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How to be an ethical gossip

What to do when you can’t stop sharing secrets with your friends.

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?

How to fall in love with humanity again

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?

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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,........

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