The virtues of virtue signalling

TLDR/Context: For some time, I donated 10% of my income anonymously, without telling my friends and family or sharing it on social media. I was worried that bringing up one’s charitable donations would be perceived as bragging or virtue signaling. However, I also believe there are important sociological reasons why we should be open about our pro-social behavior. People are largely influenced by the behavior of others around them. So by being public about donations, one also provides ‘social proof’ of such actions, helping spread a wider norm of effective giving. 

To deal with these conflicting issues, I wrote this essay outlining the reasons for giving effectively and for doing so publicly. I felt more comfortable being public about my donations if I could also explain the reason why I was public about them. A few weeks ago the essay was published on the Giving What We Can blog. I also used this occasion to sign the 🔸 10% pledge. The text is primarily written for an audience that is not previously familiar with the ideas surrounding effective giving or the power of social norms, so a lot of it will already be well-known to people reading this forum. However, repetition is the mother of learning, and maybe some will find it useful to explain or justify the decision to be public about donations. 

Today, I signed the 🔸 10% Pledge. This means publicly pledging to donate 10% of my lifetime income to effective philanthropic activities. But even though I only signed the Pledge today, I have been donating 10% of my income to such charities over the last two years, without pledging or telling anyone about it. One reason for this is that I have been worried about coming off as a virtue-signaling, self-righteous braggart. In this essay, I examine my hesitation about pledging more closely, along with some considerations for why I think there are good reasons to take a public pledge despite this fear. In doing so, I hope to explain that the reason for my public commitment is not (or at least not only^[1]) because I am such a self-aggrandizing jerk, but because I believe that making a public giving pledge is a good thing to do.

I. Why Altruism?

Before considering the topic of pledging, it is important to provide some context about the reasons for donating to effective charities. While there are many reasons, I want to mention two: 1) That it is good for the world, and 2) that it is good for you.

The first of these two claims is the most obvious, but it is still worth highlighting. Giving to charity can do a lot of good, at least if you are careful about where to donate. It turns out that there is a huge spread in the effectiveness of charities, such that carefully choosing where to donate can increase the impact of your donation a hundredfold or more. In effect, this means that you may do more good giving one dollar to a highly effective charity than if you were to give a hundred dollars to a mediocre one. Hence, it is fundamental to carefully evaluate where to donate. Charity evaluators like GiveWell are dedicated to researching these questions and provide great guidance on how to donate.

For example, one charity that is often mentioned due to its exceptional cost-effectiveness is the Against Malaria Foundation, or AMF. GiveWell estimates that AMF can save the life of one person for $3,000-$8,000 (GiveWell, 2024). This means that donating 10% of a Swedish median wage would enable you to save one life approximately every two years. Thus, by merely taking this one action, your expected contribution to human welfare could very well be greater than that of an M.D.^[2]

And aside from individual impact, I also believe that there are reasons to consider our potential collective impact if everyone adopted donating at this level. For reasons discussed below, these universalizing considerations are central to the theory behind public giving pledges. As Scott Alexander (2014) writes:

[I]f you believe in something like universalizability as a foundation for morality, a world in which everybody gives ten percent of their income to charity is a world where about seven trillion dollars go to charity a year. Solving global poverty forever is estimated to cost about $100 billion a year for the couple-decade length of the project. That’s about two percent of the money that would suddenly become available. If charity got seven trillion dollars a year, the first year would give us enough to solve global poverty, eliminate all treatable diseases, fund research into the untreatable ones for approximately the next forever, educate anybody who needs educating, feed anybody who needs feeding, fund an unparalleled renaissance in the arts, permamently [sic] save every rainforest in the world, and have enough left over to launch five or six different manned missions to Mars. That would be the first year. Goodness only knows what would happen in Year 2.

As a political theorist, I also find this vision of widespread philanthropy politically inspiring – as a way to provide social goods. While for-profit entrepreneurship can help us serve many social needs, other problems provide little or no profit motive incentivizing market solutions. The most commonly advocated alternative to market solutions is coercive state activity. However, for both intrinsic and instrumental reasons, I am wary of such coercion. For example, I am deeply worried that such strategies invite knowledge and power problems by attracting rent-seeking or incentivizing abuse.^[3] Philanthropy offers a third alternative for the provision of common goods.^[4] Effective giving is often effective precisely because it targets those individuals and causes that remain underserved by market activities. Hence, giving to such philanthropy is an opportunity to also practice what I preach, and to live the sort of change I would want to see more broadly.

