![]() ![]() Although paradigmatic gossip is about people we know personally, gossip about ‘celebrities’ is a monstrous outgrowth, now at a level of popularity and refinement unmatched in human history. By gossip I loosely mean idle banter about people behind their backs, where although the content is explicitly only factual (‘I heard Alan is having an affair’, ‘You have no idea how drunk Brenda got the other night’, and so on), there is almost always an implicit, negative moral judgment. So the ubiquity of judgments about others is manifest in two of society’s greatest preoccupations, gossip and defamation (the two overlapping significantly). The thought is the father to the deed where deeds include words. To judge or not to judge? Here is an area of practical ethics that receives little contemporary attention, yet it is as central to morality as judging the state of the weather is to the question of how one should dress.įleshing this out a little, consider first the way in which moral judgment about others is manifested in outward behaviour. We do not want to appear (or even to be) judgmental, but we also know that we do judge our fellows continuously, and believe this is often justified. Very often we are unsure of whether to judge. On the other, we are also generally loath to make moral judgments about other people. On one hand, we spend much of our time-far more than we would imagine-morally judging the character and behaviour of others. ![]() We in the liberal, democratic West live in a society with a split personality, deriving from our own individual dissociative traits. I argue that the desirability of a good name for its holder, whether the reputation is deserved or not, means that in all but a relatively narrow range of cases it is always wrong to think badly of someone, even if they are bad. Rashness is not merely about lack of evidence, but involves lack of charity and is to be avoided even in some cases where the evidence of bad character or action is epistemically sufficient for judgment. Rash judgment wrongfully damages reputation and is sometimes a seriously immoral act. I argue that a good reputation is a highly valuable good for its bearer, akin to a property right, and not to be damaged without serious reason deriving from the demands of justice and the common welfare. I sketch a way in which we might accommodate both, via an evaluation of the good of reputation and the ethics of judgment of other people’s character and behaviour. There is a tension between the reasonable desire not to be judgmental of other people’s behaviour or character, and the moral necessity of making negative judgments in some cases. The Morality of Reputation and the Judgment of Othersĭepartment of Philosophy, University of Reading ![]()
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