this post’s a little different than my usual style on here; this is a philosophy paper i wrote for my final for an applied ethics course. submitted it to an essay competition at my school on a whim, which it won, so i guess it’s worth having around—putting it up here for that reason (plus, i do think it’s neat, and i hope you do too!)
1. Introduction
Polyamorous relationships are often stereotyped as messy or harmful, especially to people entering them for the first time. As a polyamorous person, as well as a philosopher, I think this stereotype has some basis in reality: polyamory can be harmful, especially to those inexperienced with it. I wonder where the harm comes from: is it because of the vagueness of the term “a polyamorous relationship”, which can mean a huge variety of things to different people? From exclusive “throuples“ to freely loving “relationship anarchists”, polyamorous relationships can be structured in many different ways. People getting into new polyamorous relationships, though, can fail to recognize the nuances of these distinctions, and “agree to be polyamorous” with no further clarification. This common lack of clarity motivates this paper’s core question: Is it ethically permissible to hold someone to a particular set of relationship norms if you agree to enter into a polyamorous relationship with them without further clarification about what that means?
I believe that it’s not necessarily permissible to hold someone to a particular standard in that case, because “a polyamorous relationship” isn’t a clearly defined thing: many people believe that specific promises are entailed by “a polyamorous relationship”, but there’s not widespread agreement about what those entailed promises are. This suggests that, since this confusion has the potential to cause harm, there’s some ethical duty, or best practice, to avoid situations like these before they could arise.
To describe these situations in general, I’ll claim that most, if not all, promises have implicit content, and define a “contested promise” as one where the exact nature of the implicit content isn’t agreed upon by both parties. Then, returning to the polyamory case, I argue that contested promises in polyamorous relationships are often caused by a type of hermeneutical injustice, which gives us the beginning of a framework for addressing the problem of contested promising.
2: Promises Have Implicit Content
2.1: Conversational implicature
When we make a promise, we almost always mean more than, literally, the logical meaning of what we say.
Part of this is the nature of language: we mean more than we say almost every time we speak. In H.P. Grice’s Logic and Conversation, he puts forth the theory of implicature, cases where what is literally said is different than what is meant, and particularly conversational implicature, where the implicature occurs using the cooperative principle: that, in general, we’re trying to be helpful to one another in conversation. So the interaction
A: “I am out of gas”
B: “There’s a garage around the corner”
uses A’s belief that B would only say something if it were relevant to imply, through our rules of conversation, that the garage’s existence is relevant to A’s need for gas: so, that the garage sells gas, and is open, and so forth.
Grice puts forth other such rules, but what’s relevant in this context is the idea that non-explicit content is present all the time in language, and so, since promises are conveyed in language, it must too be present in promises.
2.2: Promissory obligation
In Hallie Liberto’s paper The Problem With Sexual Promises, she considers different models of what, precisely, generates “promissory obligation”, the requirement that the promisor keep the promise that they’ve made to the promisee. The four accounts she considers are the Expectation model, the Reliance model, the Trust model, and the Authority model. She provides brief summaries of each, which I’ll cover briefly in order to demonstrate how implicit content can be present—and relevant to the interpretation of obligation—under each. I’ll use the example of the non-specific promise “I’ll pick you up around 6”.
In the Expectation model, promissory obligation is generated because a promise generates an expectation in the mind of the promisee, and the frustration of that expectation creates the wrong of promise-breaking (Liberto). In this case, the expectation generated by “I’ll pick you up around 6” is dependent on details not present in the utterance—is picking someone up at 6:10 a violation of that expectation? It depends greatly on the context: if we have an important meeting at 6:30 that’s exactly half an hour away, it clearly is, and if we’re going out to dinner casually, it’s likely not.
In the Reliance model, promissory obligation is generated because a promise is an “invitation for the promisee to rely on the promisor” (Liberto). Again, the question of exactly how much reliance is placed, and whether picking someone up at 6:10 is a violation of the promise, depends on surrounding context: it’s unclear, from just that utterance, whether it causes me to rely on being picked up before 6:10 or not. Therefore, it’s clear that, again, there’s content of the promise which isn’t explicit.
