A thread through the archive
Essays tagged “virtue signaling”. Follow an idea across the archive.
Scott argues against the concept of "telescopic altruism" - the claim that liberals care more about distant strangers than nearby people - showing that people who care about faraway causes also care about nearby ones, and that compassion is generally correlated across all distances rather than inversely related.
Scott analyzes why people support government-funded foreign aid instead of donating voluntarily, examining and critiquing several theories including virtue signaling, coordination problems, and time-inconsistent preferences.
A study shows people who do one good deed are less likely to do another soon after, suggesting moral behavior operates on a limited resource that gets depleted.