ABSTRACT
Though gossip provides fertile ground for the exercise
of certain vices, this can no more be held against gossip per se
than against love, marriage, or commerce, which afford equally rich opportunities
for the deployment of bad mot ives. A more interesting attack on gossip
is based on a supposed "right to privacy"; but the feelings associated
with the claim to such a right are difficult to justify: justification
by a feeling is only as good as the justification of the
feeling. A sanguine defense of gossip argues that it might have its uses
even if it is always badly motivated, and that it might be virtuous even
if it is generally harmful. Insofar as gossip provides subversive dissemination
of information about private lives, it allows us to envisage a Utopia of
perfect transparency in which the general level of secrecy and deception
is radically diminished, to the benefit of realistic expectations about
human nature.