Common definitions of the word “virtue” — particularly in the English-speaking “West” — include “behavior showing high moral standards” (e.g., “paragons of virtue”); “a quality considered morally good or desirable in a person” (e.g., “patience is a virtue”); “a good or useful quality of a thing” (e.g., “My squalid little sex toy can really take a beating and keep on bleating.”); “maintaining one’s virginity or chastity” (e.g., “I’ve totally had enough of that funky stuff.”1).
Telegraphing one’s deeply felt virtues to others is done through a process called “virtue signaling” — “the public expression of opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or social conscience or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue.” The content of one’s virtuous signals may change over time. For instance, a couple of decades ago, some decried the ignominious evils of abandoning a campaign of “shock and awe”2 to embrace an exit strategy of “cut and run”3, while others signaled their sanctimony by explaining how they voted for the war before voting against it.4
In our time, half the people in one particular imperial power, described by some5 as “the richest nation in the history of the world,” signal their virtues by cheer-leading the “richest bro in the world”6 as he hacksaws off the scrawny little arm of a federal agency tasked with flinging small handfuls of coins to desperate little groups of the planet’s most precarious fellow humans.7 The other half of that same country’s population signal their virtues by sulking languidly even as they feverishly cling to fraying notions like “guardrails will hold”8and “it can’t happen here.”9
Some may celebrate simple virtues, like having “biggest balls of them all,”10 or not having to suffer because “we’re the best batch yet.”11 Large-scale virtues, however — such as those coveted by empires (“richest in the history of the world,” “thousand year Reich”, “biggest imperial balls of them all,” etc.) — generally require more complex attributes: control over vast territory, advanced technology relative to other principalities and powers,12 control over trade routes, military power, economic power, etc.
To discuss the topic of virtue, and the virtuous, I turn now to the kind of conversational partner I enjoy communicating with when I don’t actually feel like talking with anyone: an artificially intelligent chatbot model called Claude.
User (David): Good evening, Claude. I wonder if I can engage you in a conversation on the topic of virtue? If so, would you mind keeping your responses tightly focused, with minimal conversational superfluity? This is particularly important because our dialog will appear in an upcoming blog post. Before we begin, I’ll share the introduction to my conversation with you.13
Bot (anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking): I'd be happy to discuss virtue with you, David.
Virtue, in its philosophical essence, refers to excellence of character that enables one to function well as a human being. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle viewed virtues as dispositions to act and feel in ways that benefit both the individual and society – courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom being among the cardinal virtues.
Different ethical traditions emphasize distinct aspects of virtue. Aristotle focused on the "golden mean" between extremes, Confucius on proper social relations, Buddhist ethics on intentions and mental states, and Christian traditions on divinely inspired character traits.
The concept of virtue raises several key questions: Are virtues universal or culturally relative? Are they innate or cultivated? Do they require conscious deliberation or become habitual? Is virtue its own reward, or is it valued for its consequences?
What strikes you as most essential to understanding virtue in our contemporary context?
User (David): Thank you. The introduction to our conversation hinted at the paradoxical nature of how people signal their virtues, and how they act out their virtues in practice — particularly within complex modern human societies, like the one I am part of. Perhaps we can start there.
Bot (anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking): The gap between signaled and practiced virtue is indeed revealing.
In complex societies, virtue often becomes performative rather than substantive. We declare allegiance to values that signal our tribal affiliations more than guide our actual conduct. This performance serves social functions—establishing group membership, reinforcing status hierarchies, and creating moral distance from perceived opponents.
What complicates matters is that virtues necessarily scale differently between individual and collective contexts. Personal virtues like honesty or kindness operate differently when embedded in systems of governance, commerce, or international relations. An empire's "virtues" of strength and prosperity often directly contradict the interpersonal virtues it claims to champion.
This disconnect isn't merely hypocrisy—it reflects the genuine difficulty of translating ethical principles across different domains of human organization. The virtues that make someone a good friend may not make them effective in navigating complex power structures, creating a perpetual tension between what we profess to value and how we behave when constrained by systems larger than ourselves.
