Center for Civic Friendship: To Be Nice or Not to Be Nice? That is the Question!

Mary Jane Rein & Connor Doyle

Guest Writers

How civility is deployed in political conversations has emerged as a contentious topic in these times of heightened polarization? Is civility a virtue that allows people to engage productively with others across fundamental differences? Or is it an insidious practice that permits injustice?

These are questions that concern Philosopher Matt Dinan, a professor at St Thomas University and director of its Great Books program. He studies the intellectual and philosophical roots of being nice and how it relates to civic friendship.

His lecture, “Be Nice: The Social Virtues and Civic Friendship,” delivered to an audience of students and faculty in the Logos Program, offered an Aristotelian perspective on how to interact with fellow citizens at a time when “niceness has fallen on hard times.”

Dinan is a nice guy, who partially thanks his upbringing in rural New Brunswick, a Canadian maritime province where niceness is endemic. His hometown, like the Newfoundland town featured in the musical ‘Come from Away’, sheltered travelers on 9/11 who were amazed by the kindness of the local population.

Early in his academic career, while teaching at the College of the Holy Cross, Dinan claims that he was a little less nice because of his daily bicycle commute across Worcester. Nonetheless, a return to St. Thomas University, his alma mater in New Brunswick; as well as the advent of fatherhood restored him to niceness, a topic of his scholarship.

Some observers find that being nice can be construed as a refusal to judge others and their actions. It is an anodyne quality that offers a convenient way to evade demands for change by sidestepping controversy.

By contrast, more virtuous individuals have the courage to call out injustices in keeping with what they see as the unvarnished truth.  Conversational niceties, in this view, come into conflict with the pursuit of justice, the harshest virtue and one that demands us to behave in accordance with strict expectations.

Claims on justice can make kindness look like a vice in the face of what is passionately perceived as wrong.

Dinan turns to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to elucidate whether being nice is a trait that is consistent with the struggle for justice. Following his description of “the great souled man” who is virtuous but does not concern himself with the opinions of others and is neither civil nor nice, Aristotle introduces a set of social virtues that he asserts contribute to the smooth functioning of society.

These lesser virtues include gentleness, friendliness, and wit or tact which taken together amount to being nice.

Aristotle goes on to describe civic friendship as a state of like-mindedness that belongs to fellow citizens and that makes possible conversations about what is mutually advantageous and just.

These friendships require practicing the social virtues and are not a barrier to justice but the path towards it.

Part of the mandate for advancing civic friendship at Assumption is to promote reasonable discourse that allows us to engage productively with each other even when we hold strongly divergent views.

Finding ways to make our disagreements tolerable is of utmost concern so that we can learn how to share a campus and a community without sacrificing the pursuit of truth and justice.