In the Trust model, promissory obligation arises because promising “invite[s] someone to trust in our moral character” (Liberto). That trust, in the case of the particular promise, is trust that you will do what you have said you will do, but “what you have said” depends on implicit content of the statement, and, again, picking someone up at 6:10 may or may not be a violation of the promise, and the text of the promise itself is insufficient to determine this.
In the Authority model, promissory obligation exists because in making a promise, the promisor gives the promisee authority over their decision-making. Once the promise has been made, the promisee is the one who will decide how the promisor will act. But, again, since the issue here is linguistic—what the terms of the promise are is embedded in implicit content—the text of the promise is not complete.
3: Contested Promises
3.1: Defining the Contested Promise
In Grice’s account of conversational implicature, discussed earlier, he describes that conversational implicature exists by providing a statement that on its face, seems not to coexist nicely with the cooperative principle of conversation. Then, what is implicated is precisely the context which would make the statement nicely coexist. As in the case “My car needs gas / There’s a garage around the corner”, without the context of “the garage has gas for your car”, the statement is irrelevant and therefore violates the cooperative principle. Since we believe that our conversational partner wouldn’t do that, the context that preserves the cooperative principle is implied.
However, in some cases, “there may be various possible specific explanations,” and this can lead to a sort of “indeterminacy” in what exactly is being described. In essence, Grice argues that in many cases of conversational implicature, exactly what is implied is non-specific: it’s open to interpretation.
What happens, then, if there’s indeterminate conversational implicature1 in a promise from Alice to Beth, in which Alice has interpretation A and Beth has interpretation B, causing them each to believe that a different promise has been made? This is what I’ll describe as “contested implicit content” of a promise.
Specifically, a promise with contested implicit content meets two conditions:
1. The two parties have different interpretations of the promise.
2. Both parties believe that the other party has their interpretation (even though they don’t).
If interpretations A and B differ, Alice can do something that, under her interpretation A, is not promise-breaking, and under Beth’s interpretation is promise-breaking. Beth then believes Alice to have broken a promise, but that’s not at all what she intends.
It’s clear that, under any account of promissory obligation, this has at least the potential to cause substantive harm in the same way a broken promise does.
3.2: Examples of Contested Promises
The polyamory promises we started with are a perfect example of contested promising. Take for an example Charlie and Dave. Charlie and Dave agree to enter into a polyamorous relationship, which Charlie takes to mean “we will talk with one another before entering into a serious relationship with any other person”, but Dave takes to mean “we can enter into serious relationships with other people freely, without clearing it with one another first.” If Dave then enters into a serious relationship with another person without talking to Charlie, and Charlie then discovers this, he will experience significant emotional harm: he believes himself to have been entitled to this information, and it feels as though Dave has lied to him and broken her trust. It’s difficult to argue that Dave did anything wrong here: he sincerely believed this to be within the bounds of his relationship promise. But it’s similarly difficult to argue that Charlie’s hurt is unjustified: he believes an important, foundational promise of his relationship to have been broken, and even once it’s clarified that Dave didn’t intend this, the hurt can still remain.
Another example, in a completely different context: Ernie, raised in the country, might ask Faye, from a city, to “watch the farm for a night while I’m gone.” Ernie understands this to implicitly include closing the doors to the chickens’ outdoor pen after sundown; his community all his life has understood this, and after all, Faye’s seen the farm before, so she should know how things work. Faye, on the other hand, has no such understanding, and agrees to the promise seeing it as simply, well, watching the farm rather than doing any specific tasks. In the night, a fox gets into the open chicken pen, killing fifty nearly full-grown birds. When Ernie gets back in the morning, he’s (understandably) horrified: this time, the contested nature of the promise has had material consequences, and he’ll lose out on hundreds of dollars of meat sales.
