstration of expressive responding by Trump supporters.
Amy Wax’s defenders say her critics do not care about the students and are working their careers. Her critics say she is a provocateur trading in outrage for attention. Levy’s answer to both is the same: the signaling function is real, the sincerity is also real, and the second is what makes the first work. Signals of commitment are reliable only when the commitment is there. The colleagues who signed against her probably meant it. She means it too.
What did each signal cost?
Levy’s criterion is that good signals are hard to fake, and a signal is hard to fake when it is costly, self-validating, or involuntary. Run that test across the Penn record. Signing a letter against Wax in 2018 or filing a complaint in 2022 cost a Penn faculty member very little and may have returned something. Defending her cost a great deal, which is why so few colleagues did it and why the defenses came mostly from outside institutions built for that purpose. Wax paid the most. She lost her named chair, lost summer pay in perpetuity, took a year’s suspension at half pay, and accepted a requirement to state in public appearances that she speaks for herself and not for Penn, on top of a public reprimand. By Levy’s own accounting that is the expensive signal in the exchange. The sanction authenticated her to the audience she was signaling toward. Penn produced the peacock’s tail on her behalf.
Levy’s list of signaling behaviors includes ramping up, where signalers outdo earlier signalers to be recognized as more serious. He treats it as predictable output of any signaling system rather than as a vice peculiar to progressives. Lay the Wax sequence against it. The bourgeois culture op-ed with Larry Alexander in 2017. The Glenn Loury interview remark about grade distributions the same year. The immigration remarks at the national conservatism conference in 2019. Then the repeated classroom invitations to Jared Taylor. A signal that has already been sent carries no information the second time. To keep carrying information to an audience it has to escalate or it has to become costlier.
Levy argues that numbers are higher-order evidence, and that the larger the number of people who disagree with you, the harder it gets to dismiss them from peerhood by citing your own track record, intelligence, or freedom from bias. Wax faces near unanimous disagreement from her professional peers. On Levy’s account she is under heavy rational pressure to reduce her confidence. She has not reduced it. Either she is holding a minority position that the numbers cannot touch, which he concedes can happen and illustrates with extreme opinions about race in the antebellum United States, or she is failing at conciliation in the way his framework describes.
His footnote on non-discriminating reflectors is where a Wax defense has to live, and it is the weakest link in his chain. Numbers only supply evidence when the judgments are independent. If a hundred people hold an opinion because their guru holds it, you have one opinion. Levy says agents in the real world are almost never non-discriminating, and offers as support that even young children filter testimony for plausibility. That is a low bar. The relevant question is not whether faculty filter for plausibility. It is whether the cost structure at an American law school in 2022 lets a private judgment against the consensus surface, and whether a signature under those conditions reports a belief or reports a position. Levy’s own argument supplies the tools to press this, since he spends the paper insisting that moral statements carry a signaling function. He does not apply it to the count. Someone should.
Levy says alleged instances are too controversial to assess, because the best explanation for why some people see an accusation as trumped up may be their own lack of moral perceptiveness. Ted Ruger’s charging letter described incessant racist, sexist, xenophobic, and homophobic actions and statements, and argued that her conduct led reasonable students to conclude they would be judged on race, ethnicity, gender, national status, or sexual orientation.
Penn was signaling too. A dean’s memo would have been cheap and would have carried little information about the university’s commitments. A three-day hearing in May 2023 before a five-member faculty board, a vote, presidential acceptance, an appeal, review by the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility for procedural irregularities, and a final confirmation is expensive. It also took four years, invited national coverage, and produced litigation that outlived the sanction. Penn bought credibility with faculty and students by making the process costly to itself. That the process is faculty-driven rather than administrative is the self-validating part, Levy’s bridge case: the faculty crossed the bridge.
Levy concedes that signals invite mimics and that past some proportion of mimics the signal stops carrying information and falls out of use. Penn’s punishment communicates something only if institutions of its kind punish rarely and for cause. Every additional case where the finding tracks unpopularity pushes the proportion of mimics up and drains the signal.