Aside from the good done for the world, I also believe that doing good is good for you. In my academic research, I tend to explore extremely niche ideas and know that there is only a small chance that my work will in any substantial way change the world. While I believe that these ideas could have a tremendous positive impact in the slight eventuality that they were implemented, I also face the reality that most academic publications are read only by other academics, before falling into complete obscurity. It is a bit discouraging knowing that this, in most likelihood, will be the result of my life's work. In this context, knowing that I at least contributed something concrete to the improvement of the world is incredibly meaningful. Donating effectively is kind of like an existential insurance policy, assuring me that my life was actually net positive for the world.

Such assurance is especially important in a world that is full of problems, many of which we cannot solve on our own. This easily leads to despair. However, while it is not within my influence to single-handedly solve the climate crisis, factory farming, or global poverty, it is within my influence to determine whether I will be contributing to these problems or to their solution. This shift in focus from large problems outside of your control to your individual impact, which very much is up to you, provides a sense of agency and resolve. Often, donating to effective organizations working towards these goals is much more effective than only changing your individual behavior.

Furthermore, there is some psychological literature suggesting that people who do good for others also tend to be happier. If there is one thing that brings joy and meaning to our lives, it is helping others. Thus, people often report gaining more happiness from spending money on others than spending it on themselves.^[5] Hence, I don’t believe that people should donate to philanthropy despite the fact that this would make them miserable. On the contrary, I think that donating will make them better off. Being good is an integral part of living a happy and flourishing life.^[6]

II. Society's Persecuted Minority: "Do-Gooders"

Even though altruism is more or less universally recognized as something noble, clearly trying to signal your benevolent behavior is much less appreciated. In many religions and wisdom traditions, humility is highlighted as the sign of the truly virtuous. The term “virtue signaling” is usually used in a pejorative sense, and is associated with people disingenuously engaging in pro-social behavior, not because they love their neighbors, but rather as a way to signal their personal moral worth or superiority. If one’s seemingly altruistic actions are ultimately motivated by a desire to assert one’s superiority over others, this would turn our evaluation of the behavior from admirable to obnoxious. No one likes a braggart, and no one likes it when people try to put others down by acting as if they are superior to them. Even though this is far from the only reason to be public about something “virtuous,” it’s often the assumed intention, which means that people who are public about “doing good” are often judged negatively by others.

A related concept is “do-gooder derogation” – the negative perception of people who act exceptionally morally. People who deviate too far from the norm tend to be judged negatively by others. And while this makes sense if that deviation is towards anti-social behavior, the judgment also extends to people who deviate from the norm by acting more pro-socially than is considered “normal”.

One example of such do-gooder derogation is vegaphobia – or negative views towards vegetarians and vegans. For example, one study found that the general population rates vegans lower than common prejudice target groups like atheists and immigrants. And tellingly, vegans who chose the diet out of ethical considerations were more negatively judged than those who did so for health reasons (MacInnis and Hodson, 2017).

For this reason, I often avoid discussing veganism and always become a bit awkward at dinner parties when people start asking me about my special diet. If I were honest about my reasons for not eating meat, explaining how billions of animals suffer and die for frivolous enjoyment in what is one of the most massive moral atrocities of our time, people would most likely lose their appetite. And the blame for this would not be on the meat eaters who are actively contributing to this suffering, but rather on the person pointing it out.^[7]

One possible explanation for this is the meat paradox: most people who eat meat do not want to harm animals. Thus, they are persistently in a state of cognitive dissonance. Vegans bring additional attention to this issue, and one way to reduce this dissonance is to discard the vegans. We all want to be the heroes of our own stories. No one thinks of themselves as a villain. But this narrative breaks down when we are reminded of our moral failures. And when this self-image is challenged, it is easier to put down “do-gooders” as disingenuous jerks, rather than face this damage to one’s self-image.

