Seedbeds of Virtue.

Edited by Mary Ann Glendon and David Blankenhorn Madison Books, $27.95, 300 pp.

According to some, recent American history has led disastrously to a rejection of that there exist either identifiable virtues that all citizens should possess or a universal set of moral values that all cultures ought to respect. Against this supposed '60s-inspired relativism, however, a counterrevolution has clearly begun, and both of the books reviewed here are to some degree motivated by a desire to restore a degree of moral ballast to our discussion about values.

Seedbeds of Virtue, the collection of essays edited by Mary Ann Glendon, professor of law at Harvard, and David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute for American Values, is yet another sign that there may be no more popular activity in this country than talking about its deficiencies. In a strange way, of course, such criticism reflects a deep affection for the nation. After all, we are often most critical of those we love most, their failings disturbing us all the more because we know what they're capable of. Readers of Hamlet might dub this the cruel-to-be-kind approach, though we moderns know it as tough love.

Whatever we call it, a similar tendency is displayed throughout this collection. All of the essays here (authored chiefly by political philosophers, sociologists, theologians, and law professors) take off from the premise that the level of virtue in most Americans is dismayingly low, and all offer some analysis of now to address this problem. The importance of the family as the chief seedbed of virtue figures heavily in several essays, but many examine the broader institutions of civil society. Thus one essay treats the effect that the decline of labor unions has had on citizens' developing civic virtues, another looks at the connection between religious and civic virtues, and a third questions the overall compatibility between a society that stresses individual freedom and the cultivation in citizens of a concern for the common good.

Given the skeptical zeitgeist that characterizes our culture, readers will no doubt find much to cavil with in these earnest and well-intentioned essays. To be sure, there is something vaguely menacing, in a 1950s-ish way, in David Popenoe's claims that fundamentalist Christian groups have been extremely successful in maintaining high moral standards among their members, or that being "socially accomplished" just means being married and having children. But skeptical critics will do better not to dwell on such occasional follies lest they ignore the merits of this collection, not the least of which is the genuine spirit of constructive criticism in which most of the essays are offered. In contrast to many critics of contemporary American culture, who seem to enjoy nothing more than a good national scolding, the authors here are chiefly concerned not with finding fault and apportioning blame, but with figuring out ways to improve our condition. (Those who prefer the scolding school should turn to jean Bethke Elshtain's contribution, an updating of C. S. Lewis's vitriolic Screwtape Letters which manages to suggest that Woody Allen, Madonna, and Jean Paul Sartre are agents of Satan.

More troubling than the occasional nostalgia wafting through these essays is their general unwillingness to connect the decline of the virtues to those social forces that have made so many Americans feel deeply alienated from the life of the polity. In this regard, questions of political and economic marginalization seem to me crucial to understanding our current malaise--I mean the kind of marginalization accelerated by things like the Republican party's depiction of welfare recipients as parasites, the utterly pernicious and stultifying effect that money has on the democratic process, and the schism between the rising profits of corporations and their increasingly vulnerable and dispensable employees--and one wishes this side of the story had received more attention. This omission is especially problematic in a book dedicated to renewing the virtues, for a sense of full membership in the polity must rank as one of the chief prerequisites for developing the virtues and the essays here offer too little guidance for healing our divisions. Still, the generally thoughtful level of its essays makes Seedbeds a valuable contribution to a crucial area of public debate.

Whereas Seedbeds explores the shared virtues needed for liberal society to flourish, Sissela Bok's Common Values is after bigger game: the defense of a universal morality. Disgusted by what she sees as the disgraceful accommodations with evil around the world that moral relativists have reached, Bok, a distinguished fellow at Harvard's Center for Population and Development Studies, claims that certain minimal moral principles are recognized by all human communities and that these principles constitute objective criteria for transcultural assessments of social practices. As the values she enumerates are extremely modest, Bok maintains as well that her approach should satisfy reasonable advocates of pluralism and diversity. In the last third of the book, Bok traces some of the implications of her argument on the conduct of international policy and crisis intervention.

Despite the many virtues of Bok's approach--including her accessible prose and manifest good sense--her book may leave readers with two nagging worries. First, Bok attempts to refute moral relativism by pointing out that all human communities recognize the moral values she enumerates. But if this is the case, one must wonder what sort of threat relativism really poses. Most defenders of universal moral values are motivated by the belief that various cultures fail to recognize such values. Since Bok believes that all cultures do recognize these values, it's not clear why her argument is worth making. Philosophy and anthropology departments may contain moral relativists, but since on her account they're mistaken anyway, why worry about them?

Perhaps Bok would respond that although all cultures do recognize certain values, they don't all live up to them, and thus her argument provides a foundation for criticizing those societies that fail in this way. But this leads to the second worry, regarding the practical force of her argument. The problem here is that the universal values Bok defends are so minimal (duties of support and loyalty, injunctions against harm and deceit, and procedural justice) that it's not clear how she could criticize a society that refused to acknowledge the richer human ideals many of us see both as essential to leading a ful filling life and as the natural rights of human beings. Human goods like religious freedom, political self-rule, and career choice, for example, can't clearly be derived from Bok's list of minimal morality, but how far from relativism are we if we can't defend the value even of these?

Though Bok leaves these difficulties unresolved, her insistence that human beings have certain universal needs does, I think, constitute the right approach for combating moral relativism. The really difficult work, though, lies in establishing moral values substantive enough to allow for serious critique of other cultures. Though Bok more than once refers to the need for such arguments, one can't help wishing she had made them herself. This no doubt would have resulted in a book that offended more people, but also, I think, in one that might have changed more minds.

David McCabe teaches philosophy at Colgate University.