How to be an ethical gossip

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

When I get together with my two best friends, we often talk about other people. We catch up on what acquaintances we knew in college are doing, and gossip about the mistakes people are making in their love lives. The other day I realized I left dinner and we had spent the entire time gossiping. It made me feel a little weird. Are we mean? Is it okay to gossip so much? It’s so much fun…

I share your love of gossip. I could blame my job (I’m a journalist, of course I’m hungry for information), but the truth is that I’ve always wanted to know what other people are up to.

At times, I have, like you, confronted the fact that gossip is often considered a vice. There was even once a medieval punishment for gossiping called a gossip bridle, an iron muzzle placed over the head of a person who spoke a little too freely. Those punitive dynamics were gendered, of course: Most of the gossip bridle’s victims were women, meaning that the directive to watch what you say may have really been a way to produce the right kinds of femininity. The same may be true today. If you tried to avoid gossip, would you be a much better person, or just a quieter one?

To your question, then: If gossip feels good, can it really be all that bad? And to take it a step further: Is it possible that there could be something good about gossip itself, even though we’re taught that it’s bad? Either way, we still need to ask ourselves a few critical questions: How does the gossip we’re sharing affect the people we’re gossiping about? And how does it shape our relationships to the people we’re gossiping with?

Cécile Fabre, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, took up the question of gossip in a 2023 paper, considering it through a framework drawn from Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy, which holds that you must treat others as ends in themselves — rational beings deserving of respect — rather than as means to ends of one’s own. Fabre acknowledges that gossip can bring people together, as it does for you and your friends, but she also stresses that it has a darker side. “It lubricates and wrecks social relationships,” she writes.

First, Fabre distinguishes between good and bad gossip. “Good gossip” is truthful, and shared without breaking a promise to someone else by sharing it. If you’re telling lies about another person, or if you swore that you would keep a secret and are passing it on, gossiping raises other moral issues. But if you’re, say, passing along an anecdote that a mutual acquaintance freely and openly shared about a disastrous first date, you’re more likely to be in the clear.

But Fabre’s conclusion may make you uncomfortable: She argues that gossip is wrong when it leads us to deny others “the concern and respect which we owe them as persons.” As Fabre suggests, gossip is definitionally about people, but it often goes wrong precisely because it leads us to treat them with less dignity than we would accord to ourselves in our own personhood. For Fabre (and perhaps also for Kant, who never took the question up explicitly), then, gossiping is morally wrong when it uses others for entertainment or otherwise denigrates them to make oneself feel superior.

It’s possible that Kant, whose moral laws aspired to the universal, would have been even more draconian than Fabre makes him out to be. But as his own life demonstrates, things can get fuzzier in practice. The great metaphysician of morals was himself known to love a good gossip session over wine at a dinner party, and, according to his book of lectures, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he thought that this habit was fine, as long as no one divulged what was said later.

In the centuries since Kant let stories slosh over the edge of his cup, plenty of other thinkers have become apologists for gossip, arguing that it’s an unavoidable and necessary aspect of social life. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar claims in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language that gossip was key to our survival as a species. When ancient hominids gossiped, they were sharing information about dangerous people and practices, while also maintaining social order. Gossip was a form of cultural learning, and it easily spread knowledge across a group. Dunbar has more recently suggested that 85 percent of everyone’s conversations are dedicated to talking about social matters, much of which could be considered gossip.

Some feminist philosophers, among them Karen Adkins, author of Gossip, Epistemology, and Power: Knowledge Underground, have maintained that gossip can be a tool of the disenfranchised. (Think again about whose mouths were sealed by the gossip bridle and ask yourself who ordered them shut.) Whisper networks can inform people about bad working environments or abusive bosses. That, in turn, builds trust among the disempowered, which can be a path back to power.

It doesn’t, however, sound like that’s exactly what you and your besties are up to. It may be true that talking about people who aren’t there helps you sustain your sense of intimacy with your pals who are. But in Kantian terms, that might also mean that you’re effectively treating those absent others as means to ends that have nothing to do with them. And what should we call that if not disrespect?

You mentioned two different kinds of gossip in your question: swapping information about former college classmates and dissecting people’s love lives. You might spend some time breaking those categories down further to figure out what kind of gossip you and your friends are engaging in. In a large study on gossip, psychologists found that most gossip was not actually malicious or dedicated to criticizing other people; the majority was neutral. If, on reflection, you find your gossip is predominantly unkind, you might want to pull back. Not because all gossip is inherently wrong, but because being overly malicious could, as a different philosopher suggests, shape your experience of the world for the worse.

Here, I’m thinking about the 20th-century existential philosopher Martin Buber, who offers a nuanced account of how we treat others that might shape our understanding of gossip. In 1923, in his book I and Thou, he identifies two modes through which you can interact with the world. In the I-it mode, you encounter individuals as objects, or “its.” By contrast, an I-thou encounter treats everything you meet, whether it’s a person or a tree, as an entity with which you can enter into a relationship.

Buber thought the I-thou attitude was a fundamentally human capacity. It describes the ability to relate to others, and have a dynamic emerge between you — rather than just objectify them. While Kant helped inspire Buber, I prefer the latter’s quasi-spiritual take not just about right and wrong, but what we lose out on. When we gossip too much, we may take on an I-it attitude to others, and forget that they are living and breathing people with whom we have relationships, people who are struggling to make choices of their own, and people who, like us, sometimes get it wrong.

I’m ultimately less concerned that you gossip at all than I am about your observation that the entirety of your social interactions are dedicated to gossip, with little room for other topics. I worry that you and your friends aren’t making room for sharing your own interests or your own struggles. In that sense, the issue might not be that you’re disrespecting people who aren’t there, but rather that you’re not in true dialogue with the people who are present. Your dinner parties might be all I-it and not enough I-thou.

Whenever we prioritize one subject at the expense of all others, we risk putting on blinders. I am reminded of the Bechdel test, which asks (somewhat facetiously in its original form) whether female characters in a movie ever talk to each other about something other than a man. A story that fails the Bechdel test isn’t necessarily bad, but it might be richer if it passed. Perhaps you can adapt a kind of Bechdel test for you and your friends, but for gossip. Can you find any moments that are gossip-free?

It’s natural, fun, and maybe even useful, to gossip. But there are many ways to connect to your friends that don’t require dunking on other people who aren’t there. Go ahead and share your juicy tidbits. Then make some time to honor the richness of your own lives too.

Bonus: What I’m reading