 Imagine that you are at a large family dinner for one of the holidays. There is a cozy atmosphere, but there are also a lot of implicit norms about how you should behave, and ethics of how you should eat, how you should talk with your relatives, and perhaps even how you should look for such an occasion. But suddenly, someone mentions a controversial topic and you feel that lightning and thunder erupts even between close family members. Things have become political. This contrast between before and after a conflict emerging during dinner can be said to reflect how many of us think about the difference between on one hand shared norms in everyday life that we usually associate with the term ethics or morality, and then on the other hand, the more or less peaceful conflicts of politics. In this sense, ethics and politics seem to reside in two completely different worlds. As some say, you cannot go into politics without entering a different arena, but you also cannot stay on the moral high ground if you do not suppress the confusion, conflicts and politics about what the right and wrong thing to do is. But is this idea of two divided worlds really true? The thesis in my project is that there is a certain relation between ethics and politics and that we can use the concept of civility to characterize such a relation. Civility can be many things, right from simple norms of politeness to grand ideals about how we should organize a democratic society. But whenever civility arises, it is both a moral norm and a contested idea up for political debate. But civility can thereby also become that missing link between ethics and politics which we surely need whenever trouble erupts at the dinner table or anywhere else in our lives. My project is about exploring what civility is and what it can do for us in all those cases where we find it hard to connect our standards about right and wrong with all that tension and conflict in society that we are also a part of. What I show philosophically is that to be civil can be thought of as finding new ways of handling this problem. That as a new and original interpretation key to the very relation between ethics and politics the concept of civility can make us understand both some of our deepest confusions and our highest aspirations. Thank you very much.