Imagine this scenario. After a long drive to the airport, you’ve just taken off on a fifteen-hour flight. You’re in coach, and a family of three is sitting behind you—a man, a woman, and a toddler. They seem nice. But, as the flight continues, the kiddo grows restless. She kicks your seat and pokes her toys into your shoulder.
“Stop that,” you hear the father say. The toddler, incredibly, quiets down. The cabin lights dim. It’s time to sleep. Yet just as rest closes in, you sense motion: the seat in front of you is reclining. You watch as it comes all the way back. Now you feel cramped, with someone else’s seat in your face; you also notice some stiffness in your shoulders. Your fingers caress your own recline button. Surely the reclined-upon are entitled to recline? Just as you start to lean back, you hear a clearing throat. You turn around, and see the dad, who fixes you with his gaze. “Excuse me,” he says. “Would you mind keeping your seat up?”
Life is full of ethical dilemmas, some more consequential than others. Should you eat meat? While you decide, the lives of countless animals hang in the balance. Will you use Claude to write your cover letter? While you contemplate, your integrity is at risk. In comparison, seat reclination is small-scale. Only a few inches are at stake, perhaps for just a few hours. And yet that little wedge of space and time looms large: whether you seize it seems to suggest something about how you treat other people, or even conceive of society in general.
In 2014, when FiveThirtyEight asked around a thousand fliers what they thought about reclining their seats, forty-one per cent of them said that reclining was rude. That number seems to have risen: in 2022, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website The Vacationer, conducted a similar survey, and found that seventy-seven per cent of respondents objected to reclining. These surveys are small, but together they suggest a substantial shift in our attitudes toward the reclination question. You might find it corroborated, anecdotally, in online forums, where those who hold the rudeness of reclining to be self-evident appear to be the vocal majority. Not long ago, I conducted a small family poll, and those present were unanimous in declaring that they never reclined their seats. “If you lean back on the plane, you’re a terrible person,” someone proclaimed, with surprising vehemence.
Are you a recliner or a refrainer? Like many culture-war issues, this divide has material causes. Since the nineteen-seventies, legroom in the typical economy seat has decreased by anywhere from two to five inches. Adults, on average, have gotten larger, which makes being in an airline seat even less comfortable. Rising checked-luggage fees have likely led more people to stuff their bags under the seat in front of them, further reducing legroom. And the spread of the laptop computer has changed the spatial dynamics of the tray table, making the real estate directly above it especially valuable.
It’s easy to assume that the airlines have deprived us of space out of pure greed. But the economics of air travel suggest otherwise. It’s true that, in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, seats had more legroom—but, back then, air-cabin designs were more heavily regulated, and tickets were more expensive and had to be booked through travel agents. Today, we buy flights ourselves, and budget-conscious flyers are empowered to pursue low prices relentlessly. Airlines cater to them by selling small, cheap seats, offering legroom as an add-on to those willing to pay for it.
Nobody likes to be trapped or pushed around. On the plane, you’re hemmed in by the choices of your fellow-passengers; by the physical constraints of your environment; and by the economic considerations that have funnelled you into your particular seat on the plane. You’re primed to rebel. The question is whether you’ll do so by claiming more space, or by defending what you have.
If you’re sitting in an empty subway car, you might put your bag on the seat next to you; later, when the car fills up, you know to remove it so that someone can occupy its spot. This uncontroversial social norm reflects how we work together to share public space. One might argue that the same principle is at work on an airplane. According to this theory, leaning back is like putting your bag on a seat: it deprives your neighbor of space. Yet the analogy isn’t perfect. When you recline, you’re not preventing someone from occupying space—you’re intruding on space they already occupy, an act with an entirely different vibe. (On the subway, this would be like shifting your bag partly onto your neighbor’s lap.) The “victim” of your reclination, meanwhile, can easily claim some compensatory space by using their own recline button. (This would be like your subway neighbor passing your bag to the person next to them.)
