Subjunctive Civility and the Self-work that Strengthens Democracy

Abstract The current crisis of democracy is largely one of rampant polarization, which systematically degrades citizens’ basic civic capacities, especially their ability to properly understand and respond to their political differences. This demands an ethical response mobilizing resources that can bolster those endangered capacities. We defend civility as a democracy-promoting ethical practice that facilitates the productive transformation of civic relationships across differences. Specifically, civility may redress polarization’s civic harms by treating civic relationships as flexible rather than rigid. Here the essence of incivility is seeing or treating others as incapable of being or acting differently and therefore as unable to contribute to civic relationships in unexpectedly valuable ways. We thus reframe civility as a subjunctive virtue of attunement to the very possibilities of civic relationship endangered by deep social and political divisions. The paper has four main sections. Section 1 introduces subjunctive civility and probes its moral psychology. Section 2 situates our account, showing that its focus on ethical attunement to possibilities is systematically overlooked within recent scholarship. However, Robert B. Talisse recently defends an account of the kind of self-work he believes civility requires in conditions of deep division. He believes his model, which he calls “civic solitude”, facilitates civic remediation under polarization. Section 3 critically engages with Talisse on this terrain. Section 4 develops an alternative account, "attentional self-work”, rooted in our subjunctive account of civility. We conclude with a brief reflection on the implications of subjunctive civility and attentional self-work for democratic theory and practice.