When your daughter is looking for colleges, I hope you will encourage her to considering coming to where I teach!

Ethicists take different general approaches to replying to such questions, and one of the interesting things about this question is that it may allow us to see how different approaches will sometimes provide different answers to ethical questions. Very roughly, a consequentialist would say that in order to determine what to do in this case, one must calculate the benefits and detriments to all who may reasonably be expected to be affected, and do whatever maximizes benefit and minimizes detriment. In simple terms, you weigh the damage to the friend if you snitch against the damage done by leaving their wrongdoing undetected and do what will minimize that damage. A deontologist might count the requirement always to expose wrongdoing as a fundamental duty. (I actually doubt that any serious deontological theory would put is in such an unqualified way, in fact.) If so, a universalizable maxim of good action might be: Always expose wrongdoing! A virtue theorist would say that snitching or not snitching must be a judgment based upon good character--so what we should do in any given case (snitch or not snitch) will depend upon what the fully virtuous person would do in such a case...and then there would have to be a long story about what a fully virtuous person would be like, and how we might be able to tell what he or she would do in this case (virtue theorists--and I count myself among them--are notoriously reluctant to state rules of action for specific cases unless absolutely all of the details of the case are filled in, because we think that the exercise of judgment--which takes into account the specific circumstances of the case--rather than the application of clear rules of action, is always required).

I know that you’re primarily interested in the more sophisticated question concerning the extent of our obligations to friends, but I’m stuck on childhood “snitching,” or as it’s known in my family, “tattling.” “Don’t be a tattle-tale,” I’m often tempted to tell my five year old when she tells me of some minor indiscretion of her fourteen year old sister. Why not? Didn’t her sister do something wrong? And shouldn’t wrong-doers be held to account? And isn’t it my job as a parent to enforce all morally legitimate norms?

No, it’s my job as a parent to do what is in my power to protect my children from unjustified harm and to help them to develop their capacities to live good, worthwhile, and morally decent lives. If they are being wronged by someone else and if they do not yet have the skills or authority to prevent that wrong, then I must intervene. But the usual situations that motivate tattling aren’t like that. Most tattling is motivated by envy. Tattlers tend to regard moral norms as arbitrary rules enforced by parents that prevent them from having fun, and they don’t want anyone else to get away with an illicit pleasure that they themselves would like to have. Alternatively, in a bout of sibling or classmate rivalry, many tattlers seek to present themselves to the local god figure as “the good child” who knows and follows the rules, in contrast to those undeserving others. (Of course, my good child is never like this.) Because I don’t want to encourage these pictures of the point of moral norms (and also because tattling is really annoying), I am tempted to prohibit tattling. But I try to resist this temptation, because children often do find themselves at a loss about how to prevent injustices done against themselves and others, and a prohibition on tattling can seem like moral abandonment. So I try to resist the temptation to prohibit tattling, but I also try not to give satisfaction to the envious tattler. You need to tell your sister why her behavior upsets you. You don’t know why it upsets you? Well, let’s think about it. What is wrong with what she did? Anything, really? If not, then we shouldn’t worry about it. It’s not fair? Then maybe you can help your sister to see why it’s unfair. And so on.

Of course, as my five year old will tell you, this picture of our domestic life is pure fantasy. Most of the time, in a desperate effort to maintain my own sanity, I take the much easier route: “Don’t be a tattle-tale.”