I’m fascinated by the ethics of gossip. For something so commonplace and natural, people rarely question or discuss the morality of talking about those who aren’t present. I’ve written about the Buddhist view of gossip: it is considered a violation of ‘Right Speech’, the principle of speaking without causing harm to oneself or others. Gossip refers to casual or unconstrained chatter about others, the details of which are unconfirmed, useless, or sensational. Buddhists try to abstain from gossip because of the unwholesome intentions they believe often underlie it, such as ill will, jealousy, comparison, and ego.
Even if the details of gossip are true, Buddhism also evaluates speech by its fruits: Does it ultimately reduce or increase suffering? For example, say someone committed a wrong and has made amends. Others could continue to gossip about this wrong, describing it accurately, but doing so could further the negative reputation of that individual. Gossip based on truth can still damage trust, create division, and feed negative attitudes in the speaker’s mind, such as hatred and resentment.
Buddhism does not prohibit talking about others who aren’t present; doing so with wholesome intentions – protecting the safety of others, seeking ways to support others, or exposing corruption and wrongdoing with verifiable facts – differs from Buddhists’ typical conception of gossip.
However, some have questioned whether harm (or potential harm) is what makes gossip wrong – and of course, many question whether we should consider gossip (or most gossip) wrong at all, given its benefits.
I recently came across an article by the independent researcher Ali Raza Jatoi, titled ‘What Gossip Gets Wrong’, based on a paper he had published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy, titled ‘What Is Wrong with Gossip? An Exclusion-Based Account’. In both his article and paper, he disagrees with the standard answers as to why gossip is wrong: privacy, harm, and dishonesty. He writes, “Approximately 65% of human conversation involves evaluative talk about absent others, yet such talk often feels like backstabbing even when it causes no harm, violates no privacy, and consists entirely of truth.” Jatoi states:
[Privacy] cannot be the whole story, because gossip about entirely public facts still feels wrong. A colleague speculating about why you didn’t get promoted, using only things everyone already knows, still stings. Harm cannot be the whole story either because gossip that never reaches its target and changes nothing can still feel like a betrayal, purely because it happened. And deception is clearly not the issue, since gossip built entirely on true, verified information is often the most cutting kind of all.
Instead, Jatoi offers a broad definition of gossip, and his account of what makes it wrong:
Gossip is evaluative talk about an identifiable, absent person, shared with some people but deliberately not with the person it’s about. That person has no chance to correct a mischaracterisation, add context, or push back. Their reputation gets shaped by a conversation they are locked out of. I call this a loss of participatory standing: a legitimate claim to a voice in discourse about oneself, grounded in one’s stake in the outcome, one’s agency over how one is understood, and one’s membership in the community doing the discussing.
A criticism of someone differs morally depending on whether it is made with or without the person present; in other words, whether it is said behind someone’s back. It is not the words that matter, but whether the person is included in, or excluded from, the conversation that concerns their character. Jatoi argues that just as exclusion comes in degrees, so does the wrong; praising someone behind their back, with claims the person has no stake in contesting, is different from a claim someone has a reason to challenge (e.g. a claim about how someone’s achievement has less to do with their talent or effort and more to do with luck or favouritism). Jatoi writes:
What matters is not whether the tone is warm or hostile. It’s whether there’s anything in the remark the person would want a say in. A stranger’s exclusion also matters less than a close friend’s, since the stakes of the relationship differ. And exclusion is sometimes flatly justified as warning others that someone is dangerous doesn’t require giving them a hearing first.
But independently of the kind and degree of the exclusion – and, therefore, the extent of wrongdoing – when does gossip cross the line from permissible to immoral? For Jatoi, three factors constrain whether gossip is permissible or not:
The first is about standing. Does the target have a real stake in this conversation, through their interests, their say over their own story, or their membership in the community discussing them? If not, exclusion barely registers as a wrong at all. If a friend group is speculating about why Mara stopped drinking, that’s her reputation and her story, and these are her people. She’d want a say. But if a stranger on the train guesses why some guy looked annoyed on the phone, there’s no relationship, no story that follows him, nothing real on the line.
