Let ‘gossip’ be the practice of discussing a person’s character, conduct, or relationships in that person’s absence. Commonplaces about gossip include that it is an ordinary and ubiquitous part of human life, that it plays important social and even evolutionary roles, and that the mores of various times and places nonetheless view it with suspicion. What major ethical theories should say about gossip remains ambivalent. On the one hand, ethicists have called it a pleasant and often harmless pastime, praised its ability to promote self-knowledge and social cohesion, and recommended it as a tool for combatting pernicious power imbalances. On the other hand, ethicists have also wondered why gossip sometimes inspires feelings of guilt in its practitioners, cautioned that it runs a risk of disrespecting the personhood of those involved, and worried that it might foster undeserved isolation. In this talk, I focus on a distinctly epistemic cost of gossip. I argue that gossip eliminates opportunities to garner ‘acquaintance’—understood in the technical sense as a relationship of direct awareness—between those whose story the gossip narrates and those who listen. This matters because, according to influential views in epistemology, acquaintance so understood possesses a special kind of value.
