ABSTRACT
Historically, the question of absolutism and relativism in ethics dates back to the origins of moral philosophy, at least within the tradition of Western thought. ‘Traditionally,’ as Nowell-Smith observes, 'moral philosophy has always been regarded as a practical science … because the goal was practical knowledge, knowledge what to do.' Evaluative relativism, or ‘relativism of desert’ (Moser), calls into question the universalizability of praiseworthiness and blameworthiness. Since the types of relativism the authors have so far examined seek merely to impose limitations upon the application of moral codes, they are usually in the form of specific statements about individual cases. However, although the version of epistemological moral relativism can be argued to be both the most basic and empirically the most common one, it is not necessarily restricted to this type; and in this sense our original typology is an oversimplification.
