One of the ways we value our close interpersonal relationships is by making plans and carrying out planned activities together. But sometimes, our plans can have frustrating results. How can we decide when to stay the course, and when to go back to the drawing board?

Here’s a situation to make this question vivid. Imagine that you’re my best friend and we’ve planned a destination vacation together. This is an event we look forward to and cherish as a way of celebrating and elaborating our relationship. But it’s also one with personal stakes for each of us: it requires an investment of time and money that we could each potentially allocate in other ways, and so it’s understandable to hope that it’s worth that individual investment for each of us.

In such a situation, I think, it’s all too common for us to experience a great deal of friction during the trip itself. We can get frustrated with each other if our itinerary becomes hard to manage, or if our plans seem to prioritize one of us more than the other. It can even feel to both of us, during the trip, like our vacation is unfair. If I like museums and you like beach days, I might get resentful of all the time we spend on the beach, and you might get resentful of all the time we spend in museums. We might end up feeling like we’re fighting an undercurrent of negative feelings towards our time together for much of the trip, even though we were the people who planned it and we did so fully aware of our different preferences about how to spend our time.

If I’m right that this experience is a commonplace rather than an idiosyncrasy, then we should hope for an explanation of close relationships that makes it intelligible to us. For, on the face of it, it’s very surprising that we often end up having a less-than-idyllic time executing those most lovingly prepared plans for joint activity with a close companion. And if we can find an explanation that makes it unsurprising, then maybe we can better spend time with each other, armed with a mutual understanding of when we should need to put up with the frustrating fruits of our plans and when we should instead revise our plans.

One of the reasons the CFCP thinks philosophy can offer unique leverage on the study of conflict is that our discipline is uniquely well-equipped to explore similar phenomena on different scales. Where the theories of other disciplines are designed to model the dynamics of certain-sized groups—like a single person, or a family, or a society, or a set of nations—philosophy can pick up one of its theories that arose at one scale and inquire as to whether its assumptions, premises, and conclusions hold at a different scale. By engaging in such inquiry, we can potentially learn something about the original context, the new context, or even the theory itself. I suggest that our current case of small-scale conflict invites this kind of study: in particular, we might make progress on it by applying the idea of legitimate injustice, initially developed in the larger theater of political philosophy.

In political philosophy, “legitimate injustice” captures the idea that there are some laws which citizens ought to follow and the government is right to enforce, even though those laws are unjust. For example, if the laws of a nation include a tax code that calls for you to pay an unfairly high tax on your earnings, it might nonetheless turn out that you ought to pay and the government is justified in collecting that tax without interference. If that is indeed how it turns out, then that tax code counts as an instance of legitimate injustice. Here is how CFCP faculty fellow Jonathan Quong puts the point in his 2023 article, “Debate: Legitimate injustice: A response to Wellman”:

There are principles of justice that apply to the distribution of political power in cases of reasonable disagreement. When these principles conflict with other substantive principles of justice, the phenomenon of legitimate injustice arises. This is because, in such situations, the state and its officials cannot avoid injustice. [...] the moral legitimacy of a law does real practical work—it can render permissible conduct that would otherwise be impermissible, and it can explain why public officials have claim rights against interference even in some cases where they threaten to infringe claims of justice.

As Quong sees it, some laws can come about in the right way and demand our respect despite being unjust, and that’s exactly because reasonable people could disagree about whether they’re just or not. You might reasonably think the tax code is unfair, I might reasonably think it’s fair, and the government still needs to set down some tax code or other if we are to live together. Could this way of understanding the respect we owe an unjust law help us to spend better time in our close relationships?

I think that it can. Similarly to how we need to follow the laws the legislators give us in order to live with each other as a nation, we need to follow the laws which we give ourselves in order to live with each other in a relationship. In order for you and me to be able to do anything at all together, we need to be able to commit to a course of action: that is, to make a decision that we will take certain actions, and trust that that decision will govern us in the sense of actually determining how we will act. That’s why following joint plans is important in a close relationship: it’s quite literally a matter of respecting ourselves as a team that’s mutually investing in building a relationship which each of us values. But when we make decisions as a team that aim to equitably recognize our interests over an extended period of time, like a vacation, we can’t be sure which opportunities will seem more important to each of us at any given moment to which those plans pertain. Maybe once we start the vacation, I will discover that the beaches are less attractive than I’d hoped, or maybe you will realize that the shopping district is more rewarding to you than the museums. When we’re sitting down to plan the vacation, we can’t anticipate every way our desires of the moment will respond to the environment once we get there and live out the vacation; all we can anticipate is that, as planners, we’ll fall short of an itinerary that will follow, adjudicate, and ideally satisfy all of those desires in lockstep. And so there is a sense in which, by making plans to do things together, we’ll be less just in considering our shared interests than if we were deciding, moment by moment on the vacation, what to do. But if we didn’t plan what to do with each other, then we wouldn’t really be doing anything together: we’d be going about two separate vacations and negotiating with each other, with no conception of our past or future interests, over what would make each of us happy at every successive moment. And that would be no way of building mutual value through shared activity at all.

So, it looks like planned periods of shared, pleasurable activity with the people we value most are distinctly plausible candidates for legitimate interpersonal injustice, which is exactly the experience that seems so relatable on high-stakes vacations that should be such a joy and yet can feel like such work. But clearly, not all injustice is legitimate, even if reified in a law. An adequate account of legitimate injustice, then, should tell us when we ought to reject the law and demand a new way of living together in its place. And it looks like Quong’s picture of reasonable disagreement about the justice of a law might help us here, too. Suppose we get to our vacation destination and find that there’s unseasonably rainy weather every day we go to the beach, and that the museums are all featuring temporary exhibits in which I have no interest. From our standpoint on the vacation, seeing the stage on which our plans are now playing out, there is no room for reasonable disagreement about whether the plans by which we’ve chosen to govern ourselves are just: under the current “laws” which our decision gave us, neither of us is in a position to enjoy anything!

Legitimate injustice, then, gives us a useful roadmap for managing the time we spend together. Even if we both feel like a plan is unfair to us individually, we owe it to the relationship to stay the course if there’s room for us to reasonably disagree over whether our joint interests are being served. But when the only reasonable conclusion is that our plans have consigned us both to a terrible vacation, it’s time to go back to the legislative drawing board. Maybe we ditch the beach towels and museum tickets alike and opt for play instead.

Three silhoutted performers in front of a red curtain

Legitimate Interpersonal Injustice?

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