We all want to be good. But often, what we want more is for others to know just how good we are. We have long been warned about the dangers of flaunting our own moral superiority this way: In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus instructs his followers not to be like the ‘‘hypocrites’’ who ‘‘love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by men.’’ Nearly 2,000 years later, the 19th-century Catholic saint John Vianney argued that the instinct to show off our goodness — our fasting, our donations to the poor and the church — would ‘‘make hypocrites of us.’’ ‘‘If we desire a heavenly reward,’’ he wrote, ‘‘then we must hide the good which God works in us as much as possible, for fear that the devil of pride may rob us of the merit of those good works.’’ And yet lately, many people believe that these admonitions have been forgotten — that we are living in a veritable golden age of hypocritical showboats advertising their own righteousness.

The British conservative writer James Bartholomew may be the main popularizer of the term ‘‘virtue signaling,’’ which he first used in an April 2015 article in The Spectator, arguing that much of the moral outrage we see online is mere posturing: ‘‘Gosh, you must be virtuous to be so cross!’’ His ire was aimed mostly at critics of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), a promulgator of rabidly anti-immigrant rhetoric, and The Daily Mail, a newspaper known for its own tabloid nativism and xenophobia. On any given day, it’s easy to find Britons expressing their moral outrage and disapproval of UKIP and The Mail. But in Bartholomew’s view, this isn’t because those people care all that deeply about either. They merely want to suggest that they do — to signal that they’re exactly the kind of very virtuous people who would have enlightened, politically correct feelings about such things.

When people offer their vehement condemnation of some injustice in the news, or change their Facebook profile photos to honor the victims of some new tragedy, or write status updates demanding federal action on climate change, observers like Bartholomew smell something fishy: Do these people really care deeply about the issue du jour? They probably aren’t, after all, out volunteering to solve the problem. What if they’re motivated, above all else, by simply looking like people who care?

This sort of ostentatious concern is, according to some diagnoses, endemic to the political left. A writer for the conservative website The Daily Caller wrote this summer that virtue signaling ‘‘has been universalized into a sort of cultural tic’’ on the left, ‘‘as compulsive and unavoidable as Tourette’s syndrome.’’ There are plenty on the left who might agree. It’s not difficult to find, in conversations among progressives, widespread eye-rolling over a certain type of person: the one who will take a heroic stance on almost any issue — furious indignation over the casting of a live-action ‘‘Aladdin’’ film, vehement defense of Hillary Clinton’s fashion choices, extravagant emotional investment in the plight of a group to which the speaker does not belong — in what feels like a transparent bid for the praise, likes and aura of righteousness that follows.