Being an absolutist is not being a schoolmarm. Absolutism only says that moral values do not change ir time, according to place, culture, or according to anything that depends on changing opinions. It says that what is morally true now in these circumstances is also morally true 1,000,000 years from now, and 1,000,000 miles away from here, no matter how opinions change. There are two key concepts that need to be grasped here. One of them is that absolutism does not claim that the same moral value is present in all circumstances. For example, it doesn't say that taking something that does not belong to you has the same moral value in all possible circumstances. Just to illustrate, absolutism can accept that if you are a spy working for a country that is morally "in the good", or if you are the father of a child who is about to die of starvation, taking what does not belong to you might be perfectly morally acceptable. In contrast, stealing from a bookstore just because you want to use the money you will "save" to buy a new smart phone is a different situation where your action might be morally unacceptable. The second key concept is related to this. Given the complexity and wide variety of morally relevant circumstances, moral rules are seldom simple; they are often quite complex rules such as: "Thou shalt not kill unless the life or limb of innocent people can be preserved only by killing". (I am not claiming that this is a correct moral rule everyone has to follow; I am just saying that whatever the correct rules are, they resemble the complexity of this example). O Descriptive Ethics Prescriptive Ethics Metaethics O None of the above