Bearing Bad News

Abstract

ABSTRACT The ethics of bearing bad news has not yet been discussed by philosophers. How should the messenger feel? Is she, as Toni Morrison claimed in one of her novels, ‘corrupted’ by the message? And should she, as Morrison says, accept this ‘corruption’ if she is ‘noble’? In this paper I answer these questions. I analyze the phrases we use on such occasions: ‘I hate to be the bearer of bad news,’ and ‘I regret to inform you that…’ I allude to the notions of dirty hands, regret in general, agent regret, sickened regret, tragic remorse, performing the lesser of two evils. All of them have features resembling the case of the messenger. However, none of them captures the picture in its entirety, and each involves characteristics foreign to the case. Assembling the characteristics that are relevant, we get a description of regret that has not yet been acknowledged in the philosophical literature, and might be termed ‘messenger regret.’ This is regret expressed about the action while performing it. It acknowledges the messenger as the generator of the havoc in her listener’s inner world. She recoils from what she is doing, but knows that she is doing the right thing.