Presumed Benevolence

A few years ago I was meeting someone for a first date at a restaurant I’d never been to, featuring a cuisine I’d never tasted. I was thrilled. One of my goals in life is to try every kind of cuisine, from every nation and every culture on the planet.

When the server arrived to take our order, I was surprised when my date ordered for both of us. Bold, I thought, inner alarm bells tinkling. Either this person had paid excruciating attention to every word I’d said over the past few weeks and was modeling decisiveness from a place of care, or they were trying to control what they could in the hellscape that is post-divorce dating. Either way, I was curious to see how it would play out. I didn’t yet know if the date was beyond saving or if this was just a small fumble in the early choreography of getting to know one another.

When the first course came out, it was beautiful. My date was excited for me to try something they loved, and I had the unenviable task of gently letting them know I couldn’t eat it, despite how delicious it looked. Nestled between spiky leaves of arugula were tiny wild strawberries, glinting up like rubies through their blanket of olive oil. What my date didn’t know, because they didn’t ask before deciding to order for me, is that I’m highly allergic to strawberries.

They heroically offered to take the berries off of my plate, hoping that I could still enjoy the dish, but my allergy is such that anything that comes into direct contact with the fruit will still cause a reaction that results in 24 to 72 hours of blister-filled misery.

I’ve thought about that moment more times than I expected over the years. Not because of the date itself, but because of how something so small and seemingly chivalrous embodied the difference between intention and impact. My date meant well. They were trying to be thoughtful, intending to guide me through a gastronomical landscape that was entirely new to me. But they made decisions on my behalf without knowing the facts, and the result was something I couldn’t safely receive. It wasn’t malicious. It wasn’t intentionally careless. It was a kind of unintentional overwrite. The kind that happens when someone assumes proximity grants them clarity.

I see versions of that moment everywhere now. Decisions made on someone else’s behalf, with enough warmth to feel like care to the decision maker, yet still with enough distance to miss the mark entirely. It happens in relationships, in workplaces, in systems held up by people who sincerely believe they’re being kind. Someone steps in, speaks up, moves things along. That’s the goal, right? But they don’t pause. They don’t ask. And the person most affected is left holding the consequences of a choice they didn’t get to shape, getting more and more famished as time goes on.

Sometimes this lack of inclusion is framed as efficiency. Sometimes it’s a deadline, a meeting, a moment of pressure where someone in the room decides it’s better to move forward than to wait. The people who make these decisions usually don’t see themselves as gatekeepers. They think they’re helping. They think they’re protecting. But what they’re also doing is designing a version of care that can only function in the absence of the person it’s supposed to care for.

It doesn’t always seem harmful in the moment. It can feel like decisiveness, strength, resolution. Like someone finally taking things seriously. But when a choice gets made without the input of the person being chosen for, about what happened, what should happen next, or what they need moving forward, it doesn’t matter how kind the tone is. They still weren’t asked. They still weren’t included. And eventually the message to anyone watching settles in that regardless of intent: their presence is optional. Their voice is negotiable. And their consent is assumed.

In high-stakes situations, asking can feel like a risk. It invites complexity, or worse, messy human emotions. It slows things down. It opens the door to discomfort, or disagreement, or truths that don’t fit neatly into an already established process. But choosing not to ask doesn’t eliminate the risk. It just hands that risk to someone else. Usually the person who’s already carrying the weight of what went wrong in the first place.

Philosopher Miranda Fricker calls this ‘epistemic injustice’, when someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. This doesn’t require bad actors. Just inherited reflexes. When decisions are made without first listening, those choices don’t just signal oversight. They signal hierarchy. They divide the world into narrators and narrated, into people who are trusted to define reality, and people whose reality is treated as optional context.

Once that dynamic is in place, it’s extremely difficult to undo. Testimony turns into talking points. Experience gets reframed into something legible, manageable, less disruptive. And the person at the center of it all is left misrepresented in language they didn’t choose, have little experience with, and even less comprehension of.

Cultural theorist Sara Ahmed calls this ‘non-performativity’: the act of saying the right things while preserving the structures that enable harm. It’s the appearance of care without the cost of change. The illusion of integrity without the discomfort of accountability.

In this framework, the person harmed may be referenced, but not heard. The events of their life may be retold, but not returned to them. We get the relief of ticking the box labeled “consultation,” but never shift the question of who gets to shape the process. The system remains intact. The trust, however, does not.

What results isn’t neutral. I’ve started calling it ‘moral laundering’. I’m sure there’s a better name out there, but this one comes the closest to what happens when we reframe control as compassion. When we tell ourselves we are protecting someone when we are really just protecting our own narrative. Particularly the part where we get to tell ourselves we’re still the good guys.

Repair doesn’t begin with action. It begins with humility. It begins with recognizing that no matter how thoughtful or experienced or senior we are, we do not get to define what healing should look like for someone else. We do not get to guess, say we did our best, and hope for the best. We have to ask.

To act responsibly is not to act first. It’s to pause. To listen. To risk hearing something that might complicate the narrative we’ve built around our place in harm. It’s to make space for the wounded voice to enter fully. Without being corrected, edited, or obscured away.

That kind of pause isn’t easy. It feels inefficient. It might slow down momentum. But without it, even our best intentions continue to reproduce the very harm we’re trying to repair.

Because anything done on behalf of someone else, without their knowledge, input, or consent, is not repair. It’s retraumatization. Even if it’s beautifully worded. Even if we believe it’s the right thing. Even if we have the best of intentions.

Sources

Fricker, M. (2007). Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press.

Ahmed, S. (2021). Complaint!. Duke University Press.

Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press.