3.3: Fault in Contested Promise Cases
In the polyamorous case, our intuition about fault is unclear: we feel, generally, that they both ought to have been more specific. In the farm case, I think most people would tend to find Ernie more at fault: he should have understood that Faye was unfamiliar with farms, and shown her in more detail. This suggests that in contested promising cases, the “error” is in communication, and when one party is more responsible than another for that communication error, it seems to be more their fault.
This illuminates something important about many contested promises: because of the requirement that they are promises with different assumptions but all participants think they’re the same, they often arise from the unspoken norms of culture, the things that “everyone knows” that are, unbeknownst to the knowers, specific to particular groups.
Alternatively, in the case of the polyamorous contested promise, there are norms specific to monogamy (the monogamous injunction “you don’t have other partners”) that can be adapted in different ways to non-monogamous contexts. “Tell your partner first” and “you can do whatever” are both reasonable reinterpretations of that requirement, but, obviously, they’re not interchangeable.2
So contested promises can come from cross-cultural misunderstandings, or from counter-cultural misunderstandings—the misunderstandings that come from opting out of one common cultural rule (“have one romantic partner at a time”) while failing to clarify other related rules.
I don’t mean to claim that all cases of contested promising are the result of cultural misunderstanding, only that some are, and the case that motivates this paper in particular—polyamorous relationship promising—certainly is. To that end, I’d like to turn to the idea of hermeneutical injustice, both to provide another lens on the nature of the problem we’re considering and to potentially guide us towards a solution.
4: Hermeneutical Injustice
4.1: Defining Hermeneutical Injustice
Hermeneutical injustice, as defined in Miranda Fricker’s book Epistemic Injustice which coined the term, is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to hermeneutical marginalization” (Fricker 158), where “hermeneutical marginalization” refers to a group or person’s inability to contribute to hermeneutics, often due to the marginalization of some group. Something you’re experiencing can’t be understood by others because we don’t have the shared words, concepts or values to articulate it.
The classic case of hermeneutical injustice is the coining of the phrase “sexual harassment”, as Fricker details in Epistemic Injustice. A woman working as an administrative assistant at Cornell University in the ‘70s experienced significant unwanted flirtation from a married professor while working, causing her substantial stress and eventually causing her to leave her job. When she applied for unemployment insurance, she was asked why she’d left, but couldn’t convey the significance of what we now understand as the sexual harassment that had happened to her, and her claim was denied. This is hermeneutical injustice: she can’t articulate what she means because the experiences of women in these positions aren’t represented in the mainstream, and so she’s unable to communicate the significance of her experiences.
In Fricker’s words, this is a story about how “extant collective hermeneutical resources“—the concepts we, culturally, understand—”can have a lacuna where the name of a distinctive social experience should be” (Fricker 150). These hermeneutical lacunae, “holes” in collective understanding, are often the products of underlying hermeneutical injustices, and they’re also usefully understood as causes of contested promising.
4.2: Hermeneutical Injustices Create Contested Promises
Hermeneutical lacunae exist when a social experience is not broadly understood, and therefore can’t easily be articulated. In those cases, someone trying to make promises around that social experience may struggle or fail to be sufficiently precise, and the resulting misunderstandings can create a contested promise.
However, not every hermeneutical lacuna is caused by injustice: sometimes experiences aren’t socially well understood because they’re rare, not because they’re marginalized. Trying to talk about the social experience of being on an Antarctic research team and spending six months isolated with a few other people might be difficult because of a lacuna, but there’s nothing marginalized about that—that’s just someone trying to articulate an unusual experience.
That said, hermeneutical lacunae caused by rarity are different than those caused by injustice. Failing to understand something because you’ve never heard of it before sparks inquiry: having never heard anything about a kind of idea, a natural response is to ask for details that can perhaps bridge the hermeneutical gap. Marginalization-based lacunae, on the other hand, often operate by oversimplification: a wide variety of experiences are reductively seen as the same, and the lacuna is in the failure to perceive a nuanced difference. In these cases, there’s less of a tendency towards inquiry, so it’s more likely to cause an important nuance of a promise to be omitted.