Given these issues, it seems socially risky to be too public about trying to act morally good. This is one reason why I have been silent about my donations. Sure, giving to those with fewer resources seems like a noble thing, but being all in other people’s faces about it seems like a very ignoble thing. One can get many of the above-mentioned benefits from donating, even if nobody knows about it. So the simple solution seems to be to donate, without making a fuss about it.

III. A Theory of Moral Sentiments and Amoral Behaviour

However, I believe that there are important reasons to be public about doing good. Partly, I believe that this leads people to update away from having a needlessly bleak view of others. With a bleak view of humanity, we will act on false and overly pessimistic information, and thereby forgo possible opportunities to improve the world. Consider how high-trust societies tend to do immensely better than their low-trust counterparts on virtually every metric. Hence, work like Bregman’s (2020) Humankind, which encourages us to update to a less cynical and more realistic view of people, can be immensely important.

Even more importantly, I believe that there are socio-psychological reasons to spread norms of good behavior. Consider the question of why so few people follow a vegan diet, or give (in a significant way) to charity. Even among moral philosophers, who tend to agree with vegan arguments in principle, only a minority actually practice these views. How is this dissonance possible?

One important explanation comes from the social psychology of behavioral change. Most people’s behavior is not determined by what they see as right, so much as by what they see as normal. In other words, people tend to do not necessarily what they believe is morally correct but rather what they believe would be expected by their peer group. This can be connected to Adam Smith’s idea that we tend to judge ourselves through the eyes of an “impartial spectator” (Smith, 2022). But what the spectator is judging is not the extent to which we live up to idealized moral values, but the extent to which we deviate from the assumed norm of our community.

To give an example, consider corruption. Interestingly, people in high-corruption societies usually condemn corruption morally and wish that it would disappear. However, they still engage in corruption, since this is what they believe that others would do in a similar situation. Hence, if you take a person from a low-corruption society and move them to a high-corruption context, their behavior is very likely to adapt, even if their moral views do not. When people engage in corruption, they are actually often playing by the rules. Not by the formal rules of the law, or the moral rules they themselves embrace, but by the rules in use in this particular informal institutional context. They are merely following the standard operating procedure of their society.^[8]

This observation is two-sided. On the negative side, it explains why people might go along with morally outrageous behavior, as long as this is socially encouraged and expected from them. But on the flip side, it also indicates that social norms can be a very powerful enforcement mechanism for pro-social values, even when this is costly to the individual.^[9]

Imagine, for example, a society in which everyone is vegan. The first person to deviate from this norm would instantly be condemned as a moral monster. Similarly, in a society where everyone is expected to donate 10% to effective social causes, the first person to defect from this would instantly be seen with suspicion. Hence, I believe that many norms supporting pro-social behavior could become stable and self-enforcing if they were successfully implemented. In a society where pro-sociality is the norm, the pressure to conform would be a powerful decentralized mechanism for upholding and enforcing pro-sociality.^[10]

Just as our behavior is determined by what is normal, what is normal is also determined by our behavior. This goes back to the age-old question in social science between individualism and structuralism: are structures created by individual behavior or is individual behavior determined by the structures? Ultimately, this is a false dilemma. These arise mutually and are in constant dialectical interaction with each other.^[11]

IV. Normalise It!

One important implication of this is that we can change what conformist pressure we experience by also changing our peer group. By entering a community in which people are more likely to act morally, it becomes easier to do so yourself.

But the insight that actions determine norms also leads to a very natural next step: we can change what is normal. Just as we are influenced by our peer groups, our peers are influenced by us. When it comes to informal rules in use, we are not only rule followers but also rule makers. So by changing our behavior, we not only have a direct impact through our actions, but also an indirect impact on other people by shifting the norms. This opens up a form of moral contagion in which early adopters of an ideal make it easier for the next people to also adopt it. At best, this would enable a domino effect toward new norms (Freeman, 2020; Hazell,2021; Sunstein, 2019).

