Do you mind if I mind?

Humanities and Social Science
1

Suppose you are sitting at a table in a restaurant. There are two seats at the table, which is next to the window. You are occupying one and the other is empty. It is a good table and you want to be alone.

There are other less desirable tables available.

A stranger now approaches your table and asks politely, “Do you mind if I sit here?”

How do you react?

We might say you are now “put in a position”. You are under the social eye, so to speak. You are subject to a polite request, which for all that obscures what could be seen as an unreasonable imposition.

After all, there are other tables, but this person fancies yours and seems to be greasing the social wheels to get at it such that a response of “Yes, I mind,” makes you the unreasonable one, seems somehow antisocial. Though it’s hard to pin this down to the desire to have the table to yourself. Why shouldn’t you? The issue seems stuck instead in the social formula of the stranger’s words.

So what might we do when caught in this bind? We might play the same game and grease the social wheels in the other direction.

E.g., we might say, “Would you mind sitting somewhere else?”

Now, if the stranger answers “Yes,” it makes them the more antisocial one. The social burden to respond politely and give you the win gets passed to him or her. Another approach, which I find elegant, is to ask, with due humility “Do you mind if I mind?”

Really, this gives the stranger very little social wiggle room. To now say that they mind that you mind could be seen as going beyond impoliteness into the realm of microaggression. They must retreat, or accept the burden of implied social opprobrium.

(To avoid getting silly, let’s mention but dispense with the option inviting infinite regress where the stranger asks “Do you mind if I mind that you mind? etc.)

It seems in the original scenario, the stranger’s formula offers us two bad options.

We say “No, I don’t mind” and lose privacy or we say “Yes, I mind” and lose social face. But by playing a similar game and offering a question in reply the stranger must now say “No, I don’t mind” and withdraw or “Yes, I do” and lose social face even more obviously.

All that is in the change of phrasing, not the context in which the phrase is spoken, nor the desire of either party, nor is any one else required to be present.

I’m curious if others agree with this analysis (maybe there’s a cultural bias; where I come from, it feels so natural to acquiesce to this type of request that not to do so is very counter-intuitive and uncomfortable). And if you do agree with the basics, what do you think is going on here? And does it have any important implications?

(Analytic philosophers like Searle have analysed this sort of thing extensively. I’m interested in it as a kind of inversion of Levinas and how it leverages a distinction between the moral high ground and morality per se. But anyway.)

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If there were no other tables available, I would probably say ok. Since there are other tables, and if I want to be alone, it wouldn’t be rude or particularly antisocial to say “Sorry, I’d rather sit alone.” On the other hand, being the shy, socially awkward person I am, I might say ok anyway.

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It’s simple, there’s other seats however you want to sit in front of me, my answer is "no, find somewhere else to sit, but it would be understandable- whether I want to be by myself or not- if the place is full.
As far as being morally in the right, but this is an issue with many gray areas. Is it immoral on my part for denying the person. Or is the other person immoral for seeing my state, but still wants to interrupt it despite when there’s other options for him or her to sit.

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First thing I’d like to mention is a distinction between morals (what you can/should/must do), and manners (how should go about doing this).

First, let me take a step back. I’m Austrian, in my fifties, and I never acquired a driving license, so I’ve been travelling by train most of my entire life. I’m used to placing my bag in the seat next to me - I’ve done so all my life. I’m not, by the rules of train-travel, entitled to do so, but neither the train stuff nor other passengers find fault with that (and many others do it, too). When the train is full, it can happen that there’s an announcement not to do it. Also, in a full train, I tend to put the bag between my feet on the floor, except when I’m very tired. In a sense, the bag becomes a don’t-talk-to-me signal - which deters only shy people (it would deter me). So in a sense, my behavour favors the bold, and disadvantages the more reserved people. This is something that bothers me, which is why I often put the bad between my feet in this situations.

