Ethics of Civility

We've gotten a pretty good idea what incivility is in recent years:

• Universalizing the negative behavior of religious or political extremists to vilify an entire religion, party, or nation.
• Caricaturing, exaggerating, mis-naming, and otherwise misrepresenting the views of those with whom we disagree, to pre-emptively render those views ridiculous, absurd, or immoral without actual consideration of their merits.

Name-calling and mocking others, or using violent or dehumanizing language to render them "targets."
But it might help us to more clearly define civility. We can start by clarifying what it is not:

• Civility is not merely balancing an attack on someone to our ideological “left” with a parallel attack on someone to our ideological right.
• Civility is not minimizing differences or pretending they don’t matter.
• Civility is not indulging in passive-aggressive behavior, damning with faint praise, and so on.

True civility requires much more of us. It requires that we seek to understand the views of those with whom we disagree so thoroughly and so empathetically that we can articulate their views in ways that they would say, “Yes, you understand. That’s just how I would say it.”

Civility also requires that we seek to understand the objections our counterparts have to our own views so thoroughly and empathetically that we can articulate their objectives in ways that they would say, “Yes, you understand. That’s just how I would say it.”

Furthermore, civility requires that we try to bring others to an equal level of understanding about our views and objections. In this way, through civility, we “achieve disagreement” – a task that is harder than it first appears. Civility, then, is about communication, and for an act of communication to be civil, it must be ethical.

Obviously, it’s unethical to lie and deceive. But might we also say it’s an ethical flaw to refuse to listen when others are attempting to tell us the truth as they see it? Might we also say that a lack of respect for our counterpart represents an ethical failure on our part, and that a lack of humility regarding the possibility that we are wrong adds ethical static to any attempt at communication? In this light, our search for greater civility turns out to be an ethical quest. We can’t become more civil and ethical people without become … can we say it? … better people.

Which sounds to me like a matter of the heart, not just a matter of the mouth.