After digesting for a few days my intuitive response is to add the handle ‘virtue fatigue’ to this concept cluster. Virtues are a means by which the commons are policed. When you have runaway virtue signaling this is essentially defecting against the commons. You get what you want from scrupulous people who take public virtues seriously in the short term, but create virtue fatigue in the long run as more and more gets piled on to this working behavioral modification channel. Eventually the channel fails. This might turn ugly.
This seems closely related to the controversy around the GWWC pledge, and more generally nerds’ complaints in general about social rules that are phrased as absolutes, with a claim of 100% applicability, but actually not meant to be taken literally.
After digesting for a few days my intuitive response is to add the handle ‘virtue fatigue’ to this concept cluster. Virtues are a means by which the commons are policed. When you have runaway virtue signaling this is essentially defecting against the commons. You get what you want from scrupulous people who take public virtues seriously in the short term, but create virtue fatigue in the long run as more and more gets piled on to this working behavioral modification channel. Eventually the channel fails. This might turn ugly.
This seems closely related to the controversy around the GWWC pledge, and more generally nerds’ complaints in general about social rules that are phrased as absolutes, with a claim of 100% applicability, but actually not meant to be taken literally.