What Gossip Gets Wrong
In this post, Ali Raza Jatoi discusses his recent article in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on why gossip wrongs us not by breaching privacy or spreading lies, but by shutting us out of the conversation deciding who we are.
Think of the last time you told someone about a mutual acquaintance who wasn’t in the room. Maybe you were worried about them and wanted advice on how to help. Or maybe you were speculating about why they got that promotion, that breakup, that demotion. One of these felt fine, even caring. The other felt a bit like backstabbing, even if every word of it was true. Why?
Gossip is not a fringe activity. Researchers estimate that roughly two-thirds of human conversation is evaluative talk about people who aren’t present to hear it. We are not going to stop doing this and probably shouldn’t try. But gossip clearly can go wrong, and the puzzle is explaining what, exactly, goes wrong when it does. In a recent paper, I argue that the standard answers – privacy, harm, dishonesty – all fail, and that the real wrong is exclusion.
Start with privacy. It 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.
Here is the alternative I defend. 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.
This is what the other theories miss. The very same criticism, said to someone’s face and said behind their back, is not morally equivalent, even when the words are identical, because only one version includes them in the conversation that is deciding how they’ll be seen.
Exclusion, though, comes in degrees, and so does the wrong. Praise someone behind their back and they have little reason to demand inclusion since there’s nothing there to contest. Positive gossip is still gossip, but only weakly troubling. Compare: “She’s too humble to say it, but she probably only got the job because they needed a woman on the panel.” Still framed as a compliment, but it smuggles in a claim she would have every reason to challenge. 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.
None of this settles when gossip actually crosses the line, so I propose three further constraints. 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.
Put together, these constraints explain why gossip is neither always fine nor always wrong. A worried conversation about a stressed colleague, aimed at figuring out how to support them, passes all three tests easily. Speculative chatter about how a colleague “must have” earned a promotion, dressed up as concern, does not.
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. But we can ask better questions of it. Instead of “is this private?” or “could this cause harm?”, ask: does this person have a stake in what’s being said about them? Would they want a voice here? And if they’ve been excluded, was there a good reason for it? These questions won’t settle every case, but they get at what actually troubles us about gossip in a way that the usual worries about privacy, harm, and honesty never quite manage.
Ali Raza Jatoi is an independent researcher working across philosophy, number theory and computational methods.
