Is gossip ever appropriate as a response to other people’s misdeeds or character flaws? Gossip is arguably the most common means through which communities hold people responsible for their vices and transgressions. Yet, gossiping itself is traditionally considered wrong. This essay develops an account of social punishment in order to ask whether gossip can serve as a legitimate means of enforcing moral norms. In the end, however, I argue that gossip is most likely to be permissible where it resembles punishment (...) as little as possible. (shrink)

This article examines an appendix to the Doctrine of Virtue which has received little attention. I argue that this passage suggests that Kant makes it a duty, internal to his system of duties, to ‘join the graces with virtue’ and so to ‘make virtue widely loved’ (MM, 6: 473). The duty to make virtue widely loved obligates us to bring the standards of respectability, and so the social graces, into a formal agreement with what morality demands of us, such that (...) the social graces give the illusion of virtue. The existence of such a duty can answer Schiller’s persistent objection that Kant’s ethics scares away the Graces with Duty. (shrink)

Kant has traditionally been read as an excessively moralistic critic of lying in his ethics and politics. In response, recent scholars have noted that for Kant we have an ethical duty not to be com...