The virtue of civility

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 29, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 251-275

  Calhoun, Cheshire ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 2642551711     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2000.00251.x     Document Type: Article

References (36)

1. Marvin Becker has recently argued that this early concept of civility originated with the demise of feudal social organization and depended on a new concept of the individual as someone not primarily defined by his loyalty to local lordships. It also depended on the emergence of a conception of the public good distinct from that of local societies and on a shift away from the pursuit of glory to more peaceable practices. Civility and Society in Western Europe, 1300-1600 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988).
2. Judith Martin, Miss Manners Rescues Civilization from Sexual Harassment, Frivolous Lawsuits, Dissing and Other Lapses in Civility (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996).
3. George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation, edited by Charles Moore (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926).
4. Michael Waker, "Civility and Civic Virtue," Social Research 41 (1974): 593-611;
5. Burton Zwiebach, Civility and Disobedience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975);
6. Clifford Orwin, "Civility," American Scholar 60 (1991): 553-64;
7. Mark Kingwell, A Civil Tongue: Justice, Dialogue and the Politics of Pluralism (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995);
8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971)
9. and Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);
10. Richard C. Sinopoli, "Thick-Skinned Liberalism: Redefining Civility," American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 612-20.
11. For a similar view of the expressive function of manners see Sarah Buss, "Appearing Respectful: The Moral Significance of Manners," Ethics 109 (1999): 795-826.
12. Orwin, "Civility," p. 560.
13. While some authors continue to include law-abidingness within the scope of civility, the rationale for doing so ceases to be clear. Some law-abidingness is of course directly connected to liberal tolerance, such as respecting rights to speech, association, and privacy. But paving taxes, obeying the speed limit, and not evading the draft are not similarly connected to the distinctive requirements of liberal democracies. Instead, the temptation to equate civility with law-abidingness generally seems to reflect the continuing cultural influence of an earlier conception of civility. See for example, Michael Walzer, "Civility and Civic Virtue,"
14. and Burton Zwiebach, Civility and Disobedience.
15. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 179.
16. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, "Moral Conflict and Political Consensus," in Liberalism and the Good, edited by R. Bruce Douglass, et al. (New York: Routledge, 1990). Their analysis is of 'mutual respect,' not 'civility.' Following Rawls, I interpret them as in fact describing civility.
17. Kingwell, A Civil Tongue, p. 44.
18. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, pp. 337-38;
19. Political Liberalism, pp. 217-18.
20. Kingwell, A Civil Tongue, p. 211.
21. George Washington's Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation were adapted via a 1640 English manual from a 1595 French Jesuit manual.
22. John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990).
23. Martin, Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, pp. 366 ff.
24. The account of civility I offer may not distinguish civility from all possible virtues, particularly not from law-abidingness and civil obedience. My aim is to distinguish civility from respect, tolerance, and considerateness in particular.
25. Jean Hampton develops the idea that moralities and immoralities convey messages about worth in "Forgiveness, Resentment and Hatred" (in Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, Forgiveness and Mercy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988]).
26. Responding to them as though they weren't deficient in various ways (and then, perhaps, poking fun at them behind their backs) is hypocritical. But as Thomas Nagel has recently observed, it is a form of hypocrisy that we make sure we teach children, that we're thankful that others engage in, and that isn't deceptive since everyone engages in socially conventional practices of polite concealment and everyone knows what might be going on behind their backs. Thomas Nagel, "Concealment and Exposure," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 3-30.
27. Sarah Buss makes a parallel point in "Appearing Respectful," p. 797.
28. In a broader sense of display than I am using, demeaning one's coworker behind her back is a display of disrespect - one has made one's attitude public. On my view, for incivility, it matters to whom one makes this display.
29. An anonymous reviewer for another journal proposed a variant of this point.
30. Bernard Williams, "A Critique of Utilitarianism," in his and J.J.C. Smart's Utilitarianism: For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 104-6.
31. One consequence of this view that there is a social language for conveying respect and disrespect is that incivility is not a function of persons' intentions. Because actions have social meanings, what a person does may display disrespect even if he does not intend to do so. Making baldly sexist comments to a woman displays disrespect and is uncivil regardless of what the speaker means to be doing. The speaker may evade being held responsible for this incivility if he can come up with a passable excuse for being ignorant of the social meaning of his speech (generally a hard thing to do).
32. Martin, Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, p. 164.
33. It is, however, not always clear whether she intends to appeal to a critical moral view or to social understandings to set the bounds of civility. Her view that reacting against bigotry is not rude so long as what counts as bigotry has already been announced and socially accepted (Miss Manners Rescues Civilization, p. 358) suggests that the bounds of civility are set by appeal to social understandings.
34. A good example of this civility anarchy is the variety of nonsmokers' judgments about which behaviors on the part of smokers are intolerable. Smoking near fellow passengers, in offices, in restaurants, in bars, on public streets, and in areas designated for smokers might, depending on the person, be regarded as exceeding the bounds of the tolerable.
35. Rawls takes using the imperfections of the law as an excuse for civil disobedience to be an instance of incivility (A Theory of Justice, p. 355).
36. Lawrence Cahoone makes a similar point in his "Response to Alan Wolfe" in Civility, edited by Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 148.