Now, if I have the bag between my feet, people often don’t even ask and justs sit down. This would have unthinkable 10 - 20 years ago. I imagine this is a change in manners, rather than a change in morality. That is, 20 years ago, asking would have been a formality, and this formality seems no longer necessary now. I would never sit down next to anyone without asking, but I’ve noticed that there are, now, people who experience a moment of uncertainty (what does he want from me?). That is that there are now people who expect me to sit down without asking (not a breach of privacy), but who get taken out of their social-media-smart-phone country when I do ask (a slight breach of privacy). It’s not against morals to ask - actually, it’s still somewhere between neutral and good to ask, depending on the person. But it’s no longer obviously how you do it (there’s maybe an age-difference, too). A change of manners, not morals - I think.

So: on to your example: My initial reaction to your examples was that counter with a question is a breach of manners on par, if not worse, than simply saying “yes.” If other tables are open, the person is not entitled to your table (morals might differ between places here). You can turn them down no problem. Simply saying “yes”, is simply a rude way to get this across. @T_Clark’s “Sorry, I’d rather sit alone,” seems to me to be the correct way to let them know.

By turning things around with a counter question, it seemed to me, you were just being difficult… except, it’s not just words. It occurs to me that I might have supplied intonation, bodylanguage, etc. without noticing. It’s entirely possible there’s a way to ask these counter-questions that comes across as polite, or even friendly. Is there hesitation without speaking, what kind of eye-contact? These sort of questions matter.

I think manners tend to vary more than morals in situations like these, and because of this, there’s always leeway for “negotiation”. And social status with respect to the setting matters, too. If one of you know the manners of that particular place more than another, and both of you know of that difference, then generally, the more knowledgable party should act more lenient, while the less-knowledgable party should act less entitled. So the moral high-ground often is a matter of the manners-constellation - a continuum between unreasonably entitled and unreasonable rule-insistance, distributed among the involved parties.

You can also vary the social status of the participants: a person in an impeccable business suit imposed on by an unshaven back-packer? a teenage girl imposed on by a thrity-something guy? There’s a lot of social information we take into account before we even think of sitting down at a table with someone (and that maybe automatic, unreflected, and sometimes not applicable in the current setting).

In reality, situations occur, where manners differ, but one or even both parties are unaware of that. The overly entitled tourist, for example, might not be aware that he’s breaching manners and be unpleasantly surprised by the reaction, which might be in turn unreasonable. A flaunting of manners can lead to a flaunting of morals, if people lose basic respect for each other (and often the reason is unawareness of a manner-differential - one-sided or mutual).

Basically, there two questions: what are you entitled to in a given situation (morals), and how should you go about getting it (manners). Neither of these questions necessarily have a clear answer, though often there’s a clear bias. Then people might have differing awareness of those biases. And finally, once one party breaches either morals or manners, there may open up a new situation with another set of questions, often with a less clear bias. Eventually, such a situation can become pretty messy, if neither party “retreats”, and whether they do may often be a question of personality rather than morals.

Personally, I’d find it suspicious if someone were to ask me if they could sit with me when other tables are open. It would make me wary. That’d be the my initial condition in the upcoming exchange.

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Treating what’s at stake here in terms of ‘ social face’ has lost the game from the start by taking the direction of the moral rabbit hole (who is, or perceived to be, in the right in terms of social etiquette, and why) Instead, you should strive to effectively construe the other’s constructions of you and the situation in a way that allows you to empathetically grasp their motivations and justifications. For instance, some people prefer being nears others and can’t imagine why anyone would choose being alone ina public place over having company.

In that case your honest explanation could very well be misconstrued by them as a personal affront. In that case you could concoct a story which would eliminate their suspicions that they are being rejected. You could say that you get panic attacks when people sit too close to you, or make a self-deprecating joke which conveys the message that your ‘over the top’ need for privacy is a limitation on your part and not a statement about them.
(That’s just one of many possible explanations which don’t require you to judge them as thoughtless, selfish or gauche.)

