Virtue signalling

Rod Dreher shares a post today about a father who made his daughter walk to school after she got kicked off the bus a second time for bullying. You can read it here. Dreher praises the father for this action. Then, at the closing of the post, he says this:

(Though I wish he hadn’t shared this on social media.)

Me too. No loving father would subject his daughter to humiliation like this. We now know where she learned how to be a bully.

Those brackets are Dreher's by the way.

A fundamental moral question is this: am I really interested in virtue as a goal worth pursuing or am I really acting for other's consumption? To put it another way, am really I trying to be a better person or am I seeking attention, approval and acceptance from others?

Virtue signalling is not evil. Everyone does it. But virtue signalling is also not a virtue.