Virtue Signaling
A reader's summary of the phrase for cheap, public moral display — James Bartholomew's 2015 column that put it into circulation, its fast spread through Brexit-era commentary, Collins Dictionary's 2016 shortlisting, and the academic attempt to rename the same behavior without presuming the speaker is lying.
The term at a glance
Virtue signaling names the act of publicly expressing an opinion or sentiment mainly to display one's own good character or correct moral standing — typically on a fashionable, low-risk position, typically on social media, and typically without any accompanying action or cost that would make the statement expensive to fake. The term is used almost exclusively as a criticism: it accuses the speaker of performing virtue rather than practicing it.
Origin
British journalist James Bartholomew is widely credited with the phrase's current usage, from a column titled “The awful rise of 'virtue signalling'” published in The Spectator on April 18, 2015. Bartholomew described people broadcasting opinions specifically to be seen holding them, without doing anything costly to back the opinion up. The word “signalling” itself predates the phrase by decades in economics — Michael Spence's 1973 job-market signalling model described how a costly, hard-to-fake credential conveys real information precisely because it is expensive to obtain. Bartholomew's coinage inverts that logic: it names a signal that works, if it works at all, by being cheap.
History and context
The phrase spread quickly through 2015 and 2016, a period dominated in Britain by the Brexit referendum debate, where commentators reached for it to characterize opponents' public moral statements as posturing rather than conviction. It crossed into American political commentary shortly after and, within a year, Collins English Dictionary had added an entry and placed “virtue signalling” on its shortlist for 2016 word of the year — the year's eventual winner was “Brexit” itself, but the shortlisting confirmed the phrase had moved from one columnist's coinage to recognized general vocabulary. Academic philosophy pushed back on the framing shortly after: Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke began publishing on “moral grandstanding” in 2016, later expanded into a 2020 book, offering a label for similar behavior that didn't bake in an assumption of insincerity the way “virtue signalling” does by name.
Main ideas
One columnist claims the modern coinage
British writer James Bartholomew titled his April 18, 2015 column in The Spectator "The awful rise of 'virtue signalling'" and credited himself with putting the phrase into its current use — a public statement of opinion meant to display good moral character, made cheaply and without any accompanying cost or action.
"Signalling" already had a technical pedigree
The word "signalling" carried an existing meaning in economics before Bartholomew's column — Michael Spence's 1973 job-market signalling model described how a costly, hard-to-fake credential (like a degree) conveys otherwise-hidden information. Bartholomew's phrase borrows the word but inverts the logic: virtue signalling is meant to describe a signal that is cheap and easy to fake, not costly and credible.
It spread fast through UK political debate
The phrase caught on quickly through 2015 and 2016, a period dominated by the Brexit referendum debate, and was used heavily by commentators criticizing what they characterized as fashionable, low-cost moral posturing on social media — before spreading into US political commentary and, eventually, general use across the political spectrum.
A dictionary noticed it within a year
Collins English Dictionary added an entry for "virtue signalling" and included it among the contenders for its 2016 word of the year — the year's winner was "Brexit" itself, but the shortlisting marked the phrase's arrival as a recognized, mainstream term rather than a one-off columnist's coinage.
Academics offered a less loaded rewrite
Philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke published research on what they termed "moral grandstanding" starting in 2016, later expanded into the 2020 book Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk — a deliberately more neutral label for similar behavior, built to describe the pattern without presuming, as "virtue signalling" does by name, that the speaker doesn't believe what they're saying.
Critique
- The accusation presumes a motive it can't prove. Calling a statement “virtue signalling” asserts that the speaker doesn't actually hold the belief, or holds it only for display — a claim about internal motive that an outside observer has no reliable way to verify either way.
- It's a thought-terminating label, not a rebuttal. Dismissing a moral claim as signaling lets a listener avoid engaging with whether the claim itself is right, in much the same way other named-tactic accusations end an argument rather than settle it.
- It's applied asymmetrically. The term is almost always aimed at moral statements the accuser disagrees with; public moral statements that align with the accuser's own views are rarely described as signaling, even when they share the same low-cost, high-visibility structure.
Impact
Virtue signaling now sits alongside Purity Spiral and Cancel Culture as one of the standard vocabulary items for describing performative or escalating public moral behavior online — each accusing a different part of the same broader pattern, whether it's the display itself, the enforcement of it, or the punishment for falling short of it. It also has an action-shaped cousin in Slacktivism: virtue signaling accuses a statement of substituting for genuine conviction, while slacktivism accuses a low-cost action — a like, a share, a signature — of substituting for the costlier action that would actually have consequences.