There are several important implications from this observation. First, this indicates that even if comparatively lower-income people might have less of a direct effect from their giving, their taking a public giving pledge can still have significant indirect effects by changing norms.^[12] Secondly, this analysis suggests that you can also cause indirect harm by reinforcing harmful norms. When you act in socially harmful ways, you not only cause direct harm, but you also tacitly license other people to act similarly. Thirdly, this is a reason to take universalizability criteria seriously. Your actions are not only your actions but the norms by which others live. Hence, it is prudent not only to ask “What is the correct action in this particular instance?” but also “What is the general norm that I want to socially support?”

While this might sound compelling in theory, one may ask how realistic it is to truly change social norms. But we can find several examples of significant shifts towards more desirable norms within living memory. When I was growing up, homophobic jokes were commonplace in a way that would be completely unacceptable today. We have moved from a norm where homosexuality was taboo to one in which it is homophobia that is shunned! While homophobia is far from eradicated, it is still extremely striking how much has changed within the last few decades.

Notice, however, that in order to shift norms by acting in a particular way, it is crucial that we are open about these actions. What determines social norms is not what others do and approve of per se, but rather what we think that they do and approve of. So even if a large number of people secretly practiced effective charity, this would not have any effect on social norms.

This brings us back to the original question motivating this essay: Should you be public about your charitable donations? I have been worried that doing so would be perceived as self-aggrandizing or obnoxious virtue signaling – that such immodest boastfulness would reduce the moral value of these actions. However, by concealing my donations, I have missed the chance to also spread the norm of effective giving. This wasted opportunity strikes me as a moral mistake in itself. Clearly signaling our virtuous behavior can have an important moral role, not in highlighting our character, but rather in spreading pro-social norms.

Norms are sticky, and changing them is costly. However, they are not completely fixed. We should celebrate the early movers willing to incur these costs for changing norms. While virtue signaling is often perceived as objectionable, engaging in costly virtue signaling to shift social norms toward more pro-social and moral equilibrium seems like an admirable thing to do. For this reason, I have decided to add my name to the list of almost 10,000 people who have signed the 🔸 10% Pledge, and to explain my reasons for doing so in this essay. Thereby, I hope to also inspire others to do the same.

References

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Trammell, P. (2022). Patient philanthropy in an impatient world. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NcfTgZsqT9k30ngeQbappYyn-UO4vltjkm64n4or5r4/edit?usp=embed_facebook

1. ^{^}

   As Simler and Hanson (2018) emphasise, almost all our behavior is to some extent motivated by signaling, even if not consciously so. Presumably, this also applies to me. Read through this lens, this essay might just be clever rationalizing cover for other deeper motives. Notice, however, that the larger argument of this essay might still be correct, even if this is the case.

2. ^{^}

   The Against Malaria Foundation is a good illustrative example, since it enables us to empirically measure the impact of these donations. However, there could be many other charities with an even higher – albeit more difficult to estimate – impact. 
   
   For example, patient philanthropy is the idea to invest your donations, enabling them to grow over time. Due to accumulating interests, the long-term effect of these investments can be massive compared to the original investment (Trammell, 2022). Another strategy would be to invest into efforts to avoid existential risks of permanent societal collapse (Ord, 2020). Due to the vast number of animals on factory farms, and the relative neglect concerning their wellbeing, efforts to improve their condition or to reduce meat consumption could also massively reduce suffering (Animal Charity Evaluators, n.d.). And in my own research, I have explored strategies for equalizing access to land. I believe that the scale of this issue is massive, since it indirectly leads to many social problems like poverty, economic inefficiency, and inequality. I also believe that it could be made tractable, by utilizing similar exponential growth mechanisms as patient philanthropy. Hence, this could also be a possible avenue for effective, systematic social change (Jacobson, 2024, chap. 8). In the future, I hope to rewrite this argument within an effective altruist framework.

3. ^{^}

   For some discussion of these problems, see Coyne and Goodman,2021; Lavoie, 1985; Long, 1998).

^{^}

It should, however, be recognized that philanthropy can often suffer from different irrationalities of its own. While market actors can use profits and prices as a feedback mechanism to evaluate their success, non-profits lack this fundamental source of knowledge. Moreover, it often introduces principal-agent-recipient problems, as the people who are supposed to be helped by the interventions, and often have the most tacit, contextual knowledge, usually lack power or influence over how it is designed (See Coyne, 2013). These issues can help explain the massive spread between the most and the least effective charities – since ineffective charities are not sorted out by feedback mechanisms, they persist in wasting resources that could have been used better elsewhere. It also explains why giving people direct cash transfers is often much more helpful than the vast majority of conventional charity (GiveWell, 2020).