With a little imagination, there’s no reason you can’t find a way to convey what you need and allow the other to feel good about themselves at the same time.

Unless you don’t feel they deserve such consideration because you’ve convinced yourself they have disrespected you, in which case I’d suggest you’ve slipped down that moral rabbit hole.

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“Sorry, but I’m expecting company.”

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First of all @Dawnstorm is clearly right that there are an enormous number of cues we would rely on to make a decision in such a situation or to judge the behavior of others.

That said, my first reaction was that this is a strangely atomized liberal-capitalist framing, which seems to make you the sovereign individual and this most desirable table your territory that the other is invading. Where’s the human solidarity?

And in that spirit, my other reaction, which might have come first I’m honestly not sure, was “Of course you can sit down! Hale and well-met fellow lost soul, traveler on this spinning ball!" Maybe not quite that.

And maybe even before that was, get over yourself, share the bounty of this excellent table, and make some small connection to this stranger. Not a grudging acceptance, but an embrace of the chance encounter. That might be the same thing.

Maybe it’s not a moral issue at all, but maybe it’s exactly that. What’s the most important thing going on here? Your private reverie? Your reading? Or the intersection of your life with another’s?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to go the whole day without speaking to another human being, though the chance doesn’t come around very often. But there’s also some impulse in me to give some attention to other people, to value them as other player characters in the game, not NPCs. I’m that guy that’ll speak to you in the grocery store. Maybe it’s because I’m in the American South and that sort of situational familiarity is more than acceptable. I’ve had interesting conversations with truck drivers while unloading a shipment. These are all real people just like me, no less important for not being me.

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Thanks all for the interesting replies so far. I just want to clarify, before getting into them individually, that in presenting the situation as a kind of social game rather than something more personal, I’m not condoning it as such. And the framing can and should be questioned.

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I think this is close to how I would naturally react. Though I don’t think I’ve had this precise experience, it’s an analogue to other experiences both socially and at work where a kind of default sociablenesss has been my first reaction, but then has worked against me, and I’ve regretted it after (as it didn’t reflect how I felt). On the other hand, to make up for that, I’ve sometimes been too direct in the other direction. The idea of coming up with a formula like “Do you mind if I mind?” seems to me to make explicit that there’s something funny about this. On the other hand, there’s something wrong with that too as others have mentioned.

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Yes, but would that not feel uncomfortably direct / confrontational? Where I come from, the type of person comfortable with reacting like that would not be viewed well.

On the other hand, this still stands:

The other, though couching their request in accordance with decorum, could be seen as using that decorum to try to force compliance with what could be seen as an unreasonable imposition (a “covert” breach of decorum). Does the morality here rest with their intention? Or is there a morally relevant “meta-decorum” rule that says that levels of decorum should be consistent with each other?

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I wouldn’t say that they are immoral because their intentions ,or the action is immoral because of the intention. I would say it’s a moral because of the lack of consideration. Because the individual didn’t take into consideration another person’s peace, but rather interrupted that peace to satisfy his own.

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I would like to add, being that you asked would I be comfortable with responding that way. being that I’ve judged the person to be inconsiderate. I don’t think I would have an issue with responding that way. However I should also consider. Does his immorality justify me responding in a to his preceived immorality with equal immorality or greater.

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The Levinasian thing to do would be to say “Actually, I’d prefer to sit alone right now,” refusing to play the game, refusing to allow the ethical encounter to be used in a parasitic exchange of oneupmanship. The ethical encounter with the face of the other as described by Levinas is prior to these social games. Politeness is not on the same level as morality, it just pretends to be, and actually obscures the ethical encounter.

Not that such games are bad, necessarily.

“Do you mind if I mind?”

It’s good, but it might just be a smart-arse version of “Actually do you mind sitting somewhere else?” which achieves the same thing. It risks confusing the stranger and producing a defensive reaction to what seems like a way of outsmarting you.

