Civility as a ‘political’ virtue: exploring its social and moral features

Civility is often considered as a fundamental virtue of liberal democratic citizenship. As a strictly political virtue, however, civility is often contested by those who take it as a demand of social conformity that delegitimises dissent or by those who emphasise the role of moralities and non-public values in shaping this virtue. This chapter contributes to the discussion by seeking to reconcile the social, moral and political features of the virtue of civility. The argument proceeds by distinguishing one concept of civility, understood as a pro-social disposition of citizens to engage with one another in circumstances of deep disagreement, from three distinct conceptions, namely ‘mere civility’, ‘moral civility’ and ‘public political civility’. In this contribution, I ultimately propose a friendly amendment of public political civility which takes seriously all those social and moral features that reinforce citizens’ allegiance to civility norms in contemporary liberal democracies