Civility during Covid-19: Necessary, but Paradoxical and in Need of Further Development?

Civility is an important theoretical category, both for political theory generally and in order to understand and discuss the many issues raised by the Covid-19 crisis, as well exemplified by Matteo Bonotti and Steven Zech’s book Recovering Civility during COVID-19. Bonotti and Zech’s examples of issues during Covid-19 related to civility as politeness do, however, indicate more general problem relating to civility, which might amount to a paradox of civility. Furthermore, their discussion of justificatory civility indicates that there may be further aspects of relevance than the usual distinctions between public and non-public reasons from the public reason literature.