Moral relativism, n. The common misconception that moral standards are interchangeable. MORAL RELATIVISM may be reached either by assuming that all moral systems are effectively congruent, or by denying that they can be compared at all. Either position flies in the face of the common sense of ordinary people, who routinely resolve moral dilemmas through a process of weighted averaging. While the MORAL RELATIVIST struggles with, say, preemptive war and fellatio, the man in the street knows instinctively that fellatio must be the greater evil, because its effects are so much easier for him to imagine.