The second is about purpose, in particular, is the talk serving a genuine need, like warning someone or working through a hard decision, or is it entertainment at someone’s expense? The third is about justice. Does this gossip, even in a single harmless-seeming instance, prop up an unjust pattern? Speculation that trades on a stereotype about women, or about any marginalised group, carries a structural weight that outstrips the individual conversation, however casually it’s meant.
Buddhism proposes five criteria for the permissibility of a speech act: “Do I speak at the right time, or not? Do I speak of facts, or not? Do I speak gently or harshly? Do I speak profitable words or not? Do I speak with a kindly heart, or inwardly malicious?” I suppose ‘profitable words’ is the closest criterion to cover Jatoi’s exclusion-based account of the wrongness of gossip. Excluding the target of gossip from the conversation is unprofitable if they have interests in being included: being excluded may negatively impact their reputation, safety, standing in a friend group or community, or acceptance by society.
It is hard, however, to see how the wrongness of exclusion is not reducible to harm. The knowledge of others talking about you behind your back stings, which can be distressing – a kind of psychological harm. It is easy to imagine someone feeling hurt or betrayed if they overheard their friends talking about them in ways they don’t talk about them face to face. However, even without this knowledge, someone’s reputation could still be harmed. The gossip doesn’t sting – since the person talked about is unaware of the conversation – but this doesn’t preclude reputational damage, which may have downstream negative effects on how others treat that person, based on others’ negative evaluation of them.
Yet, Jatoi maintains that exclusion is not equivalent to harm; it relates to the fact that a person has a stake in what’s being said about them and would want a voice in the conversation, so that they have their side of the story heard. He believes this is what makes gossip troubling when considerations of privacy, harm, and honesty don’t capture it. Nevertheless, while Jatoi tries to disentangle exclusion from dishonesty, he seems to see them as connected when he writes that someone’s exclusion can lead to them being mischaracterised or misjudged. Indeed, it seems that what makes exclusion most acutely wrong is this very fact: certain truths about the person are left out or distorted. The conversation about the absent person is therefore not completely honest or truthful.
I can understand the reasoning behind distinguishing exclusion from harm. If someone doesn’t know or experience anything negative from others’ conception of this person being different from the person’s self-conception, then where is the harm? Their reputation has been ‘harmed’, in a colloquial sense, but their reputation in the eyes of others only has a psychological impact when they’re aware of it.
I think Jatoi’s exclusion-based account captures a feeling I’ve long had about the unfairness of much gossip, specifically: “That person has no chance to correct a mischaracterisation, add context, or push back. Their reputation gets shaped by a conversation they are locked out of.” When gossip concerns the character of a person, their intentions and motivations, their virtues and vices, it is extremely easy for a mismatch to form between self-conception – how an individual understands themselves and the direct knowledge of their inner life – and other people’s conception of who that individual is.
If someone misjudges and reaches a conclusion about a friend’s motivation for a decision they’ve made, this judgement can stick. To use one of Jatoi’s examples, they might have an ongoing impression that this friend gave up drinking for one simple reason, when it wasn’t for that reason at all, or that reason was one among several. Gossip often reduces the complexity, nuance, and wholeness of people into simplistic and narrow conclusions. To invoke a Buberian perspective, gossip often encourages us to see someone as an It – an object to be analysed, labelled, and categorised – rather than a Thou: a whole, unique individual undistorted by our conceptualisation of them.
I would also argue that the bonding, trust, social cohesion, and community that gossip provides, which makes it so deeply rooted in human interaction, are best served by non-exclusionary gossip. In its exclusionary form, there’s a risk of people’s reputations being misjudged. Arguably, social cooperation and cohesion are most likely and effective when someone’s sense of who they are matches others’ sense of that. Otherwise, people who deserve trust may not receive it, and those who don’t deserve it may be afforded it. As I’ve written elsewhere, group cooperation is facilitated “when your self-concept aligns with how other members of the group perceive you as an individual.” (A fair objection to this point is that inclusion doesn’t guarantee accuracy, and a person’s self-conception can be wrong.)