Is this tension between signaled and practiced virtue something you see as primarily modern, or as a persistent aspect of human societies?
User (David): I suspect that tensions between signaled and practiced virtues have featured prominently in human societies for at least as long as recorded human history. Perhaps you can share your thoughts on this as well.
Your point about how virtues scale differently between individual and collective contexts is important, and worth developing further. For instance, let’s suppose a militant arm of an oppressed people rises up, crosses a national boundary, and slaughters 1,195 people: 815 civilians and 380 members of their oppressor’s security forces. Let’s also suppose that another 251 civilians and soldiers are taken hostage over the course of this atrocity.
Let’s now suppose that the oppressor government’s security forces immediately launch a massive and brutal campaign of revenge and collective punishment. Over the next year and a half, this campaign of vengeance racks up an impressive body count of 50,000 people, most of whom are women and children. Many more of the oppressed are maimed for life. Adding to the diabolical nature of this series of atrocities is a leader of the oppressor government who appears hell-bent on keeping the conflict raging in order to aid his political survival, and to avoid potential incarceration.
We could add to the complexity of this sordid scenario by factoring in the oppressor government’s imperial sponsor, whose previous executive administration — responding (at least in part) to massive protests across the globe against the killing spree its client state is engaged in — puts on an impressive show of hand-wringing, but does little to slow down the slaughter: possibly because the imperial power’s client state is also doing such an effective job at degrading the interests of the oppressed people’s state sponsors, all of whom are enemies of both the oppressor and its imperial sponsor. Meanwhile, the incoming executive of the imperial superpower campaigns on a promise to bring the conflict to a quick end, yet all but ignores those pledges once entering office.
What are some of the complex virtues we can observe being signaled in a tragic scenario like the one described above?
Bot (anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking): In this tragic scenario, we observe a complex web of contradictory virtue signals:
The militant group signals:
The oppressor government signals:
The oppressor's leader signals:
The imperial sponsor signals:
The protests signal:
This scenario reveals how virtue becomes weaponized in modern conflicts. Each actor transforms virtues that would be recognized at the individual level (protection, justice, compassion) into justifications for collective violence. The moral frameworks become incommensurable, with each side appealing to different historical contexts, timescales, and conceptions of justice.
Most tellingly, we see how institutional and geopolitical imperatives corrupt virtue. Leaders invoke universal virtues while acting according to particular interests, creating moral systems where mass civilian casualties become acceptable "collateral damage" in pursuit of supposedly virtuous ends.
This isn't merely modern—similar dynamics appear throughout history—but our interconnected information environment makes these contradictions more visible than ever before.
User (David): Perhaps we can now train our focus on the virtue signaling people within societies employ to “declare allegiance to values that signal … tribal affiliations more than guide … actual conduct” with the aim of “establishing group membership, reinforcing status hierarchies, and creating moral distance from perceived opponents.” I’m particularly interested in how this dynamic plays out within an ideologically and socially polarized society — particularly one inhabiting a major imperial power that features vast wealth, income and educational disparities, and is potentially in the process of decline and / or destabilization. How might this dynamic further contribute to the society’s potential destabilization and possible unraveling — perhaps even undermining the interests of those who show the greatest commitment and expend the most energy in signaling their virtues? Please don’t hesitate to respond at length.
Bot (anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet:thinking):
In polarized societies within declining imperial powers, virtue signaling becomes more than mere social positioning—it transforms into a mechanism that can accelerate destabilization through several interconnected processes:
As social divisions deepen in a declining empire, virtue signaling escalates from simple disagreement to fundamental moral incompatibility. Each tribe increasingly defines its virtues in direct opposition to the other, creating what political psychologists call "moral magnification"—where opponents aren't merely wrong but evil. This transforms compromise from a pragmatic necessity into moral compromise, making governance increasingly impossible.
