The moment you start broadcasting moral positions as corporate policies, you're virtue signalling. It's not always negative, or false, but it's certainly a marketing move.
> early all of the things we now hold as self-evident (racial equality, gender equality, sexual orientation equality, etc)
Not all of us believe in all of that in the sense in which you mean it.
> Were the people who were ahead of the morality curve virtue signaling?
Were and still are.
Speaking of things that "are not facts, they are beliefs", you should check your own. Religious fundamentalists did not create racism, sexism, homophobia or any other prejudice. Religions reflect the prejudices of the people, not the other way around. God did not create us in his image; we created him in ours. People can and will use the power of muscle, religion, science and even art in service of their power, their selfishness, their oppression of other. There was no religion that created Nazi Germany. There is no religion behind Trump's sexism, racism and corruption. There is no religion behind the tech industry's general sexism and refusal to acknowledge it. There is no religion behind humanity's environmental destruction.
There is only human selfishness. Just people unwilling to do the right thing because it involves giving up their advantage, whether its the advantage of their color, their gender, their tribe, the convenience of single-use plastic, or their ability to eat a diet that wouldn't be sustainable if everyone on the planet ate that same diet.
I say all this as a meat-eating atheist-leaning agnostic. If my prior paragraph applies to me and my meat consumption, it is something I must own up to, and do the right thing.
There are more religious people than SV/tech people trying to help the homeless. If anything, the growing inequality fueled by the power and dominance of tech and the tech class is pricing people out of homes and putting people out of work.
I'm certain the "real" Dr. Who would agree with me.
> God did not create us in his image; we created him in ours.
Apparently you don't understand religion at all. This is exactly the opposite of what they believe. Your idea about man creating God is the atheist position. Fundamentalists believe the Bible is the inerrant word of God and his will must be obeyed. They differ only in interpretation and level of conviction.
Some people will use X to justify their behavior but most people are just too stupid for that. Evangelicals come to mind. They just believe whatever they are told because it makes them feel good or special. It's sheer intellectual laziness that allows their though processes to be corrupted or completely bypassed by religious dogma. Once it reaches a tipping point in the population you enable people like Hitler and Trump who will take advantage of the movement to get what they want.
> There are more religious people than SV/tech people trying to help the homeless.
The don't want to help, they want to assuage their own guilt by doing as little as possible. And you can be sure the only homeless they want to help are straight and white and don't live anywhere near their gated communities. The make token donations so they can forget about all the harm they really do by electing idiots who invent bathroom laws, anti-abortion laws, try to keep gays out of the military, kill people by taking away affordable healthcare, give huge tax breaks to the rich and millions of other shitty little laws.
This is patently, provably false.
You're begging the question. By labeling it virtue signaling, you've already dismissed it as false, as not a genuinely held moral position.
What if someone honestly believed that giving up meat was the moral thing to do, given the current conditions of the world?
Remember that nearly all of the things we now hold as self-evident (racial equality, gender equality, sexual orientation equality, etc) were once radical / crazy positions. Were the people who were ahead of the morality curve virtue signaling?