Ann Mongoven has written an important book about civic virtue that aims to lead by example. This is true in two respects: She begins by bringing to the reader's attention the case of MADD—Mothers Against Drunk Driving—and shows how normal accounts of civic virtue cannot convey understanding of or describe this group as virtuous. In the second respect, her writing stands as an example of the kind of impartialist practice that she ultimately associates with a transformed civic virtue.

Mongoven's critique of contemporary theories of civic virtue makes the central point that civic virtue itself has to operate on several levels. This opening allows her to reconsider the vexing role of “impartiality” in civic virtue. Partialists versus impartialists, she argues, have equally missed some important elements in the ways they frame their debates. In a well-constructed argument, she shows that the standard thought experiment about whether one should save a stranger or one's loved one (originally proposed by Richard Godwin), in short, “SVLO”—“stranger versus loved one”—fails to capture important dimensions that are lurking in descriptions of the ethical acts of citizens. She identifies motivation as well as justification as one issue left unresolved by such a “false dichotomy” (p. 121). She also notes, following Marilyn Friedman, that “SVLO scenarios ignore the social structuring of bases for communal trust” (p. 81). Thus, while it might be appropriate for an individual to save a loved one in preference to a stranger, we expect firefighters to be impartial when they arrive on the scene. Thus, partiality and impartiality may both have a place in activities that are virtuous.

Mongoven's rich exploration of the partialist/impartialist debate deserves careful consideration. She argues insightfully about the centrality of these issues; for example, even the dispute between care and justice is, she convincingly argues, another version of the SVLO case. After an extensive review of the literature, heightening the dilemma's unresolved quality between liberals and communitarians, philosophical partialists and impartialists, Mongoven provides a solution. Before making this positive case, though, she draws analogies between how scientists have solved the problem of objectivity and how Christians have solved the problem “loving thy neighbor” with the political theorists' concern with impartiality. Just as scientists and Christians have resorted to the practices of making judgments within their communities to resolve these tenions, so, too, Mongovern argues, a solution awaits for political theory. Civic virtue, she argues, requires that we transform impartiality from a standpoint by which we evaluate and justify moral action to a practice by which we can determine how to engage in moral action. In so doing, she observes, the more nuanced elements involved in a practice (e.g., as described by Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue, 1981) allow the questions of “for whom should I care, and how important is impartiality in my care?” to be resolved on multiple levels. On the micro level, “in diverse micro-practices of care in their multiple social roles” (p. 232) citizens need to exercise the kind of personal impartiality that guides parents or teachers in treating each child fairly, which does not mean in the same manner. On a more macro level, citizens extend their concern for strangers “not by an impossible imaginative activity to separate all citizens from their passionate cares, but rather by a pragmatic imaginative ability to consider how important strangers' duties of care are to themselves” (p. 232).

How are citizens to engage in such broader expansions of their perspectives? Having used an analogy concerning science, religion, and politics, Mongoven now claims that the ethical possibilities of citizenship also require “analogical reasoning” applied in a broader context of citizen activities. Since she has “questioned presumptions that public justification of policy preferences is the quintessential activity of the virtuous citizen” (p. 289), she turns to the activities of citizens in such organizations as MADD, the Anti-Defamation League, La Leche League, and ACTUP to argue that many more forms of politically creative activity are possible, making citizens into the oxymoronic “ordinary heroes.” Ordinary heroes sometimes take actions to which others object. For example, some people have criticized MADD (the author explains in a fine appendix that explores several of these cases) for not being sensitive to such questions as who is more likely to be stopped for drunk driving. While Mongoven finds such interplay valuable, it also requires that citizens be willing to extend a kind of “impartiality as practice” toward those with whom they disagree politically in the form of imagining broader “political friendship.” Through what she calls “disciplined vulnerability,” she expects Catholics to try to understand why an ACTUP activist's “trampling of a communion host” might “remain open to further exchange by categorizing the offense as an excess from the mean of appropriate symbolic play rather than as a sign of moral depravity” (p. 291).

As this last example makes clear, Mongoven's positive argument really does require a transformation of how we think about civic virtue. Such forms of constraint, impartiality, and civility have not characterized recent civic action or discussion in the United States. On the one hand, all political theorists who advocate positive change face the “start-up” problem: How does one begin to make this change happen? On the other hand, Mongoven may be more open to this criticism than are others since she herself has invited us to reason by analogy. Her own analogy may be faulty.

There is a problem with her analogy concerning the success of the scientific community's intent of finding a way to truth without “strong objectivity,” Christian communities' intent on understanding the meaning and extent of God's love in their practices, and the not-yet practice-minded world of politics. It is more difficult to presume a commonality of purpose within the political community. Politics is always, on some level, about unequal power and conflict. One person's “ordinary heroes” will remain another person's degenerates, bigots, prudes, or interfering do-gooders.

Mongoven has placed her argument in close conversation with feminist arguments, though she had not been able to consider some other recent developments about virtue and care, such as Michael Slote's The Ethics of Care and Empathy (2008), or another way to solve the care/impartialist problem, such as Daniel Engster's argument for care as a principled response to the reality of the ubiquity of human caring in The Heart of Justice (2007). Although it would be unfair to have asked Mongoven to address arguments that had not yet been made, it will be useful for readers to place hers in the context of these other strategies to address the problem she considers. Both Slote and Engster would probably be sympathetic to her call for a more caring civic virtue. On the other hand, on a metaethical level, Margaret Urban Walker's Moral Understandings (1998) offers an “ethics of responsibility” as the normative framework for practices of what she calls “expressive-collaborative morality.” Walker's approach would find Mongoven's account of the limits of impartialism persuasive but incomplete. Walker's own approach goes much further, and demands that we begin to express our positions and views and collaborate in order to properly allocate responsibility in society. Were we to be honest about which responsibilities we accept and deflect, I wonder whether there would be so much room left for heroism. In this way, Walker's solution points to a more political, less virtue-oriented, alternative.

It is interesting to note that asking “disciplined vulnerability” of citizens strikes me as a masculine-gendered construction of virtue. The message is similar to the command to “be a man” by checking emotions. Feminists might criticize such a view by drawing an analogy with some criticisms of “toleration.” Since the citizen knows his or her views are better anyway, then there is no reason not to be “disciplined” in letting those others protest or organize as they wish.

In the end, then, Mongoven has made a spectacular case against all of the existing resolutions of the “impartiality” debate in the discussions of civic virtue. It is only fitting that her own positive solutions for reframing civic virtue will provoke wider debate about what should constitute civic virtue.