This latter, chain-reaction aspect of seat reclining makes it even more fraught. If you sit in first class, you can recline without inconveniencing anyone. (From this perspective, part of what you’re paying for is a sense of moral peace.) But, for everyone else, exercising the choice to recline forces the person behind them to make a similar choice. Arguably, a heavy moral weight burdens the person in the bulkhead seat, since if they lean back, they risk initiating a cascade of reactions. Picture this cascade in your mind’s eye—what does it look like? According to Jones’s survey data, roughly half of fliers find reclining so reprehensible that they simply won’t do it; another third believe it to be rude but will still sometimes recline; and the remainder find nothing wrong with reclining. Psychologists talk about “social licensing” (if you see someone doing something forbidden, you’re more likely to do it), and ethicists ponder the principle of proportionality (the larger your injury, the larger your response, and vice versa). So we might imagine pulses of recline propagating rearward from unrepentant recliners. If Alice reclines all the way, Bob might initiate a three-quarters recline, followed by Carla, who reclines only halfway, until Dan stops the pulse by refusing to recline on principle. He enables the uprightness of Enid and Frank, until Geoff decides to exercise his reclinatory rights, initiating a new pulse.
Everything would be simpler if passengers made a unanimous decision: recline, or not. Accordingly, some airlines have built cabins in which all the seats are “pre-reclined” to the same degree. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a uniformly ideal degree of recline. It’s not just that individuals differ in their preferences (which they do). Ergonomics research has shown that, when people are focussing on a task (working, watching TV, eating), they tend to prefer a slight recline; when they are trying to rest, they recline further. And the most important determinant of comfort may be movement: physiotherapists often say that “the best posture is the next posture.” (Sometimes, you just need to lean back for a minute.) This suggests that creating no-recline cabins offers a simple trade-off: social harmony comes at the cost of comfort.
The counterpoint is that not all comforts are physical, and neither are all discomforts. When a seat is reclined in front of you, it can cause distress even if it doesn’t touch you or your stuff. It invades what’s known as your peripersonal space—defined, in a 2020 paper by a group of psychologists, as “the space surrounding the body where we can reach or be reached by external entities.” We don’t like it when things or people lunge into that space, and our sensitivity to incursions can be heightened by stress and other factors. In a 2021 study published in the journal Mathematical Problems in Engineering, five researchers based in Xi’an, China, surveyed a few hundred people about their flying experiences, and identified fourteen main types of “personal space invasions,” or P.S.I.s. In their model, the higher your P.S.I. burden, the more acutely you feel each marginal increase: if the armrests are too narrow, and there’s a weird smell, then you’ll find a reclining seat even more irritating. Interpersonal difference makes everything worse: a family member in your space is one thing, and a stranger is another. If you’re a woman, it’s worse when a man leans back, and vice versa.
There’s an asymmetry here worth dwelling on. Reclining your seat can make you feel better physically; in contrast, with some exceptions (crunched knees, cracked laptops) being leaned into is mainly a psychological harm. Theoretically, it ought to be possible to make being reclined upon more tolerable through compensatory means. Shabila Anjani, a researcher in the industrial-design program at the Delft University of Technology, has put people into a dummy aircraft, conducting comfort surveys and sometimes measuring their heart rates while they occupy seats with varying degrees of width and “pitch” (the technical term for the distance between rows). She found that “the level of comfort of sitting in an 18-inch-wide seat was nearly the same as sitting in a 17-inch-wide seat with 4 inches extra pitch”—in other words, an inch of width is worth four inches of legroom. This may be because “all body parts except for the buttocks” are “significantly influenced by seat width” (butt comfort depends mainly on the quality of the seat cushion). Intuitively, this makes sense; if your body has more room to move from side to side, you can take up less room front to back.
Is the pursuit of more legroom a red herring? After all, statistics show that people aren’t getting taller, but wider. Unfortunately, widening seats isn’t easy. As the aviation reporter Michael Boyd has pointed out, the tube-shaped nature of planes gives airlines freedom to change pitch, but not width. (A designer can move rows further apart an inch at a time, but can’t broaden the fuselage of the plane.) All of which suggests that your best bet might be to try to fly on planes with slightly wider seats. Boyd identifies the Airbus A220 and A320, along with the Embraer E175 and E190, as models with economy seats that are eighteen and even nineteen inches across. Perhaps, on such aircraft, we can all be a little more relaxed about reclining.
