It's an intellectually dishonest argument, because it actually uses someone's profession of good intentions, accepts them, and then somehow turns it against the

It's an intellectually dishonest argument, because it actually uses someone's profession of good intentions, accepts them, and then somehow turns it against the speaker. As used on the internet, it's also useless because it always assumes the speaker doesn't actually act on their believes, and there usually is no way for them to prove their willingness to act on their believes. It also ignores that even just stating such believes can have an effect. After all, these statements are used to convince others to adopt them. The best proof of the last point may actually be this protest by Google employees: their conviction was probably formed by reading and hearing about the ethical responsibility of engineers, a topic that is certainly teeming with "virtue signalling" according to the common definition. They might even be the product of Google's own "virtue signalling", i. e. "Do no Evil". Maybe Larry Page and Sergey Brin only ever wanted to pay lip service to ethical behaviour. But their employees didn't get the full memo, took them by their word, and are now acting upon it. In this sense, "virtue signalling" aka "Greenwashing" or "diversity boilerplate" may start as a cynical profit-motivated lie, and end up changing the world for the better.