Gossip ethics: how to talk about others without harm

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…

Dear Dirt Disher,

I get it — I enjoy gossip, too. My job as a journalist certainly feeds that appetite, but beyond work I’ve always been curious about what others are doing.

Gossip has long been framed as a vice. Historically, there was even a medieval punishment called the gossip bridle — an iron muzzle used to silence people who spoke too freely. That punishment was mostly applied to women, which suggests that the injunction to curb gossip has sometimes been a way of shaping acceptable femininity. So if you stopped gossiping entirely, would you be morally better, or simply quieter?

To answer your question: gossip can feel good, so is it necessarily wrong? And might gossip sometimes do social good even as we’re taught it’s bad? To address that, we need to ask how our talk affects the people we’re discussing and how it shapes our ties with the people we gossip with.

Cécile Fabre, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, examined gossip in a 2023 paper through a Kantian lens, which emphasizes treating others as ends in themselves rather than as means. Fabre acknowledges that gossip can bond people — as it does for you and your friends — but she also underscores its harm. “It lubricates and wrecks social relationships,” she writes.

Fabre separates better and worse forms of gossip. “Good gossip,” she says, is truthful and shared without breaking promises. Passing on a lie or revealing a confidence you swore to keep raises different moral problems. But relaying an anecdote someone openly told about a disastrous first date is more defensible.

Fabre’s more unsettling claim is that gossip becomes wrong when it leads us to deny others “the concern and respect which we owe them as persons.” Gossip is about people, yet it often dehumanizes them: treating them as entertainment or as a means to feel superior. For Fabre (and arguably for Kant, who didn’t write directly on gossip), that instrumentalizing of people is the core moral failure.

Kant himself might have been harsher, though his life shows the idea is complicated. The philosopher enjoyed gossip over wine at dinner parties; in his lectures in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, he suggested such habits were acceptable so long as what was said wasn’t repeated later.

Other thinkers have defended gossip as inevitable and useful. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues in Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language that gossip helped human groups survive by spreading information about risky people and practices and by enforcing social norms. Dunbar has more recently estimated that 85 percent of conversation is about social matters, much of which looks like gossip.

Some feminist philosophers, including Karen Adkins (author of Gossip, Epistemology, and Power: Knowledge Underground), argue gossip can serve the marginalized. Whisper networks can warn people about bad workplaces or abusive bosses, building trust among the disempowered and sometimes providing a route back to power.

That said, what you described — swapping news about former college classmates and dissecting love lives — may be more about bonding than mobilizing justice. Even if talking about absent people helps you feel close, from a Kantian angle it risks treating those absent others as means to your social ends. In plain terms: that can look like disrespect.

You flagged two kinds of gossip. Psychologists studying gossip found that most of it is neutral rather than malicious. If you find, on reflection, that your conversations are mainly unkind, it could be worth pulling back — not because all gossip is wrong, but because persistent malice can change how you see the world.

Martin Buber’s philosophy offers a helpful contrast. In I and Thou (1923) he describes two modes of relating: the I-it stance, which treats people as objects, and the I-thou stance, which enters into relationship with others. Buber saw the I-thou as a core human capacity. Too much gossip can encourage an I-it attitude, causing us to forget that the people we discuss are living, struggling subjects, not mere fodder for conversation.

My bigger worry isn’t that you gossip at all but that your social life is dominated by it. When every conversation circles back to other people, you may be missing the chance to share your own interests and struggles with the friends who are present. In Buberian terms, your dinners risk being all I-it and not enough I-thou.

Finally, any habit that crowds out other topics puts on blinders. Think of a Bechdel-style test for your group: can you find moments that are gossip-free? It’s fine — even natural — to enjoy juicy tidbits. But also make space to honor your own lives and to talk about things that aren’t about other people.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• In 1938, W.H. Auden wrote the essay “In Defense of Gossip.” He argues that gossip is irresistibly engaging and offers advice on how to gossip well. That didn’t prevent gossip and drama from nearly breaking apart the communal living project he was involved with a few years later, as recounted in the book February House.
• The podcast that made me rethink gossip is Normal Gossip. Each episode shares an anonymized, outrageous social situation and shows gossip can be entertaining even about strangers.
• I didn’t focus much on celebrity gossip here because it raises different questions. For history on that side of things, see Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood’s Notorious Scandal Magazine, which traces the origins of the American celebrity-gossip magazine.

Source: vox.com