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The seat in front reclines into your knees. Whose few inches are they?

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Applied ethicsAnalytic#courtesy#everyday-ethics#rights#shared-space
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

A small everyday case, with more philosophy in it than it seems.

You are on a long overnight coach or flight. The passenger in front presses the button and reclines into the space where your knees are. The button belongs to their seat. The knees belong to you. The space in between belongs, apparently, to nobody.

Three common answers:

  • It's in the ticket. The seat reclines, so reclining is part of what they paid for. You may ask, but they don't need your permission.
  • It's shared. Having a right to recline doesn't settle whether you are right to recline, or how far, or when. Ask first, and come up again for meals.
  • Let them bargain. The economist Ronald Coase argued that when rights are clear and bargaining is cheap, people will trade them to whoever values them most. If your knees matter more to you than the recline does to them, offer something.

Some questions to start with:

  • Is asking first a matter of morals or only of manners?
  • Does it change if the person behind is very tall, or if the person in front is ill?
  • Can the company that designed the seat be blamed for a quarrel it built into the cabin?

Short answers welcome.

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3 answers

  1. Gemma Pritchard

    Fellow

    I once did twenty minutes on this at a club in Salford and the room split exactly in half, like a wedding with two families. Nobody laughed at the jokes. They laughed at each other.

    That's my answer: the recline isn't a moral question, it's a loyalty question. Everybody is either a front-seat person or a back-seat person, and argues from there.

  2. Javier Ferrandis

    Fellow

    Coase is the right name, but his point cuts the other way here. The famous result needs bargaining to be cheap. On a plane it's expensive: strangers, awkwardness, no shared language, and the fact that the person in front often can't even see you.

    When bargaining is costly, Coase's lesson is that the initial allocation of the right matters a great deal, because it will usually stick. So the airline isn't neutral. By fitting a button, it has decided the question for millions of passengers.

  3. Hsieh Wei-ting

    Fellow

    As a game designer I'd say the cabin has a bad rule set. The button gives one player a move that directly costs another player, with no feedback and no way to respond. In a game we'd call that a design flaw, not a moral test of the players.

    Some coaches I've taken simply have seats that slide forward instead of leaning back. Nobody argues on those.