Returning to the question of harm, perhaps Jatoi’s exclusion-based account is essentially a harm-based one: if the wrongness of gossip stems from frustrating someone’s interest or preference in being included in that conversation, then this can be considered wrong under an interest- or preference-based account of harm. It is an objective or hidden harm. Not all conceptions of harm in philosophy require that the wronged person experience pain or negative emotions as a result. A person’s autonomy may still be violated. They still have an interest in how they’re represented in the world and want a say over that representation. Damaging someone’s reputation without their knowledge denies their agency and ability to defend themselves. Jatoi might respond that calling a violation of an interest a ‘harm’ is just renaming the wrong he has in mind, rather than reducing it to what he considers harmful. However, if the wrong consists in a setback to a person’s standing and agency, a broad enough notion of harm would apply.
As alluded to earlier, reputation is a form of social currency, and even if there is no direct or immediate harm done to the person being talked about secretly, there can still be indirect or subsequent negative effects from others altering your reality behind your back, such as lost job opportunities, exclusion from social circles, or being treated with suspicion. So, even if you never find out why these things are happening, you are still suffering the real-world consequences of a damaged reputation.
Gossip may also be a kind of epistemic injustice. Not only can gossip create a mismatch between self-conception and the judgements of others; it also excludes someone from the ‘social court of judgement’: the process and reality of their social standing being decided. Gossip excludes people from testifying about their experiences. This may create a false conception of this person, which may then be disseminated and believed by many people. And even when the group’s picture isn’t false, the person has still lost the chance to add context or offer their own interpretation.
This is something we naturally and understandably care about, especially if those with a false, incomplete, or one-sided idea are people we’re connected to, who matter to us in some way, or whose opinion of our reputation can affect our ongoing livelihoods and relationships. It’s easy to say, “Ignore what others think; just trust that you know who you are.” There is some wisdom in this, but we cannot ignore the fact that, as social animals, we have an interest in the alignment between our self-knowledge and reputation.
This fits Jatoi’s picture of why much gossip is wrong. But I want to examine whether this wrongfulness is really distinct from harm. After all, epistemic injustice, in which the subject is unaware of the gossip, could also be considered an objective harm, in this case, an epistemic harm. A person’s ability to share certain knowledge about themselves is denied and, as a result, their agency over how they’re understood has been undermined. Therefore, it is plausible that this kind of gossip is wrong because the exclusion involved is a kind of harm.
In any case, regardless of whether Jatoi’s exclusion-based account collapses into a harm-based one, his argument still emphasises a question we should ask before we gossip: Would the person being talked about want to be included in this conversation? If we adopt an empathetic stance, imagining ourselves in their position, would they realistically have an interest in having their say over how their actions, motivations, or character are being discussed? Much like the Buddhist criteria for Right Speech, asking these sorts of questions can provide a moment of pause before idle chatter turns into a judgement about someone that can be hard to undo. After all, while we ourselves can later reflect on whether we’ve been too quick or harsh in our judgements of others, what others in the conversation think and conclude is less in our control.
This doesn’t mean we should object to all gossip or be harsh on ourselves if we find our conversation about others slipping into more unconstrained gossip. Talking about others not present is natural and, in many contexts, deeply valuable. Jatoi is not opposed to gossip in and of itself: “I don’t think we can or should try to eliminate gossip. It is too tightly woven into how humans build trust, share information, and hold each other accountable.” It is extreme to conclude that gossip is always permissible or always wrong.
As Jatoi argues, the constraints he describes – participatory standing, purpose, and justice – “provide a framework for navigating gossip’s complex moral terrain while respecting both the social value of information-sharing and the dignity of those we discuss.” Gossip is an everyday moral issue that can be dizzyingly complex to navigate, but it is worth navigating, nonetheless.
Taking time to consider the interests and stakes of those we talk about doesn’t mean doing away with gossip. In reality, it means we can gossip more effectively: we can spend less time discussing useless, inaccurate, or sensationalist information and instead focus on the kind of gossip that best protects others’ well-being. This enhances the social glue of conversation, as does leaving out exclusionary gossip. Saying nothing at all, or keeping our judgements about others to ourselves, is often how we maintain healthy relationships. A judgement gains new power, and may spread or mutate, when spoken out loud.
