Toward Relational Being in Intimate Life: Integrative Justice and an Ethics of Dialectical-Positivist Practice

Positivist, evidence-based technologies increasingly mediate intimate life: couples coordinate, record, and remember through software whose default logic is measurement and optimization. This paper asks how such technologies ought instead to be governed if their aim is the flourishing of a relationship, the sustaining of what it calls relational being in intimate partnership. It makes four kinds of claim. (1) Normative: an integrative-justice framework, resting on a relational ontology, draws on a dozen ethical and epistemic traditions and assigns each the questions it is competent to answer, in a defended ordering rather than a numerical average. (2) Practical: an ethics of dialectical-positivist practice warrants measurement differentially, site by site, according to whether a phenomenon is constituted partly by remaining unmeasured. (3) Engineering: a working application, designed by the author, instantiates the framework in software, with event-driven household coordination, a witness-only AI layer, co-creative exploration, and the deliberate absence of AI where it would intrude. (4) Diagnostic: it names wrongs specific to intimate computing, among them proxy epistemic injustice, the misattribution of an act of knowing, and the opposition between structural efficiency and relational development. The limits are explicit. (i) Mediation's deepest harms, relational alienation and epistemic distortion, can be reduced but never wholly removed, so the framework offers harm-reduction and a discipline of restraint. (ii) Its dialectical adjudication is a practice of judgement for which no algorithm is given. (iii) The evidence is a single, author-designed case, offered as illustration and existence proof. The framework is meant, finally, to bear on adjacent settings as well: the ethics of the societal use of data, and the design of mechanisms linking the family to public institutions.