As French historian Pierre Rosanvallon noted, "Democracy requires that we see those we disagree with as fellow citizens, not enemies." But virtue signaling in decline often explicitly frames opponents as existential threats, creating a feedback loop that renders collaborative problem-solving—precisely what's needed in periods of instability—virtually impossible.
Perhaps most damaging to imperial stability is how performative virtue substitutes for structural reform. The educated classes—especially those with declining economic prospects relative to their expectations—often invest heavily in virtue signaling precisely because traditional paths to status have narrowed. Yet this energy, directed toward moral performance rather than structural reorganization, serves existing power arrangements.
Historical parallels abound: Late Roman Republic patricians engaged in elaborate displays of traditional virtue while economic conditions for average citizens deteriorated. The Habsburg Empire's educated classes fought bitter culture wars while imperial foundations crumbled. In both cases, elites most committed to signaling particular virtues were ultimately undermined by the very instability their focus on symbolic rather than structural concerns helped create.
Within imperial systems featuring vast educational disparities, the language of virtue becomes increasingly specialized and academic, creating what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "cultural capital"—moral vocabularies that function as class markers. The most enthusiastic virtue signalers often employ linguistic and conceptual frameworks unintelligible or alienating to broader populations.
This creates a paradoxical effect where those most committed to certain virtues (equality, justice, tradition, patriotism) communicate these values in ways that undermine coalition-building necessary to advance them. The virtuousness becomes self-referential—valued for its performance within in-group contexts rather than its effectiveness in achieving stated aims.
Imperial stability requires broad coalitions across disparate groups. Yet intensive virtue signaling often demands moral purity that fragments potential alliances. When moral positioning takes precedence over pragmatic coalition-building, the result is political impotence despite moral certainty.
This dynamic particularly undermines those most committed to virtue signaling, as their insistence on purity creates ever-smaller factions incapable of exercising meaningful power. Meanwhile, less morally rigid groups—often representing established interests—maintain pragmatic coalitions that preserve existing arrangements.
Perhaps most ironically, zealous virtue signalers often provoke counter-movements specifically organized against their signaled virtues. When particular virtues become associated with educated elites perceived as condescending or out of touch, populations experiencing status anxiety or economic precarity may embrace opposite positions primarily as identity markers.
This creates scenarios where those most invested in signaling particular virtues actually generate electoral outcomes directly threatening the values they champion. The backlash doesn't necessarily represent opposition to the content of the virtues but to the perceived social status and authority of those doing the signaling.
Most devastatingly for imperial stability, intense focus on virtue conflicts often blinds participants to underlying structural problems threatening the system itself. Late-stage empires typically face challenges like resource depletion, military overextension, infrastructure decay, and environmental degradation that transcend ideological divisions.
When social energy focuses predominantly on moral positioning rather than addressing these fundamental challenges, the result accelerates systemic decline. The virtuous on all sides find themselves fighting over increasingly irrelevant moral terrain while the foundations supporting their entire way of life erode beneath them.
For those most committed to virtue signaling—across ideological spectrums—this creates a profound irony: their intense moral commitment ultimately undermines the stability required for the values they champion to flourish. The virtue signalers most certain of their moral frameworks may be least equipped to navigate the ambiguities and compromises necessary for social cohesion during imperial transition.
Historical perspective suggests that periods of imperial decline are rarely reversed through intensified virtue conflicts. Rather, stability either emerges through new frameworks that transcend existing virtue divides or the system continues its descent, with virtue signalers of all stripes ultimately discovering that their moral certainties provided little protection against the consequences of systemic collapse.
Download a transcript of the conversation presented above here:
Virtue-Signaling-in-Declining-Empires
Senator Bernie Sanders: In the richest country in the history of the world, we CAN end child poverty. ↩
United States Agency for International Development (USAID) ↩
AI Overview Retrieved 2025-03-23: In a secular context, "principalities and powers" can refer to powerful institutions, organizations, or systems, such as corporations, nation-states, or even ideologies, that wield significant influence and authority, potentially becoming forces that demand allegiance and can be seen as oppressive or problematic. ↩
In addition to my question here, I also shared the intro shown above with Claude. ↩