...In Nature’s Virtue, the Charles Patterson... argues that virtue has largely lost its luster. The Left identifies it with dogmatism and unjustified privilege; libertarians too often confuse it with an assault on individual freedom; postmodernists ridicule it for its “binary distinctions” and allegedly heavy-handed moral appeals; and deconstructionists see it as no more than “linguistic and social constructions” that justify the oppression of the weak by the strong. Feminists predictably identify virtue with male domination and the omnipresent threat of patriarchy.
As this brief recapitulation suggests, a good deal of angry moralism informs the academic and political assault on “nature’s virtue.” When virtue and morality are severed from their grounding in nature and reason, untethered moralism and political fanaticism are unleashed in the academy and the public square. We soon inhabit a Manichean social world where victims and victimizers are too readily identified by ideologues of all stripes. Nature’s virtue is thus a necessary antidote to both limitless moralism and limitless relativism, two threats to human self-understanding that increasingly converge in profoundly toxic ways....
...Pontuso draws on the recovery of the common-sense view of morality found in thinkers such as the American political scientist James Q. Wilson and the British analytical philosopher Philippa Foot. Both Wilson and Foot show how widespread, and natural, goodness is. Relativists need to come to terms with the reassuring fact that good behavior and virtue are much more widespread than generally recognized. As Pontuso teasingly remarks, “Most people do not abuse their parents, beat their children, steal from their local grocery store, wantonly destroy public property, or kick their pets.” Evil is palpably real but goodness—natural goodness, nature’s virtue—is much more ubiquitous than we sometimes acknowledge.
...The lesson is clear: Making judgments, and even fine-tuned moral evaluations, is a preeminently human activity. Solzhenitsyn added that this ability both to evaluate and comprehend morality and the full range of the virtues began when the “human race broke away from the animal world through thought and reason.” The conclusion is not hard to draw: Relativism betrays the most precious acquisition of human beings....