ABSTRACT
Moral or ethical relativism is simultaneously the most influential and most reviled of the relativistic doctrines under discussion. This chapter focuses on metaethical discussions of moral relativism. The weaker claim amounts to the denial that moral values are universal and absolute; the strong form claims that all moral frameworks, and hence the values that are part of them, are equally good. Carole Rovane’s thesis, like Gilbert Harman’s, is metaphysical in that it is about the nature of the moral domain. Value incommensurability, like semantic and methodological varieties of incommensurability, has played a significant role in discussions of moral relativism, and Rovane’s approach advances this discussion in an interesting way by linking it with the metaphysical metaphor of multimundialism. The chapter aims to distinguish between descriptive, normative, and metaethical relativism, and also focuses on the most philosophical of these approaches: namely, metaethical relativism.
