Is it wrong to ignore a friend’s request to keep a confidence if you believe doing so might result in that friend being in danger?
For the past several years, a reader we’re calling Tom has noticed that an elderly friend who lives several states away has been having trouble remembering things. The friend will often call several times a day, forgetting that he had called earlier and often not remembering why he called.
Tom has been concerned but he has rested a bit easier knowing that his friend has family living nearby, a couple of whom seem to check in with him regularly. Occasionally, one family member in particular will give Tom a call to let him know how his friend is doing.
Recently, however, Tom got several calls within a couple of hours from his friend who seemed to be in a more agitated state than usual. The friend told Tom that he was having trouble logging into his email and that he was unable to reach anyone in his family who lived nearby. When Tom pressed his friend on how long it had been since he spoke with family members, his friend was unsure. The friend was convinced, however, that the family members had stopped talking to him or taking his calls and he suspected that they cut off his email as well.
Tom was unsure what to do. This was not the first time his friend seemed confused and forgetful. But this time the friend specifically asked Tom not to call his family since he was convinced they were cutting him off.
While Tom was pretty sure his friend’s family was not cutting him off and that there was a logical explanation, he wrestled with whether he should honor his friend’s request to not call his family or if he should go ahead and do so to ask them if all was OK.
If Tom planned to call the friend’s family in spite of his requests not to, the right thing would be to tell his friend that he was planning to do so. He could explain that he was concerned and was not willing to risk something going truly wrong at his friend’s house without his family knowing. Or if Tom did not believe his friend was at risk, he could do what he typically did in such cases and wait a few hours and then check back in with his friend.
Tom ultimately chose to do the latter and within an hour his friend called him back to tell him that the family member who usually checked in on him had just called to let him know that she’d been tied up tending to a friend who had a medical emergency. All was fine, Tom’s friend told him, and then he began to regale him with old stories from their youth as if nothing was wrong.
Tom honored his friend’s request not to get in touch with his family and all turned out OK-ish, but in cases such as this, Tom would do well to enlist the help of those in closer proximity to his friend if he believes his friend is in danger. Even if the friend is unlikely to remember Tom telling him he planned to call his family, Tom would still be doing the right thing by letting his friend know his intentions.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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