Bearing Bad News

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethics
• messenger
• bad news
• regret
• dirty hands
• agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. An anonymous referee commenting on an earlier draft wrote that the most famous example of bearing bad news is ‘I wanna divorce!’ In such a case the messenger is the cause of the trouble. But my concern will be with cases where the messenger is just a messenger, as in the original case of ‘killing the messenger.’ The deliverer of bad news has nothing to do with originating the news. She only informs her listener about it.

2. See, for example, Teike Lüthi and Bori (2011).

3. For instance, Seifart et al. (2014), have conducted a study in Germany that proved that patients are sometimes not content with the exact SPIKES protocol: ‘Previously, the approach “ask–tell–ask” was recommended. Following patients’ preferences in the present study, we suggest to change the approach to “ask–tell–invite to ask–reassure” understanding.’(710).

4. Kamtekar and Shaun (2019, 191) take such ‘undoing thoughts’ as constitutive in the feeing of agent-regret.

5. All quotes in the recent three paragraphs are from Price (2020), 151.

6. For the connection between empathy and such immediateness see Michael (2007), chapter 2.