Suppose we’re happily ensconced in the widest economy seats imaginable. Would that drain seat-reclining of its ethical drama? Probably not. The bottom line is that reclining is a social act in an environment of social stress. It involves deciding whether to inflict your will on someone else, and enduring or resisting the effects of someone else’s decisions. It’s often pointed out that, in economic terms, the airlines have sold the same inches of space twice—once to you, and once to the person behind you. It’s hard to get out of that bind.
A few weeks ago, I was at a seminar with a couple dozen philosophy professors and graduate students. When I posed the seat-reclining question to the group, they were quick to identify its many dimensions. Seat reclination raised issues of responsibility, complicity, and determinism; it exposed the gap between what’s permitted and what’s good; it suggested the inevitable challenges created by the exercise of individual rights. Someone raised the possibility of differentiating between defensible and indefensible seat-reclining (what if the person in front of you reclines, but is actually hunched forward, lost in their laptop?), and another wondered if there was a prisoner’s dilemma of reclination: If you were a canny operator, you’d claim to be against reclining while secretly reclining yourself.
In an influential essay, “Freedom and Resentment,” from 1962, the philosopher P. F. Strawson described two ways of responding when people harm us. In the ordinary course of events, we follow cues from our “reactive attitudes”—anger, fear, forgiveness, and so on—which emerge naturally when we engage with other human beings. Alternatively, we can adopt “the objective attitude,” seeing the offender as subject to forces greater than himself. If you resent someone else for what he’s done to you, Strawson suggested, you might say, “He didn’t mean to,” or, “He couldn’t help it”—responses that explain what’s happened while maintaining the autonomous personhood of the perpetrator. Or you might think something like, “He’s drunk”—in which case the “he” who harmed you is somehow distinct from the regular version. You might, in other words, conclude that the person you’re encountering in coach is meaningfully different from the person you might encounter in ordinary life, and cut him some slack.
That might sound far-fetched. But consider what happened on August 24, 2014. James Beach, a six-foot-one businessman from Denver, was on the Newark-to-Denver leg of a return trip from Moscow. He needed to get some work done, and so opened his tray table and his laptop; he also deployed a device called the Knee Defender—“a $22 gadget,” the Associated Press reported, “that attaches to a passenger’s tray table and prevents the person in front from reclining.” Beach—who told Scott Mayerowitz, the A.P. reporter, that he never reclines his seat (“You have the right, but it seems rude to do it”)—didn’t alert the woman in front of him to what he’d done. (When using the Knee Defender, he explained, “I’d rather just kind of let them think the seat is broken, rather than start a confrontation.”) But she flagged down a flight attendant, and the jig was up.
From there, events spiralled. Beach removed the Knee Defender, but then became enraged when the woman reclined forcefully, risking damage to his computer. He confronted her, pushed her seat forward, and tried to reinstall his device, at which point she turned around and threw her soda in his face. (A crucial fact: “Both passengers were sitting in United’s Economy Plus section, which offers 4 more inches of legroom than the rest of coach.”) The plane was diverted to Chicago, where it was met by police, and news coverage of the event “started a broad public discussion of whether passengers should be allowed to recline,” Scott Mayerowitz wrote. Looking back, Beach acknowledged that he was “ashamed and embarrassed” about what had happened. “I said a lot of things I shouldn’t have said,” he concluded. “I could have handled it so much better.” Evidently, the “I” on the plane and the “I” on the ground were quite different.
In many ways, a plane in flight is an orderly little universe. When it comes to reclining our seats, however, the airlines have abandoned us to chaos. The seat-reclination question has no obvious universal answer; reasonable people can disagree about it, not just with one another but with themselves over the course of a flight. The particulars matter, and yet we know almost nothing about the minds or bodies of the people sitting in front of or behind us; ideally, we’d make decisions based on our values, but we’re cranky, exhausted, and immersed in an artificial environment. “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them,” Baruch Spinoza wrote, in 1670. Seat-reclining might not be a problem to solve, but a lesson to learn. We’re all different, and yet we’re all here, smooshed together, with few rules to guide us, whether at cruising altitude or down on Earth. ♦