So the specific kind of lacuna that is the product of hermeneutical injustice is particularly likely to itself cause a contested promise. In the case of polyamory, the lacuna is of exactly this form: a reductive common view that leads people to mistakenly see all polyamory as identical.
In the hermeneutical injustice case of sexual harassment prior to the coining of the term, one can imagine a similar failure: a woman could confront a man sexually harassing her, and he could promise to stop “flirting so aggressively”, but since the actual nature of the dynamic is about persistence and the abuse of power dynamics, rather than the aggressiveness of any particular flirtatious encounter, this can create a contested promise caused by her inability to articulate the precise nature of the problem with the behavior.
In general, hermeneutical lacunae are a common cause of many kinds of contested promises, and so practices that can mitigate their effects would be useful in reducing instances of contested promising. Fortunately for us, Fricker’s once again ahead of us, and the virtue of hermeneutical justice does exactly that.
4.3: The Virtue of Hermeneutical Justice
Hermeneutical justice is the virtue associated with combating hermeneutical injustice—the way of engaging with others that minimizes the risk of harmful hermeneutical injustice. Specifically, since hermeneutical lacunae can make it difficult to convey an important point, hermeneutical justice is found in “an alertness or sensitivity to the possibility that the difficulty one’s interlocutor is having as she tries to render something communicatively intelligible is due not to its being a nonsense or her being a fool, but rather to some sort of gap in collective hermeneutical resources” (Fricker 169).
What this looks like in practice is a patience towards people trying to convey challenging ideas, particularly ideas that originate in marginalized groups or practices, given the greater risks of those ideas falling under hermeneutical lacunae. Fricker also recommends that in trying to listen with this patience and sensitivity, we’re aware of the relationship between our social identity and that of the speaker: when engaging mutually in counter-cultural practices, then, such as the polyamory case motivating this paper, we ought to pay particular attention when we’re newer to expressing this social identity.3
The virtue of hermeneutical justice is, of course, not always simple to execute in practice, but being aware of its principles can give us a toolkit, even if it’s an imperfect one, in avoiding contested promising caused by hermeneutical lacunae.
5: Further Implications
While polyamory is what we’re considering here, it’s far from the only case in which cross-cultural or counter-cultural practices end up falling into hermeneutical lacunae that lead to contested promising. In general, anytime we’re trying to construct a set of norms different from those that are broadly culturally accepted in a social space, and particularly when we ourselves are new to those norms or the subcultures they’re inherited from, we are at particular risk of contested promising.
Whether the social space is a relationship, or a teacher trying to nontraditionally lead a classroom, or a group of friends buying a house together, navigating the world in ways that aren’t supported by our default social scripts and norms carries with it a higher-than-usual risk of falling into hermeneutical lacunae when we attempt to form the foundational promises that bind together that social space.
This isn’t—at all—to suggest that these risks should prevent us from deviating from social norms and creating nontraditional spaces. Rather, my goal with this paper is to highlight one specific way in which those spaces carry with them unique risks, which must be handled with care to avoid harming the people invested in them, and to suggest through the framework of hermeneutical justice one possible way to mitigate these risks.
- To be clear, I don’t believe that mistakes in conversational implicature are the only way this can happen—but Grice’s account usefully illustrates one way that it can happen. ↩︎
- While the idea that we simply ought to clarify that duty completely is compelling, and may be appropriate in this case, complete clarity of every duty isn’t really an achievable standard: at some point, particularly in matters of relationships, we need some frame of reference, which usually comes from societal norms. ↩︎
- As [a friend of mine] Luna helpfully noted in the feedback and revision process for this paper, this isn’t a perfect solution! If both parties believe that they all understand the matter perfectly, no amount of particular attention will necessarily help. However, many cases don’t fall under that, and since we have limited cognitive resources, a framework that helps us direct when to pay explicit attention is still useful. ↩︎
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