Even in that scenario, though, I think it’s a mistake to focus on the virtue signaling itself rather than the not-virtuous actions/intentions as the main problem. Like, if you have an agent with few or no moral boundaries who wants to do a selfish thing, why should we be surprised that they’re willing to be manipulative in the course of doing that?
If you think of virtue signalling as a really important coordination mechanism, then abusing that system is additionally very bad on top of the object-level bad thing.
If you think of virtue signalling as a really important coordination mechanism, then abusing that system is additionally very bad on top of the object-level bad thing.