I think what matters within the game of politeness is probably that you asked a question rather than stated your preference—just like the stranger, you asserted your preference without stating it, maintaining the pretence of caring about the other’s welfare (“do you mind?”).

I imagine there are analyses of politeness that go deeply into this sort of thing, but I don’t think it’s ethics. This is a bit like what I was saying in “Scrolling Past the Dead”, when I was talking about rational expanded-world morality versus face-to-face morality:

Politeness here would be a simulation of an ethical encounter, unmoored from the encounter itself and taking the form of a game of power.

EDIT: It occurred to me that politeness is a form of distancing that prevents the ethical encounter.

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Yes, but I think disentangling these is not always straightforward. The effect of a breach of manners can be morally significant.

Thank you for letting me know you’re Austrian. It helps as I believe Austria is a relatively high power distance culture (along with Germany), which makes social strata very relevant and contextualizes your comments.

Anyhow, I tend to do the same thing with a bag on a train or a bus as long as there are ample alternatives available, but I keep a close eye on that as I get irritated when I myself am forced to ask someone to move their bag because no other seat is available.

I think this is almost a perfect example of a change of manners that has, in itself, nothing to do with morality and everything to do with what is expected, which in subtle cases like this can quickly change (and your mention of social media and phone use helps emphasize how rapid this change can be).

Yes, I was trying to get at that with the qualification that such a question, if asked, should be asked with due humility and awareness that, in its strangeness, it is likely to, at least momentarily, confuse our interlocutor.

That’s very neatly put and right, I think.

Here, things become somewhat complicated and we can return to the idea I mentioned at the end of the OP that the situation leverages a potential difference between the moral high ground and morality per se. For example, though a person in an impeccable business suit no doubt occupies a higher social status than an unshaven back-packer (in almost any macro-social environment), there’s no reason to think he occupies a higher moral status. Or is there? Is the idea something along the lines of the protestant ethic? That his appearance displays evidence of a commitment to hard work and progress etc?

Exactly, and I think this underlines the difficulty of disentangling the macro-social and the meta-social, the mores of a particular culture and how people should be with each other in general, i.e. morality writ large. For a moral relativist the latter might collapse into the former, but it doesn’t have to. Who is right when one disrespects another unintentionally when exercising what they see as their freedom of expression, for example? Does it come down to what they should know about the culture they are in or what they actually know?

Yes, it’s messy, yet we like to imagine there’s an answer, ultimately, to the question of what we should do, but part of what I think we’re highlighting here is that there are levels of personal and social interactions for which the answer is very different. We can move from the personal (who is that to me?) to the micro-social (what is the specific situation we are in?) to the macro-sociai (what is the cultural context? what are the general rules of decorum / manners) to the meta-social (what is the right (moral) thing to do?) in general. But which level we ought be on or how we relate levels to each other to get to “moraity in general” is far from straightforward.

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Yes, good, and I think that’s right, though very difficult in practice where reactivity tends to take over and we fall back on some kind of social formula. This is to say I think it’s right not to “skip” the personal level but to try to integrate it into the micro and macro levels to arrive at the meta-social in proper moral dress, so to speak.

Your response reflects also, I think, how Levinas might answer (though others more knowledgable on that point might chip in here), which is why the framing of social face meets social face rather than individual face meets individual face is, as mentioned in the OP, a kind of inverse Levinas, an immediate “short-circuiting” of morality. Though that’s largely how social life functions in modern societies where the “stranger” is everywhere.

Yes, but is this a satisfactory solution to the moral short circuit mentioned? Don’t we necessarily instrumentalise the other by lying to them and thereby depersonalize them while trying to be personable? Even if it’s a “white” lie? Or is this more like a mutual play that is not really deceptive as we both at some level know what’s going on and are satisfied by it? Certainly, I can point to interactions that fit the latter bill and seem to work.

Yes, as I’ve suggested, I think I agree that the original framing should be questioned on this point as it represents a view of things that sort of leaves morality behind from the get-go.

