Abstract
The Aristotelian concept of civic friendship (CF) is a promising pathway for improving political cooperation in fragmented Western democracies. A moderate version of CF can be appropriated into modern politics with three elements: goodwill for fellow citizen’s own sake, reciprocity, and the mutual awareness of this activity. The focus is on a realistic moral psychology for CF. Five well-documented features of human psychology can scaffold CF, including prosociality, ingroup favoritism, cooperation, norm responsiveness, and shared intentionality. These features are typically portrayed in amoral terms, but they are moral concepts because they can be appropriated for good or bad ends.