Patrick Stokes is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University.

Emmanuel Levinas knew what fascism looks like. It imprisoned him in a POW camp for five years while it murdered much of his family.

For the rest of his life, the question that haunted and animated the French philosopher's work more than any other is how we can take morality seriously after the Holocaust, whether there is any hope for ethics at all after Auschwitz.

For Levinas, ethics breaks into the world through our direct encounter with other people, whose vulnerable faces shatter our self-absorbed egotism. A key part of that encounter is an implicit command to be hospitable, both on a personal level (let the other into your metaphorical "home") and political (let the orphan, the widow, and the stranger, as Deuteronomy has it, find safety in your nation).

It's grimly perfect, then, that in a political moment punctured by the faces and cries of children - strangers, separated from their parents like orphans - a denial of hospitality in a small restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, should have become such a flashpoint.

When Stephanie Wilkinson asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her party to leave the Red Hen, it's unlikely the manager thought she was igniting a debate about "civility." Refusing a meal is a distinctively personal act, a denial of someone's animal needs, not simply a repudiation of their ideas or beliefs. It was also a calm, nonviolent, even polite (Huckabee's cheese platters were complementary) act of protest at a time when nothing else - certainly not rational persuasion or appeals to common humanity - seems to work.

"Civil" is a threshold term, a minimum. To be civil is not to be warm or even friendly but merely to meet some basic standard of interpersonal decency. Some people clearly think such a line must never be crossed in the political life of advanced democracies. Others find demands for civility to be oppressive in themselves, a way of forcing the already-victimized to shut up and take it.

Part of the confusion, I think, is that there are actually two kinds of civility in play here. The first is what we might call the civility of normal politics. The second is a civility of human openness.

It's easy to forget that policy disagreements usually take place within a reasonably narrow frame. Politics is bruising, but in normal circumstances the game is played with a number of shared assumptions and tacit agreements, including that the players themselves shouldn't really get hurt. As long as play stays within certain implicit boundaries, we accept, however grudgingly, that the side that wins the election has a right to govern, and that our only recourse to stop them is through the ballot box.

In that context, the prudential argument for civility - "if you're uncivil to them, what stops them being uncivil to you?" - makes a degree of sense, because you and they are understood as having equal moral standing. You're simply people who disagree about policy, however passionately.

It's doubtful that "normal politics" has ever truly existed; even the dullest politics usually depends on someone's misery or oppression, somewhere. But as a regulative ideal - a goal to shape our actions, rather than a target we think we can achieve - normal politics is attractive. If we're still planning to make this curious hybrid known as liberal democracy work, with its uneasy mix of majority-rule and individual rights, then we need to be able to disagree loudly while respecting each other's full participation in society.

Normal politics, however, has its limits. Trump and his administration have not merely transgressed those limits, they have made doing so their signature move. It may seem strange to see people who had no trouble with chants of "Lock her up!" or calling journalists "enemies of the people" rush to condemn the incivility of giving a powerful woman free cheese and politely showing her the door.

But the point of these complaints isn't really civility, understood as how people should treat each other, at all. Rather, it's a way of insisting that the disagreement still falls within the acceptable boundaries of liberal democracy, that both sides are still morally equal, that the complainant's views, their preferred policies, their preferred President, are still "normal."

If normal politics are suspended, then the limits of civil behaviour imposed by it are thrown into doubt. The question, then, is whether what happened in Lexington (and elsewhere) is an unacceptably personal attack, or a legitimate form of resistance.

Knud Ejler Loegstrup knew what resistance looks like. In 1943, the Danish priest-turned-philosophy-professor published a short treatise in which he argued against his government's acceptance of Nazi occupation. In April 1940, Denmark had been "invaded by telegraph" and put up only minor resistance before accepting the inevitable; better, its leaders thought, to accept Nazi rule and preserve as much of Danish autonomy as possible under occupation. Loegstrup instead called for the response the Norwegians had given: armed resistance.

For Loegstrup, our lives can only flourish because of certain background conditions, especially trust. Those who threaten the conditions that sustain our shared life thereby become our enemy:

"for what he is trying to do is nothing less than to cut through the roots of our life and cause it to wither and be stunted in the wretchedness of mistrust, just as surely as each of us has our life's roots in our fellow humans' primitive human trust in us that we will behave humanely."

As he wrote these lines, Loegstrup had likely already joined the Danish Resistance. The following year, after acting as a courier and hosting secret radio transmissions, he was forced into hiding from the Gestapo for the rest of the war.

Loegstrup, like his theological contemporary Dietrich Bonhoeffer - a German who resisted and was put to death over a plot to kill Hitler - was under no illusions about what making someone an enemy involved. Yet he also understood that there is another form of regard for the other, a second kind of civility, that goes beyond this.

In his masterwork The Ethical Demand , written a decade after the war, Loegstrup warns against using legitimate ethical complaints to write people off completely, to "liquidate" them. The transgressor, he reminds us, "is something other than and more than his action," and recognising this fact "means that in our censure or protest there remains a desire to communicate with him about the norm." Our protest does not destroy the person we protest against, but calls him or her to do better.

In the mid-1960s Loegstrup returns to this theme, in his discussion of Goethe's play Goetz von Berlichingen. In that play, the sixteenth-century German warlord Goetz confronts the treacherous Weislingen. He knows what Weislingen is, and he takes precautions to protect himself. "Yet in all of this," Loegstrup insists, "he will still be giving him a chance - the chance which consists in his not washing his hands of him; and in so doing Goetz von Berlichingen will realize trust and openness - on his own terms."

That, I suggest, is the kind of civility inherent in Stephanie Wilkinson's protest. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, by virtue of doing the job she does for this administration, is not a member of the moral community in good standing. Wilkinson was right not to let her off the hook. Yet she did not simply write Sanders off, either.

In the heat of politics, we do well to distrust our own judgments of who is and is not beyond the pale. We should certainly be wary of insisting norms that otherwise properly restrain us no longer apply. Yet the last century also showed the risk in being too slow to realise when resistance is needed. Loegstrup's closing words from 1943 still have power to sting: "Or is it enough just to hold lectures about truth, justice, and freedom?"

Patrick Stokes is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. He is the author of The Naked Self: Kierkegaard and Personal Identity and Kierkegaard's Mirrors: Interest, Self, and Moral Vision.