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Quite neat. It’s, I suppose, not true, but it dissolves the “threat” to privacy fully (who’s going to argue?) while not implying anything negative about the imposing party. The sorry also kind of says (for me) “I’m sorry I need to lie to you, but you asked for it”. On the other hand, though you’re answering faithfully the OP, we still skip the personal level here and treat the other as object to dispense with.

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Yes, exactly. There’s something midly psychopathic about gaming this out rather than just being fraternal. Then again, we take the risk that the stranger responds fraternally. It might be they are interested exclusively in the table!

Yes, you’re coming down very strongly on the personal level here and putting yourself out there. I think the degree people can do that depends largely on their interpersonal skills and their sensitivities. For some, to stretch out the hand of friendship to strangers who might bat it away or worse is psyhologically very difficult. Does that figure morally too? Should we be more personable? Or are we condemned in advance by our interpersonal limitations? Maybe we limit ourselves unkowingly.

But also, focusing so much on the personal, we skip the micro and macro-social, which can be very relevant and complicate things as @Dawnstorm’s comment highlights.

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But then, it is a restaurant table. not a battlefield.

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I think this is the most moral answer specific to this case because, as you said (and as I’ve discussed above), it eschews the social face for the human one. It refuses to instrumentalize the other and presumes they relate to us in a way that empathizes with our desire to be alone, while at the same time not doing them any social damage.

I just wonder at what point this breaks, at what point we need to traverse carefully the macro-social to get to the moral answer because the personal is so entwined in it. For example, in Thailand, consideration for the other is dominantly tied to “face”, and one can easily concoct a situation where telling someone you would prefer to be alone could make them lose face in a painful way. Does politeness here illegitimately infringe on morality; necessarily infringe on morality; or, in some sense, become morality? Where does the human face end and social face begin?

For example, you are in Thailand and the restaurant is now the staff canteen and it is your boss that approaches your table. Other staff at other tables can potentially observe the encounter. The rest of the scenario remains intact. Your boss could sit somewhere else. You would rather be alone. But if you insist on your genuine desire to do so as you described, you are likely to ensure a dramatic face loss for your boss that could have significant psychological and social consequences. Can we still insist that politeness obscures the ethical encounter rather than becomes an inextricable part of it? A legitimate consideration?

Agreed.

In the original example, yes, because there is not a major cultural impediment to being honest. But, again, I’m not sure that always holds if we ramp things up culturally. I tend to still think the route to the proper moral answer ought to be found in the integration of all levels, the personal, micro, and macro social, or even has to be so found because of the way they interact. But maybe Levinas has more to say on that.

Edit: And I might be contradicting the thrust of my Bartleby commentary here, but I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about that more.

20

It is a decision, and as such there are enough relevant factors that an all-purpose answer seems silly. Honestly, I guess I’d like it not to be a decision, but it’s a complicated world so it does have to be.

I guess I’m just going to bat for one of the factors I think should be considered when making such a decision, in a situation like this or any number of others.

The other person here figures as a character in a story about you, your story, your life. They make their cameo appearance—as likely, but you never know—and then they’re gone.

But of course the same is true of you in their story.

There’s no way to judge a priori what’s going on here, as your two stories are briefly entangled. I could, without hardly trying, give dozens of different possible reasons for you to be sitting just where you’re sitting and for them to approach you. We don’t know nearly enough to say.

But I suppose in part this is why there’s a moral dimension here, because I don’t have to know everything, I just have to know that there is something to know, and that what there is to know about the other is much like what there is to know about me. There is no threshold the other has to meet, no test of worthiness of my consideration, right?

It’s a bet I’m generally willing to place, at least, that treating strangers with some decency and consideration costs me little and could benefit them greatly. (As a matter of fact, this sort of behavior is what James talks about in the paper of the month.) I don’t need to know whether the kindness I show has any effect to know that there definitely won’t be any positive effect if I don’t.