I do not know whether the term virtue signalling will catch on or not. I have mixed feelings. On the one hand, it describes something human beings actually do. On the other hand, it was quickly appropriated by the perpetual outrage community as a cheap and easy put down.
The key fact is this: virtue signalling is a normal and unavoidable thing that all human beings do. It's not evil. You, me and everybody else we know will, under most circumstances, express the values the we believe the people we are with want to hear. It's a normal, and even productive, thing to do.
A friend of mine is pregnant with her second child. She noticed that her first child has started to grunt when he bends over. He does this because mummy, heavy with child, grunts when she bends over. That's virtue signalling. He's expressing a value, bending over is hard, because his mother expresses that value. In her case, it's actually true. In his case, it's not. He does it because he, like all human beings, is hardwired to learn by imitating others and because his very life depends on his mother.
That is true of us too. Our very life depends on the community around us. If you find yourself stuck with people you don't know well for an extended period of time, you will begin to mirror their behaviours and attitudes.
There are two lessons to be drawn from this. The most commonplace one is the that it takes courage to speak up for your values. Most of us have had the experience of finding ourselves in the presence of someone who brashly says things we deeply oppose but found ourselves unable to respond. We just sat there while things we found hateful were said. But there is a deeper and more important lesson here and that is that our expressed values are often at odds with our real values.
Think of the example I give above in a slightly different light. Imagine you are in a group and someone says things you deeply oppose and you do not object at first but soon notice that the others in the group do. And now you join in. Or maybe you wait a little longer to see if a few others also join and then you join in. Perhaps you wait until it's obvious that the person is rejected and reviled by the rest of the group and then you join in (perhaps "pile on" would be a better term by that point).
We've all done these things. What this tells us is that fitting in is a value we treasure deeply.
To return to the previous example, let's consider a further hypothetical: if the group started to be angry with the person who had expressed offensive opinions, at what point would we pull back? We hope that it would be sometime before someone got a rope to lynch them with but who knows what we are capable of.
We live in a deontological culture. That is to say, we live in a world where morality is largely defined in terms of duty defined by rules. Be tolerant. Don't use violence. Recycle. Don't have sex with teenagers. Be faithful to your spouse. Don't text while driving. And many more. Each of these rules comes accompanied with a justification in terms of duty. "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling."
This is a very compelling morality. It's clearly expressed and relatively easy to understand. Compared to utilitarianism, Do what will give the greatest happiness to the largest number," or virtue ethics, "Act in a way to train yourself to be a better human being, " there is clarity and ease of application to be found in, "There is a garbage crisis and it is your duty to reduce landfill waste by recycling." You know what to do and you can easily figure out if you've done it. It's also liberating in one sense—once you've done what the rules tell you to be your duty, you can stop. "I've recycled, I can get a beer and watch television." That's nothing to sneer at, although we all do sneer at it.
But, at the same time that we accept deontology, we also reject it because we cannot and do not fully internalize these values. My real attitude toward recycling is something like: "I will do this up to a point but if I just have to get the place cleaned up because guests are arriving or because I've been getting depressed at the kitchen being so messy and I know I'll feel better if I can clean it up quickly then those plastic containers are going straight into the garbage and I don't think that will do any real harm so long as I don't do it too often but, at the same time, I don't want everyone thinking this is okay so I will continue to hold the hard line when expressing my attitudes towards people who don't recycle."
It's not that we have some alternative set of values that we really follow. It's more that we are willing to make a whole lot of exceptions that we aren't honest with ourselves or others about. And that is why we fear and love the expression "virtue signalling". We fear it because we know it can be justly applied to what we do. We love it because it can be justly applied to what other people do and that makes it a useful tool for making others talk and behave in a predictable fashion.
What do we do about this? I'll try and come back to it.
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