^{^}

My wise mother in law often says that if you are feeling down, the best thing you can do is to try to help others – thereby getting a perspective on your troubles while fostering a sense of meaning and connection. If you don’t trust her judgment, this connection between happiness and helping others is also backed up empirically (Aknin et al., 2013; Aknin, Norton, and Dunn, 2011; Dunn, Aknin, and Norton, 2008).

^{^}

Of course, this is a theme in virtue ethics. Each semester I have the opportunity of teaching Plato’s The Republic to new students, discussing the fundamental question of whether vice or virtue is that leads to individual flourishing. And over time, I am increasingly persuaded by the argument that virtue is a constitutive aspect of a good life – and that Gollum is an accurate depiction of Gyges. The theme of this essay can also be connected to another Socratic topic – is it possible to be a virtuous citizen in non-virtuous city?

^{^}

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that all meat eaters are irredeemable people. On the contrary, most of my friends and family – the people I love the most – are in this category. For reasons explored in this essay, I also believe that there is a natural explanation (but not justification) for why they are doing so. But even if I love these people, and think that their behavior can be explained, I still believe that these actions are morally wrong.

^{^}

The distinction between “rules in use” and “rules in form” was a major contribution of the Bloomington school of political economy, see, for example, Ostrom, 2015. See Brennan et al., 2016 for a relevant distinction between moral norms and social norms. For applications in the case of corruption see Köbis, Iragorri-Carter, and Starke, 2018; Rothstein, 2021.

^{^}

David Graeber (2004) argues that such dynamics, where social recognition is acquired by giving away resources, can also be used to check on wealth accumulation and economic inequality: "In gift economies there are, often, venues for enterprising individuals: But everything is arranged in such a way they could never be used as a platform for creating permanent inequalities of wealth, since self-aggrandizing types all end up competing to see who can give the most away" (p.22).

^{^}

While social pressure could induce more pro-social behavior, there is admittedly also something disconcerting with such pressure. While conformism for pro-social ends is better than conformism for anti-social behavior, and while social pressure towards charity seems better than outright coercion for charity, conformism as such seems to have a stifling influence on individual self-expression and flourishing (cf. Mill, 1859, chap. 3). For more on norms as decentralized enforcement mechanisms, see Muldoon, 2021.

^{^}

One book which makes this vivid is Robert Axelrod’s (1984) Evolution of Cooperation. Axelrod explores how the prisoner’s dilemma cooperation problem could be addressed through repeated interactions. In single interactions, the dominant choice is to defect, thereby undermining cooperation, even if every player would have preferred mutual cooperation to mutual defection. But in repeated interactions, players also have an incentive to cooperate to entice the other player to also do so in the future, creating mutually beneficial long-term results. Hence, rather than choosing an action in isolation, we should rather consider which strategy of actions and responses we should adopt. Which strategy is optimal will depend on the strategies adopted by other players. Hence, the strategies chosen by each individual player will create a broader structure, and this structure will also determine which strategies are optimal for the players. This focus on strategies, together with the observation that simple and understandable strategies tend to promote cooperation, gives us reason to pay additional attention to universalized rules rather than isolated actions.

^{^}

Of course, indirect impact will also differ significantly between people, as we belong to very different peer groups. It seems plausible that people are more likely to emulate those with high social status, indicating that these individuals might have an outsized indirect impact. However, some factors could also increase the indirect impact of those with relatively lower incomes, as this creates additional pressure on those who are relatively wealthier. It is easy to support a norm that people who are wealthier than ourselves should donate to charity, since this puts no onus on ourselves to do so. Hence, I will not necessarily feel much pressure to increase my donations by learning that the super-wealthy, who already have more resources than they could ever spend, are doing so. However, if people who are comparatively less wealthy than oneself donate significant shares of their income to philanthropy, they thereby also enforce the norm that everyone could do so.

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