Reclining Your Seat on an Airplane is an Act of Evil

If there’s one thing I believe in my life, it’s that one should do everything they can not to inconvience another person, particularly a stranger. It’s my very strongly held belief that if everyone believed–and this is correct–that they are the least important person in the world, then the world would get along much better. You are not more important than anyone else. Neither, by the way, are your kids, who have no greater value than any kid around the world. It might be your job to take care of them and you should do that, but thinking your child is special is the kind of individualist cancer that creates the hell of extremist individualism that we face in this society today.

Unfortunately, any sense of collectivism is completely dead and treating others with basic respect as humans is something that has no value if it gets in the way of me doing whatever the fuck I want at any given time. You want to take my guns? Fuck you. You want me to get a Covid shot to keep old people alive? Fuck you. You want me to pay taxes so that the poor can eat? Fuck you. You want me to support public schools by sending my kid to them? Fuck you.

The political implications of this are horrendous. Even on the left, everyone is a personal brand, a little niche of neoliberalism locked in their own bodies and identities. Solidarity means “Do what I want you to do for me right now without any mutual obligation for me to step up for you,” which is quite literally the opposite of how this word started to enter into the lexicon, which was mutual aid between workers of different countries in 19th century Europe.

As you can tell, I really love contemporary society.

Well, one fantastic example of how the disaster that is our society is people’s behavior on airplanes. I’ve argued in the past to ban alcohol on flights as a workplace safety issue for the crew, or at least restrict it to one drink per flight, two tops, if the flight is minimum 3 or 4 hours. You don’t have the right to impact other people because you are a drunk fool.

The same goes for the most antisocial behavior in existence–reclining your airplane seat. This is an outright hostile act toward the person behind you. There is a single exception–a long flight where sleep is required AND ONLY if the person behind has already reclined their seat. Even then, I find it sketchy, and I say this having the extremely long flight from Santiago to Boston (through Bogota) coming up in a few days. There’s a long piece on the questions of reclining your seat in The New Yorker:

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.

It was not me who proclaimed that. But, in fact, if you lean back on the plane, you are indeed a terrible person.

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.

OK, here’s the thing. You are sitting in a chair. In the sky. You are flying around the world at incredible speeds. You want discomfort? Take a boat across the Atlantic before jet travel. That’s not to let the airlines off the hook here for the lack of comfort on modern flights, but this particular issue is a bit more complicated than that.

In short, I would far rather just deal with my less than comfortable seat for the flight than to be a tiny bit more comfortable at the cost of hurting another human being. I may be a terrible person, but I am not a terrible person in this way and if you recline your seat back into someone else, you are indeed a bad human being who needs to rethink your entire moral compass of life.